The city’s upcoming cultural program “Cerca de Ti” (“Near You”) will bring free, live entertainment in the Centro and in spots to its east, west, north and south.
More than 300 artists will take the stage at 14 venues, offering 35 shows for the public on Friday, June 1.
Like the Noche Blanca it apparently replaces, music of varying genres, poetry, dance and theater are all on the agenda. Unlike Noche Blanca, it touches the city’s four corners in addition to the Centro.
Highlights include Margarita, “the Goddess of the Cumbia,” at the Fernando Valenzuela baseball park in the south of the city. The park at Col. Juan Pablo II will host Los Méndez and Altabrisa’s Tabenthá park has the Totem Band and Titerechévere.
Regional theater, puppets, tropical music, jazz, rock from the 1970s and ’80s, chamber orchestras, folk ballets, dance and a runway show in tribute to the guayabera are all on tap.
Carolina Cárdenas Sosa and Felipe Ahumada Vasconcelos, general coordinator of community policy and director of Culture of the City Council, respectively, released the details Friday at a press conference.
For the whole city
“Mérida Cultural, Cerca de ti” is the first program of its kind that, in addition to the Historical Center, includes venues in the four corners of the city, with the aim of bringing art and culture closer to citizens.
And, Cardenas continues, this strategy includes people who do not have the resources to pay for transportation and attend the events organized at the Centro. Also, if the presentations are at night, participants would have run the risk of not finding public transport to return home.
But more than anything, the program seeks to respond to the Charter of Cultural Rights of Citizens and to follow up Agenda 21 of which the municipality is a part. So this activity brings art and culture to all corners of Mérida, in addition to the Centro.
Other venues are: the new Cultural Center of the South, the La X’tabay parks in Polígono 108, Chuburná, Parque de Las Américas, Museo Palacio Cantón, Mercado Lucas de Gálvez and the Palacio Municipal.
All events will begin at 8 p.m. Friday, June 1 and will last until 11 or 12. Some 30,000 people are expected to attend the events.
The complete festival program is apparently still in development.
