weekend of arts

This weekend I learned a little about the great cultural side of Ecuador. Saturday morning I didnt have any plans, so I decided to take a walk around my apartment and saw a mass crowd walking to towards estadio Olimpico, the main stadium in Quito located about 1.5 miles from my house. I figured a big game was going on, but as I got close the crowd didnt seem like the type going to a soccer game (meaning they didnt have jerseys on and the majority were families and no beer was being sold on the street). I stopped at an internet cafe on the way to the stadium, and the guy working there informed me that it was a free concert going on all day. I decided to check it out and to no surprise, it was packed (I often wonder where the advertisement is for things like this as I apparently am completely oblivious). While the sound system wasnt great, so I couldnt quite make out everything that they were saying (including the names of the artists), I know that the singers I heard were all Ecuadorian. I found out later that night that the concert was in honor of a program called corazones azules (blue hearts), a campaign to bring attention to the number of deaths caused by violence and car accidents in the area. They started marking places where someone had been killed with blue hearts. The concert was a great way to spend part of my Saturday, once I got passed my fear of large crowds.

That evening I went to an Israeli film festival and watched a movie called the bubble about a group of 3 young Israelis living in Tel Aviv. One of the Israelis falls in love with a palestinian soldier and while all of the main characters are against the violence between the two groups of people, they become entangled in it. Three of the main characters are gay, which was interesting to see in a catholic country. I went with one of my Ecuadorian roommates who said that homosexuality is becoming more accepted here, but he thinks the only reason a movie was shown with such explicit homosexuality. 

I finished off my weekend by going to a museum on Sunday afternoon called capilla del hombre (chapel of man), which is an exhibit of the artist Oswaldo Guayasamin's work. He was a famous artist from the 20th century who depicted the struggle of man in his works. It was moving seeing how he interpreted the pain and suffering of Latin America's poorest citizens using shapes and colors to represent different elements of life. That night I went to a dance by Ecuador's national dance team that had been arranged by a Cuban director. While I usually dont like modern art, the danced were interpretations of different elements, such as a mirror, a bug getting moved around by a humans hand, and a wedding. They had a screen in the background that was used in conjunction with the dance. Like to represent the mirror, they had pre recorded the dancers before the show, and each person moved in conjunction with the previous recording.