Things to Do: El Baile de Loteria at The Pilot Dance Project

Cynthia
Garcia, a Houston-based choreographer born and raised in El Paso, Texas, has
been playing lotería since she was a child.

“I used
to play a lot during church bazaars,” she recalls.

Often
described as Mexican bingo, lotería originated in Italy before arriving in
Mexico in the 18th century. Though similar to bingo, instead of a card with numbers
and letters, players receive a tabla, or board, with images of characters,
animals, and objects. Today, it’s common to see the game’s traditional pictograms
replaced with imagery from pop culture and daily life, like editions that
feature characters from Star Wars or the Disney-Pixar film Coco,
or millennial and Y2K versions – all of which Garcia owns.

On
September 16 and 17, Garcia will premiere her own take on the game in the form
of a dance concert, El Baile de
Loteria, an evening-length work presented by the artistic team of The Pilot Dance Project, at the MATCH.

“I think
what makes lotería so special is that you don’t have to speak Spanish to play
the game. You have all these bright, vibrant, colorful cards to look at instead
of trying to figure out how to pronounce a certain card,” says Garcia.

In lotería,
an emcee pulls a card from the deck and, if a player has the corresponding
image on their tabla, the player marks it off, historically with a pinto bean.
A player wins when they mark off all the pictures in a row, a column, diagonally,
all four corners, or even the whole card, depending on the game, and shouts, “Loteria!”

For El
Baile de Loteria, audience members will receive a program that doubles as a
tabla, and an emcee will lead the evening so they too can play along. At the
end of the night, one lucky winner will take home a prize put together by a
very special person.

“My mom,
bless her heart,” says Garcia. “She’s donated a lot of stuff for the prize bags
we’re giving out each night.”

Garcia
began working on El Baile de Loteria in 2023. Though she
can’t point to an “aha moment” when she realized she wanted to create a dance
around the game, she says the process started before rehearsals for the World
Dance Extravaganza at San Jacinto College, where she serves as an adjunct
professor. The dance concert focused on world dance forms or pieces that explored personal culture or family
history, and Garcia found herself thinking about one lotería card in particular
– El soldado, or the soldier.

“It
really stood out because it reminded me a lot of my grandfather, who was a
prisoner of war in World War II. I thought, ‘How cool would it be to create a
piece that’s titled after this card, this lotería card?’” recalls Garcia. “I
then went on from there like, ‘Okay, what other cards are found in this game?
How can I bring those cards to life through movement?’”

Today, the
short dance Garcia created to honor her grandfather’s memory has grown into a
series of ten dance works, each three to five minutes long, that make up El Baile
de Loteria. If you’re familiar with the game, you’re
sure to recognize some of the more popular cards represented among the piece’s 15 different characters, such as El borracho
(the drunk), La rosa (the rose), and La sirena (the mermaid).

“When I
choreograph, I like to tell a story. So, I feel like I’ve had to create a lot
of stories for all these characters, and that does involve a lot of motifs to connect
the movement to the character and the card,” says Garcia.

La rosa, for example, evokes the life and death of a
rose, with motifs that represent thorns, wilting, and dying. In El soldado,
Garcia says she’s using strict, erect movements to get a “militaristic feel,” while
also incorporating elements of her grandfather’s experience as a prisoner of
war.

“He
wasn’t tortured, but he had very poor sleeping conditions,” says Garcia. “There
was no roof over their heads. It was very cold, and they didn’t have a lot of
warm clothing, so my grandfather’s feet ended up getting frostbite while he was
a prisoner of war. As long as I had known him, his feet were purple, and so my
dancer wears purple socks to represent that.”

Inspiration
also came from unexpected places. For one card, La bota, or the boot, it
came from a dancer who, unfortunately, fractured her ankle and had to withdraw
from the piece.

“She was
in a boot, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, there it is. What if I create a dance
about how dancers sometimes get injured and how all they want to do is keep
moving? What does that look like in terms of a story? Who is this character?
How can we develop this character who has a boot on their ankle and create a
dance out of it? That could be La bota.’”

As a musically
driven choreographer, Garcia adds that she likes music to be one of the first steps
in the process.

“Sometimes
it’s just as simple as looking for music about certain characters found in the
game,” she says, pointing to the Vicente Fernández song, “El Adiós del Soldado,”
featured in El soldado. “And sometimes I just go down a rabbit hole and
see what I can find.”

After
considering different songs and sounds of the ocean for La sirena,
Garcia chose a “haunting sea shanty,” which gives the piece “a darker edge.”

“When
you look at the La sirena card, it’s like, ‘Oh, she’s a mermaid. She’s
cute.’ But I tried to find different takes on these characters. So, La sirena
is a little more of a darker tale of a mermaid,” explains Garcia.

Latinx theatre
company TEATRX contributed the idea that inspires El Baile de Loteria’s final, sixteenth
character: the emcee El Gritón, who is drawn from a mythological figure that
doesn’t appear in the game.

“El Gritón de Medianoche is almost like a
cryptid kind of character. We want to bring this character to life as part of the
emcee who will come out at the beginning, introduce the show, explain to the
audience how the game works [and] a
little bit of history on it,” says Garcia. “[The character] then will come out
every so often in between pieces to make sure that the audience is playing
along, give some comedic banter and just tie the whole thing together.”

The emcee character will guide the audience
through the experience, which is another reason Garcia says they wanted to
bring the character into the story. “Most importantly, I want the audience to
have fun and feel like they’re participating in this game.”

Performances of El Baile de Loteria are
scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, September 16, and Wednesday, September 17, at
the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, please call 713-521-4533 or visit matchouston.org.
$15-$20.