It has become a summer tradition in D.C. This year the Smithsonian is bringing the country of Colombia to the District of Columbia for this year’s 10-day Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This year’s event will be a fitting marriage of cultures with a large selection of Colombian artists, workers, farmers, musicians and cooks, all there to envelop the nation’s capital in everything from empanadas to Amazonian jewelry, with a little Joropo dancing thrown in.
Olivia Cadaval, curator for the festival, described some of the highlights of the Smithsonian’s Colombia: The Nature of Culture program, which will feature Colombian artists and performers offering a window into their daily lives; like gold-mining communities sharing their experiences panning and trading along the Atrato River in the Pacific rain forest; and a roundup of celebrations and rituals from the Momposino flood plains.
| IF YOU GO |
| The Smithsonian Folklife Festival |
| » Where: National Mall between 7th and 14th streets |
| » When: Thursday to Monday, and Tuesday to July 11; 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. each day. Concerts, special events and dance parties will extend into most evenings. |
| » Info: Free, festival.si.edu |
Then there’s the food — steaming coconut rice, bunuelos (cheese fritters), empanadas, wrapped foods like quesillos and tamales, and every variety of arepa (a cornmeal pancake).
“We’ll have a veal roast each weekend, in the style of the plains, where you have a whole feast around it,” said Cadaval.
This year’s festival will serve as the culmination of three years of field research in Colombia, where Cadaval worked with local scholars to find participants, which will include everything from drum makers to world-renowned musicians like Cimarron — performing on Saturday — a group with an inventive style of traditional Joropo music from the plains of the Orinoco River.
Carlos Rojas, harpist and composer for the group, discussed the role he’s assumed as an ambassador of Colombian music and culture over the years.
“I [have] heard Joropo music since my childhood in my parents’ house. I come from a musical family, so I’ve found the Joropo ‘naturally’ in the cultural and family environment where I grew up,” he explained, going on to describe more about the genre itself, a style that he described as fast-paced, using “highly demanding” vocal and instrumental techniques.
The style itself ranges from a waltzlike dance using harps to more complex multistringed instrumental compositions, often using guitars, cuatros, bandolas, maracas and even dancers to keep rhythm.
“Dance is a very important element of a Cimarron show, not only because it represents a major scenic element but also because the stomping sound is an important component of the sound of the group. Dancers are really [the] percussion players of the group,” said Rojas.
Also included in this year’s festival lineup are Ayombe (July 9), performing songs from the award-winning album “ÁAyombe! The Heart of Colombia’s Musica Vallenata,” and the 2011 Ralph Rinzler Memorial Concert featuring Elizabeth Mitchell, Suni Paz and Chip Taylor and the Grandkids.
Woven into this year’s celebration of Colombia will be a program about the Peace Corps, which has a long history with Colombia, but which only recently brought its volunteers back to the country after a 30-year absence, bringing health care, construction and community development to regions that have suffered shocks of violence since the organization left in 1981.
But even after wading through the many cultural offerings at this year’s festival, Cadaval said the goal of this year’s event is simple — to bring Colombia to America.
“We’ve really tried hard to contextualize it,” she said, “making sure that when people come here, they’ll feel like they’re in all the different regions of Colombia, the textures, the sounds, the smells — everything.”
