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Timbalaye is a project devised and promoted by Ulises Ezequiel Mora Valiña and Irma De La Caridad Castillo Ruíz that founded Aché, the first School of Cuban Folk Dances (Rome-Italy).
Timbalaye is a unique international cultural project to present Rumba as the original expression of the Afrocuban roots of Latin-American music, which is very successful all around the world.
Rumba is the type of music that best represents the socio-cultural Cuban system and it expresses values, traditions and ambitions of a population that tried to integrate into an international context without abandoning its-own principles and to defend its-own identity through the culture.
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LThe Festival’s main idea is based on the concept of Transculturation, invented by the anthroplogist Fernando Ortiz to explain the evolution of the Cuban Culture. This term explains how the “Cuban Religion”, the Regla de Ocha, also known as Santería, was born.
This cult is the result of a syncretism between the African deported slaves’ faith and the Spanish colonizers’ catholic one.
The word TIMBALAYE comes from this religion deeply influenced by Yoruba (a Nigerian group). It means tenacity and confidence in earthly existence and gives us a way to show how Rumba is a constitutive and determinant part of Cuban music and folk dences, also contemporary, as the Casino Cubano, or the international cultural phenomenon known as Salsa.
The Festival’s aim is to reveal Rumba’s cultural richness, combining different expressive popular languages, from poetry to plastic art, from music to dance to underline its beauty, to diffuse its values and to protect its origin.
To this end the event, scheduled on September 3/6 2009 in Havana, will take place in picturesque places of the city with the participation of important Cuban and international personalities such as anthropologists vand experts who will describe Rumba from the historical and social points of view, and dancers and musicians who will emphasize Rumba’s artistic and musical features.
The programme of the event will include meetings, dance and percussion stages, concerts and performances to ensure a complete overview of the Cuban Rumba, which is based on an ancient popular and musical African tradition but that is undergoing rapidly evolving including many aspects of Cuban reality.
All this makes the event a mean of communication between Cuba and the rest of the world, which appreciates and dances its music. It also promotes a real knowledge of the Island’s history and reality through its traditional featuresand at the same time looks ahead.
The events is realized thanks to the patronage and the cooperation of the Asociación Nacional Hermanos Saíz and the Consejo Nacional de Casas de Cultura, two institutions of the Cuban Cultural Ministry.
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