It could have been just another performance the one Angel Peña showed at the Yolanda Perdiguer Hall from the Tomás Terry theater, which was devoted to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the Cienfuegos´ Folklore Company. The graphic register was enough to make sure the success of this company directed by Bárbara Lamí in order to convey its visual story, but Peñita always comes out with something new to transgress the epidermic, circumstantial. That´s why every exhibition by him - since 30 years ago - grabs the attention of critics and especially, of those beings that are part of the daily landscape like him. His research turns into an anthropological epiphany: a revelation of men in their daily microcosms. 

 "Folclor" (the exhibition´s title) was a challenge to his pupil. He could frozen the gestures and offer a chronicle. However, he preferred to testify with the daintiness that overcomes the difficult things and catch the ungraspable. He was able to transform photography into a metaphor and visual poetry, inextricable stories. He recorded the ancestral sense of time, placed in cultural identity practices that shape the Cuban popular religiousness in the usual cult places. He catches the atmosphere of the authentic in them, as well as the dance transpiration, paroxysm and faith solemnity which revealed to the believers without posing or tricks.

And that essence turned into the germinative irradiation to set out the eloquence of another cycle: the show´s A gauzy connection to pay a tribute to the Company´s anniversary. Then appeared the lights, the stage, the choreographic styling and the conceptual synthesis of impressions that desacralize belongings and turn it into an explosion of colors, rhythms, dizziness and merrymaking; which are not exempt from grace, winks and coquetry, like an unmeasurable heritage that is projected to present time.

Finally, the mythical reminiscences ceded to the internalization of the creating responsibility and Angel Peña transfigures the references in plastic sequences. Purified and suggesting accents that overcome the literalness of an anecdote, so expensive to the folklore tradition that sometimes is just lived with its autophagia. Apprehensions where Peña becomes distant from the recurrent and shapes a suggestive symbiosis between tradition and contemporaneity, a purified composition and an infinite continuum of mar and sky full of sensuality, from which the atavistic nobility of indocile mortals to whom resistance turned into the sign of their existence. Revealed entrails of this unreal universe, infinite and magical sediments of the traditional Afrocuban culture.

(Taken from 5 de Septiembre)

Translated by: Osmany Ortiz González (Azurina)