Skip to main content

Arte y Pasión presents: MANTAS DE LUZ: El Diario de Ana Franco "BLANKETS OF LIGHT: The Diary of Anne Frank"

Arte y Pasión presents: MANTAS DE LUZ: El Diario de Ana Franco "BLANKETS OF LIGHT: The Diary of Anne Frank"The Flamenco Opera telling the story of a young girl named Ana Franco, living in a detention center, whose diary is found at the border.16jan7:00 pm8:30 pm 3 Add to DreamList

Event Details

For those who missed it in October, Arte y Pasión partners with DreamWeek to present this repeat of the performance via streaming.  We are proud to present MANTAS DE LUZ: El Diario de Ana Franco, or “BLANKETS OF LIGHT: The Diary of Anne Frank” on Saturday Jan 16, performed from Arte y Pasión’s newly constructed outdoor stage, built in response to the pandemic.

MANTAS DE LUZ tells the story of a young girl named Ana Franco, whose diary is found at the border. She lives in an unnamed detention camp at our border. Her journey to the north began when she was 12 when her family knew they needed to flee their own country, and they knew they could follow their dreams in North America. The story is a series of vignettes that narrate her dream sequences and the stories that Ana writes in her diary, and her views of the world around her. While we do not know if she is still in the detention center, her writings are marked with hope in humanity, and hopes for her own dreams and future.

Arte y Pasión’s MANTAS DE LUZ is a project that started in 2019, dedicated to those who have to endure life in our detention camps at the border. The project refers symbolically to the silver aluminum foil blankets: what purports as a symbol of protection becomes instead a symbol of exposure. Now, Blankets of Light can also refer to the invisible blanket of surveillance that covers our population by foreign or domestic interference; or, the unstoppable news that covers us, seeping into our pores and our lungs, or the once in a century pandemic we are now experiencing.

El Diario incorporates performance and poetry with flamenco forms with dancer Tamara Adira, cantaora Chayito Champion, guitarist Randy Cordero, with San Antonio’s Poet Laureate Andrea Vocab Sanderson.

Flamenco is the national treasure of Spain and has become a cherished expression here in the American Southwest. While it is difficult to trace the roots of flamenco past 300 years, inscribed only recently by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, the origins of flamenco are said to have started at the time of the reconquest of Spain, after seven centuries of peace between Christians, Jews, and Moors, when the Gypsies migrated through Spain. At the time of the Inquisition, the Gypsies, Moors and Jews found themselves in a place of deadly persecution. Those who weren’t killed fled to the hills of Andalucia where they could not be found. It was in these caves that the first strains of flamenco could be heard. They would sing of their joys, pain, sorrows and hope. Flamencologists trace the word flamenco back to the colloquial Arabic felag mangu, meaning “fugitive peasant” and derived from a root meaning “to flee.” The art of flamenco has found its way to the American Southwest over the past century.

Arte y Pasión, led by dancer and artistic director, Tamara Adira, is a company known for pushing the boundaries of flamenco and Spanish dance. Each performance is a visually stunning theatrical event comprised of independent artists, each highly accomplished, who come together to form one of the most contemporary Spanish dance companies in the country.

Admission to the streaming performance is $7.  Proceeds go to the artists and Arte y Pasión. There are sponsorship levels available and a silent auction. For more information contact Arte y Pasión at 210.241.2771 or www.arte-y-pasion.com, Facebook: arteypasionsa.

CAST:

Tamara Adira

Chayito Champion

Randy Cordero

Poet Laureate Andrea “VOCAB” Sanderson

Time

January 16, 2021 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Event Entrance Fees

$30 in person/ $7 admission to the stream via Zoom, with sponsorship levels available.

Registration/More Info

Artistic Director of Arte y Pasion, Tamara Adira: "We dedicate MANTAS DE LUZ: El Diario de Ana Franco to our immigrants who have to endure life in the detention centers. This is happening right in our backyard, much like the concentration camps of 1942 Germany and Poland. The project refers symbolically to the silver aluminum foil blankets: what purports as a symbol of protection becomes instead a symbol of exposure. By June of 2019, up to 18,000 people were held in immigration detention centers on our Mexican border each night. A Customs and Border Protection Commissioner stated that, “A high number for us is 4,000. A crisis level is 6,000. 13,000 is unprecedented." Immigration authorities have detained a record number of undocumented immigrants this past year, ICE held an average of more than 52,000 people in custody each day throughout the fiscal year 2019. Many more will join these immigrants confined in jails, prisons, tents, and other forms of detention – and many of these are for profit. In 1933-39, Nazi concentration camps held around 45,000 prisoners. First, they comprised of Communists, Socialists, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, LGBT, and other people they considered undesirable. In 1945 this would peak at 715,000 as the role of the camps expanded to hold more minorities, including Jews, disabled people, and the clergy. Six million Jews would perish in the camps in what the Nazis called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem.” Concentration Camps are not a new phenomenon, under any name. The United States' reliance on immigrant detention is not new, nor did it emerge with Donald Trump, though its growth under his administration is confounding. Like Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, our camps are shrouded in secrecy, and it’s hard even to know where they are or what they are called. Conditions are so dangerous in the facilities that there have been so far over 24 deaths in ICE custody, as well as sexual assaults, rapes, and preventable illness. As a Jewish person with ancestors who have survived the holocaust, and some who did not, what’s happening at our border hits close to home for me. The unmarked men we now see in the streets are strangely familiar. There is precedent for the forces like those that Trump just unleashed on Portland. It was in 1942, called the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), or #Gestapo for short. It was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and German-occupied Europe. The Gestapo was Hitler’s tool to find and seize undesirables such as anyone who protested the Nazi regime, the Jews, Roma, disabled, and homosexuals. These people were seized and put in unmarked vehicles and taken away simply for exercising their expression, or simply for existing. When the Gestapo didn’t meet with resistance, eventually they would load crowds onto unmarked trains and sent to detention centers. We later learned these were concentration camps, where six million Jews and hundreds of thousands of others spent the rest of their tragically shortened lives. We have met with the horror that our own beloved America has come to follow this model. Each day, Mexicans, Immigrants, and Black people in this country suffer human rights abuses which get worse with time. Racism against blacks has run so deep in this country that it has been institutionalized as part of our fabric and culture. And now, we find people exercising free peaceful expression are being gassed, seized, kidnapped. We can’t be afraid to speak up. We cannot afford to continue to politicize human rights. This is why this project is important to me. At this time more than ever, we must not forget what is happening in our very backyards. Our 2020 election will come and go, but the institutions that have placed these people in power will remain. Our detention camps at the border will remain. Our immigrants whose lives have been frozen in there will remain unless we take action. Now at this time more than ever, it is imperative that each of us do what we can to call attention to it so we can change it. We can’t let our fear stop us from speaking out for the love of our beautiful country and people...made up of both genders, all colors, races, religions, creeds, and sexual orientation. We cannot pursue Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness without reclaiming our Human Rights. Our Human Rights are not politics."