Arts & Entertainment

Mexico’s Rituals, Festivals, Music Inspire New Performance from Ballet Folklórico

Ballet Folklórico de México de Amalia Hernández is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year and the party is coming here to Chicago. The Mexico City-based ensemble is bringing together audience-favorite dances that traverse the history and culture of Mexico with performances at the Auditorium Theater on Feb. 12 and 13.

Artistic director Viviana Basanta is the daughter of the ensemble’s founder, Amalia Hernández. She spoke about how her mother shaped some of the dances featured in these performances.

“My mother always liked to go to each region to learn. She didn’t learn steps in a room. She always made a whole investigation of each part of the choreography that she makes,” said Basanta. “The pre-Hispanic that we don’t have now, she [worked] with anthropologists, ethnographers that helped her to make the whole composition. So she’d make the movements from the Mexican codices and from one image to another, she’d make the movement.”

Basanta says she feels honored to be part of bringing the brilliantly diverse culture of Mexico to audiences all over the world.

“The company and the dancers are really involved in the contact with the public and trying to make them feel the emotions and the different dynamics and also the heritage of the culture, all the profound history — that everything comes from the root to our [present] days. So I think we have a lot of different language to share with the public.”