The second annual Sucede Festival, a six-week blitzkrieg of free cultural events at over 105 locations around Guadalajara, kicks off Saturday, October 7.
Billed as second in size only to Guanajuato’s world-famous Festival Cervantino, municipal Guadalajara’s seven main urban zones will host 357 events covering music, sculpture, science, cinema, literature, dance, theater, circus, clowning, puppetry and more. Out of those events, 124 will be workshops and 47 will be conferences.
The festival’s uniqueness lies in that it eschews major venues to reach out to plazas, parks, community centers, schools, markets, gardens and other small spaces in barrios located in many corners of the municipality. There will, however, be a range of events in the downtown area, including the Plaza Tapatia, Plaza Liberacion and the esplanade of the Instituto Cultural Cabañas.
Represented in the festivals’ roster of artists will be the landmasses of Africa, Europe and South America – and Mexico, naturally.
Inaugurating the festival in spectacularly visual fashion will be “The Pearl,” a work by French street theater company Plasticiens Volants. The work, consisting of several giant balloon sea creatures – some up to 25 meters in height – manipulated by the seasoned veterans of the troupe, is set to run at the Glorieta Minerva on Saturday, October 7, 8 p.m. and Sunday, October 8, noon. (The glorieta will be closed to traffic on these days, as it will on the evenings of October 5 and 6 for rehearsals.) A large crowd is expected if last year’s inaugural event is anything to go by.
Among notable international performers at the festival will be Blick Bassy, a folk and afro blues artist from Cameroon; Chango Spasiuk, a renowned accordion player from Argentina; Carmelo Torres y su Cumbia Sabanera, one of Colombia’s top cumbia bands; and Mateluna, a Chilean theater group that will present a work dealing with the horrors of the Pinochet dictatorship.
The Sucede Festival may be considered part-and-parcel of Mayor Enrique Alfaro’s mission to make Guadalajara an artistic city-on-the-hill. Recent months have seen the Tapatio headman scatter public art works all over the city like dice, some which have become lightning rods of controversy – something Alfaro seems to not mind courting.
Footing the 25-million-peso bill for the free-and-for-the-people event is a combination of federal and municipal funds and corporate sponsorship. For more information on the huge program, go to festivalguadalajara.mx.