Mask-Making Workshop and Bomba Performance at El Batey

Saturday, May 18, 2024, 3:30-4:30, ages 6 and up

Mask-Making Workshop at El Batey, 175 Rano St, Buffalo, NY 14207

Multinational Illumination Art artists Deborah Canales and Benjamin Cirino will conduct workshops at the El Batey Puerto Rican Center located in the Black Rock neighborhood. The workshops will explore the traditional approach of mentorship and generational exchange that passes a skill from parent to child through siblings and extended family members. Instructors Deborah Canales and Benjamin Cirino will teach traditional vejigante mask-making techniques in a safe and accessible way. The workshop will include a demonstration of traditional vejigante mask-making tools, techniques, and materials as well as a discussion of how artists choose the characters to create with the masks. Participants will engage in brainstorming and idea development towards creating a vejigante character and design of their own while also trying various carving techniques using soap and safe tools.

Saturday, May 18, 2024, 5:00-6:00 pm

Bomba Performance at El Batey, 175 Rano St, Buffalo, NY 14207

The 1,849 Millas project will also include bomba performances at El Batey Puerto Rican Center. A batey is a space where people sing, play, and dance bomba, the oldest genre of the Afro-Puerto Rican musical traditions. El Batey’s mission is to celebrate, inspire, and connect people to Puerto Rican culture and each other so that together they can reimagine and reshape their future. La bomba is Puerto Rico's traditional dance and musical style developed over 400 years ago among the island’s enslaved Africans to communicate with each other and as a “means for resistance, resilience, and self-expression.” All of the center’s programming is empowered by a strong connection to Puerto Rico’s rich traditions and history.