Ensamble Folclórico Colibrí injects the modern into traditional folkloric dance
The dancer twirled the colorful skirt synonymous with the iconic Jalisco song ‘El Son de la Negra.’
The 6-minute performance began with ‘Pasacalles’ and then ‘El Pasajero’ before moving on to the finale where a charro got down on one knee and proposed to a female dancer.
The response – from the dancer and the audience at the Warnors Center for the Performing Arts – was positive.
This was not a normal performance of the Jalisco standard on the final evening of the 44th Danzantes Unidos Festival. That’s because the first dancer was a male. The charro who proposed was a female.
“I’m jealous. He twirls the skirt better than I ever did,” said María Luisa Colmenárez about Arturo Magaña, one of two male dancers with Ensamble Folclórico Colibrí.
The San José-based group has shaken the folkloric world with its LGBTQ+-friendly performances.
“They’re not here in the terms of ‘Will you accept this?” said Colmenárez, executive director of Danzantes Unidos. “It’s like, ‘We’re here!’ They’re not asking for permission. They just want to be included.”
Colibrí is not new to the festival, the largest gathering of Mexican folkloric enthusiasts in the country. Magaña, 49, and his group performed in 2018.
“I felt there was a personal need for me to represent myself and identify exactly who I am on stage and dance my tradition,” Magaña said five years ago. “It was also for the community. For people to feel it is OK to see two men dancing together. It’s not a sin, it’s not a forbidden rule we are breaking in folklore.”
Today, Magaña and Colibrí keep taking folkloric dancing in a new direction.
“The choreography that we did was our staple piece, which is Jalisco; and, we decided to do a queer proposal,” said the native from Jerez, Zacatecas, México.
The group was founded in 2015, but last year was the first time that Magaña and fellow dancer Bryan Guzmán danced in skirts.
“The way the community received us was amazing,” said Magaña. “We have made wonderful friends since then.”
Not all of Colibrí’s performances will have a happy ending, said Magaña, because that is not reality when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community.
“We’re working on a beautiful piece that is Michoacán, and we’re actually depicting the violence against transgender women,” said Magaña. “In the piece, the transgender woman doesn’t survive.”
It’s not a “happy ending, but it’s a true story.”
“It’s things that are actually happening to our community,” said Magaña.
How embracing is the folkloric community?
“I’m not going to say 100%. I’m going to say 99.9%,” said Magaña. “But every maestro that I encounter has been very, very welcoming.”
There are also the occasional comments on the group’s Facebook page saying “This is not how folklórico is,” he said.
Raúl González Ibañez, 29, danced folklórico at Roosevelt High School and is now the president of the Danzantes Unidos board of directors.
He loved Colibrí’s performance.
“Being a gay man myself and seeing that representation on stage is amazing because little kids that are now coming up LGBTQ+ or are in the spectrum of that are questions their sexuality,” said González.
“For them to see that on stage and see it normalized is something that should be happening,” he continued. “They were incorporating the masculinity and femininity of dance.”
More groups should embrace “gender fluid dances,” said González.
Colibrí continues to grow. Dancers come up to Magaña and say they want to dance with the group, which brought 22 dancers to the recent festival.
“I’m really happy to see that other groups are now including, for example, women dressed in the male form,” said Magaña. “And it’s not like they had run out of (male) dancers.
“It feels like a person feels comfortable wearing the male attire, and that’s wonderful. That is something that was very needed.”
Magaña performed in the 1990s with the short-lived Folklórico Pro Latino in San José where males and females reversed their roles.
With Colibrí, Magaña wants to inject the modern into the traditional.
