Calpulli Mexican Dance Company is using the holiday to share the culture of the Puebla region with New York audiences this weekend.
When Alberto López Herrera was growing up in the Mexican city of Puebla, Cinco de Mayo was celebrated on a small, ceremonial scale. There were school events, a military parade and historical re-enactments on the holiday, which commemorates a battle fought in Puebla on May 5, 1862. So when López moved to the United States in 1990, he was surprised at how Cinco de Mayo is celebrated here: the parties, the margaritas, the misconception that it’s Mexican Independence Day.
When Juan Castaño was growing up in Texas, his Mexican American family didn’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo at all. It was only during and after college, when he started dancing with Mexican folkloric troupes, that he became interested in the holiday. “We would get tons of performances around that date,” he said recently.
López is the artistic director of Calpulli Mexican Dance Company, which he founded in New York City in 2003 with Castaño, who is managing director. Their show “Puebla: The Story of Cinco de Mayo” — at Chelsea Factory in Manhattan on Friday and Saturday — seeks to use the marketability of Cinco de Mayo to direct attention not just to the historical events but also to the culture of the Puebla region.
“It’s not only margaritas,” López said. “We want to show the audience our traditions.”
“This is our take on Cinco de Mayo,” Castaño said, “and what we want people to know.”
The history is a little complicated. In 1861, after the president of Mexico, Benito Juárez, suspended foreign debt payments, Napoleon III sent French troops to invade Mexico. In Puebla on May 5, 1862, the Mexican army unexpectedly defeated the much larger French one. But that wasn’t the end, because the tide of war soon turned to the French, who installed Maximilian I as emperor of Mexico. Not until 1867 did the Mexican Republic expel the French, execute Maximilian and regain control of the country. (And it was in California that the Cinco de Mayo holiday took off; beer ads started the commercialization in the late 1980s.)
Calpulli’s show simplifies and streamlines this story, with a strong point of view. “The villains,” Castaño said, “are the Mexican elites, the church and the French, who were all working together for power.” The production takes revenge on these figures mainly by making fun of them. When Maximilian and his wife, Carlota, are attacked by bedbugs — which really happened, according to the historian M.M. McAllen’s book — it’s a scene of broad comedy. The emperor does the Itch.
“What I love most about the story,” López said, “is how Carlota and Maximilian fell in love with Mexico — not with the elites, but with the regular people and our culture, especially the Indigenous traditions.” This show aims to make the audience fall in love, too, with Mexican culture.
The story provides plenty of opportunities for dancing of different kinds. There are variety of folkloric numbers, some requiring special attire, like China Poblana blouses and skirts or the huge coronal headdresses for the Danza de Los Quetzales. But there is also some ballet, as in a heartfelt goodbye duet between the Mexican general Ignacio Zaragoza and his wife before the big battle. The battle itself is represented in freeze-frame to a mournful song, and the celebratory finale that follows has enough percussive footwork to overpower an artillery barrage.
All of this, warmly delivered by a company that seems like a family, is customary for a folkloric troupe. Much less common is the extended storytelling and somewhat pointed perspective.
“Our community is generally very Catholic,” Castaño said, “so we knew it was a risk to talk about the church. I told Alberto, ‘I don’t know if my mom is going to be mad at me, because she sings in the church choir.’” At a performance of “Puebla” in Houston, he said, the sections critical of the church were met with stony silence from the audience. “I think that response is related to what people expect from a folk dance show,” he said, “just happy people in beautiful costumes.”
Another distinction: Like all Calpulli productions, “Puebla” features live music. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” said George Saenz, the company’s musical director. “Our audiences don’t just get a dance show. They get a concert as well.”
For the “Puebla” score, Saenz said he worked on reproducing the characteristic sounds of the Puebla and Huasteca regions of central-eastern Mexico: the style of violin playing, the falsetto leaps in the vocals. “We want to make people feel that we’re in Puebla and hearing one of the bands on the street.”
As a company, Calpulli has always had the ambition to be different. López and Castaño met in another group, Ballet Folklórico Mexicano de Nueva York, not long after Castaño moved to the city in 2000. López, who had been studying Mexican folkloric dance since kindergarten, was doing choreography for the troupe. “The people running the company were comfortable staying where they were,” Castaño said, “but we saw a lot of opportunity to serve our community and grow.”
They founded Calpulli — Nahuatl for “large house” — as a nonprofit organization and started applying for grants. At the outset, López wanted a more experienced person as artistic director, so he didn’t take that position officially until 2012. As the troupe began building a repertoire and choosing which Mexican traditions to showcase, Castaño said, “There was no criteria other than ‘Do you love it?’”
“We researched dances and we taught each other,” Castaño continued. This internal company education soon turned outward, as Mexican American families asked for instruction for their children. The company’s arts-in-education programs and dance and music classes grew robust.
And as the company became more successful, its ambition grew, too. A 2012 production with a Day of the Dead theme evolved into a 2016 show with a full trip-to-the-underworld story paralleling the 19th-century ballet “Giselle.” In 2018, “Navidad: A Mexican American Christmas” crossed Tchaikovsky and mariachi music in a tale about children torn between cultures. “That really pulled from my own experience growing up Mexican American,” Castaño said.
As Calpulli moved into story productions, it had to learn how to adapt folkloric dance to dance-theater narrative.
“We’ve worked with theaters who asked us, ‘Why don’t you just use words here?’” Castaño said. “And there are moments when we’ve thought, ‘We could probably save a month of work by just speaking here.’ But we’ve seen how powerful it can be to tell a story just through movement. It’s worth the effort.”
López recalled teaching at an elementary school in Yonkers, N.Y., when a couple of boys who had seen “Navidad” told him they had recognized a dance their mothers do at home. “That was very emotional for me,” López said. “Those boys had never been to Mexico, but we helped them connect.”
The part of “Puebla” that most gets to him, and to Castaño, is the song “Cancíon Mixteca.” The lyrics speak of immense nostalgia and homesickness. “It’s about what we miss from Mexico,” López said. And about what they have brought with them to New York.
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