Program 03
El Rola
A standing stage for original music written in Sonora.
Who it serves
Emerging bands and musicians from Sonora playing their own material, and the audience that comes to hear them.
This is the program where the company's two constituencies are most clearly the same room: the stage exists as much for the person writing the songs as for the person listening.
What it addresses
A composer in Sonora plays bars that ask for covers, festivals that happen once a year, or livestreams with no one in the room. Very few venues program original work on a regular basis or treat the performance as work rather than as a favor.
The principle is the one that governs our theater season: one gig does not build an audience; a season does. A stage that exists every month, curated, with the same technical care as a theater performance, changes what a composer can expect from their own city.
How it works
A permanent home in La Galería, the 35-seat concert room at El Mentidero — listening-room scale, not bar scale. Bands are selected through an open call. Each season brings a group of bands together over the course of a month, one night a week, three or four bands a night, on the condition that the material is their own. The house technical crew loads in and runs every session.
What is written in Sonora is heard at El Mentidero.
Where it stands
First night on August 1, 2025. By May 2026 the archive records session 37. Projected reach is 600 to 1,000 people per season.
What funding makes possible
El Rola is not only a night of music. For most of the bands that come through, it is the first time anyone has programmed them with curatorial intent, given them a professional load-in, and recorded the result. It is the first formal stage of a career.
What the program needs, in order of consequence:
Artist development for musicians who are starting out. A young composer does not only need a stage. They need their name to circulate, material they can use to book the next date, and someone to put them in front of an audience that did not know them. The program can currently produce the night; it cannot produce what comes after the night. That is the gap: promotion and campaigns, better audio and video capture of every session, press materials, and incentives for bands that sustain a body of work.
Adding a fee to the exchange. El Rola works today as an exchange: the house provides the stage, the equipment and the technical conditions for a band to sound right, and hands back the photo and video documentation musicians use afterward to present themselves and book the next date. What that exchange does not yet include is a fee, and the company wants it to. Admission is free, so there is no box office to pay from, and the public support the company operates on is committed to an approved work program that does not include El Rola.
A gift to El Rola does both: it makes playing in your own city paid work, and it makes that night useful to the musician afterward.
Contact
Rodolfo Nevárez, Programming and Partnerships · rodolfonevarez@mentidero.mx
Download: program sheet, PDF · English and Spanish
