Grupo Folklórico de UCLA to release online Día de los Muertos video performance
(Photo illustration by Jaelen Cruz/Daily Bruin and Courtesy of Lauro Pilar)
By Lindsay Harrison
Nov. 23, 2020 5:11 p.m.
This post was updated Nov. 29 at 3:24 p.m.
With colorful choreography, dancers shine a celebratory light on death.
Grupo Folklórico de UCLA will release an online video showcasing their annual Día de los Muertos celebration in December, after finishing filming the production Nov. 21 and Nov. 22. Through various traditional Mexican dances, the club hopes to emphasize the importance of community and honor lost loved ones. Featuring dances from Mexican states like Yucatán, Sinaloa, Veracruz, Nuevo León, Michoacán, Jalisco and Guerrero, the performance will be available for anyone to view on the club’s website. Beyond honoring the dead, club coordinator and fourth-year political science student Aranza Guzman said the club’s annual show allows members to honor their heritage.
“It’s really cool to not only be able to educate ourselves about our culture (and) about our roots, but (to) also be able to showcase the love and excitement that we have to our audience,” Guzman said.
The show fosters a sense of community among students and focuses on spreading celebratory sentiments regarding the lives of the dead, Guzman said. Día de los Muertos commemorates the lives of past loved ones with numerous traditional elements that will also appear in the show, including an altar for the dead, cempasuchil flowers and decorative skulls called calaveras.
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One of the club’s artistic directors and fourth-year communications student Kathia Valdez said Mexican culture views death as bittersweet, a sentiment the club tried to emphasize through its performance. Some dances are energetic and fast-paced, Valdez said, while others have slower pacing.
The dancers begin dressed in white, but she said as the show progresses, their dresses and outfits become progressively more colorful to mirror the growing idea of celebration.
To honor the importance of Día de los Muertos in communities throughout Mexico, the club performs seven dances, each from a different Mexican state. Artistic director and graduate student Carlos Garcia said the performance begins with a dance from Yucatán to energize the audience before leading into another dance called “El Huateque” – which translates to “the party” – from Veracruz, where the dancers are dressed in white.
Some of the dances, however, feature more antics and require acting on the dancers’ part, Garcia said. When the club performs “Los Viejitos” from Michoacán, dancers perform various capers dressed as the elderly, giving an energetic performance that contrasts with their costumes. Additionally, in Sinaloa’s “Toro Mambo,” he said the dance intends to emulate the bullfighting of matadors.
“There’s a little section in the song that is very reminiscent of matadors where the girls are using their dresses to have that idea of a little cape, and then the ‘bull’ runs past it,” Garcia said. “So we have a couple of the dancers acting as bulls running around.”
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For the first time since the club was formed, the Día de los Muertos show will be presented as a digital performance, edited to accommodate for distance restrictions, Guzman said. The video includes the seven dances, performed by club members able to meet in Los Angeles, but now also features a “DDLM-from-home” component. Garcia said the from-home component allows club members unable to participate in the show to film themselves dancing to a song in the performance, which will then be edited to accompany the other dancers.
“We owe it to our members to be able to have these experiences,” Garcia said. “They’ll still have screen time and still be able to participate (in) and take part in (the celebration).”
Although the online format has proven difficult at times, Guzman said she believes it is an opportunity to bring more people together than before. Time and travel constraints that could have impacted the turnout of the organization’s in-person shows are no longer issues online. In the long run, she said the club’s virtual show will continue to connect people in the future, sharing the club members’ enthusiasm with others for years to come.
“It’s kind of (like) recording history, because 10 or 15 years from now, whatever cabinet is spearheading Grupo Folklórico de UCLA will be able to look back at 2020 and see our show, see the dances we did, and see our members,” Guzman said.
