Companies and artists from Mexico and abroad, who find a venue in the northwest, and audiences in Hermosillo, who see work in their own city that they would otherwise have to travel to the capital to find.

And artists from Sonora, for whom a festival at home is the most direct way to be seen by presenters and peers from other circuits without leaving the state to go looking for them.

Mexico's performing arts circuit is organized around the center of the country. For a city in the northwest, being outside that circuit means two things at once: its audiences do not see what is being made elsewhere, and its artists are not seen. A festival of one's own is the only way to break both at the same time, because it brings in and shows out in a single motion.

Three lines, each at a different scale.

DMT — International Performing Arts Festival. Dance, Music, Theater; in Spanish, Danza, Música, Teatro. The acronym also carries a local wink to the Sonoran desert and to the Comcáac people, which is where the toad on the poster comes from. First edition November 28 to December 4, 2022, with work from Argentina, Spain, France, Italy and Mexico City. 1,500 attendees.

Muestra Nacional de Teatro de Península a Península. Created and run by the company since its first edition, this national theatre showcase is now in its 17th, documented since 2010 including an online edition in 2020. It takes place within the Fiestas del Pitic. The 2023 program brought work from Baja California, Mexico City and Yucatán.

Somos del Cerro. The neighborhood festival: theater in the colonias surrounding the venue. Two editions, 2022 and 2023.

We also help organize festivals we did not create, such as Hermosillo's Fiesta de la Música, which was founded and is sustained by an independent citizens' committee. Those are listed as partnerships, not as authorship.

In 2022 the company coordinated Un Shin… de Arte, an umbrella of three festivals running November 19 to December 4 — the Fiesta de la Música, the Desert International Film Festival and DMT — which drew 14,000 attendees and made El Mentidero one of its venues. It is the largest operation the house has carried.

A festival is the activity least able to sustain itself and the most expensive to mount. The company puts everything it has into each edition — the theater, the plaza, the technical equipment, the staff, the coordination and a share of the money — but a festival concentrates into one week costs that no box office in a city this size can absorb: travel and lodging for national and international companies, their fees, large-format production in the outdoor plaza, technical equipment rented every time because public support cannot be used to buy it, permits, security, press and outreach.

The first edition of DMT was paid for 70% out of the company's own resources — money that came out of that year's operation. Somos del Cerro has had two editions and is the only one of the three that reaches the surrounding neighborhoods. Both have audiences; what decides when each one returns is the funding an edition is built on.

No single institution carries a festival: it is built between several, which is why this is the program that most depends on someone else stepping in. A gift to Festivals makes a second edition of DMT possible, which is the company's priority, and returns Somos del Cerro to the calendar, the least expensive and most socially consequential of the three, without either one having to be paid for out of the year's operations.

Paulo Galindo, Executive Director · director@mentidero.mx

Download: program sheet, PDF · English and Spanish

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