by the El Reportero’s news services

Disney and Marvel’s Black Panther’ continued an impressive run, adding $100 million in its second weekend in U.S. theaters for a total of 700 million, becoming only the fourth movie to achieve the feat.

The film also topped past rivals such as ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ and ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ to claim the title of second best sophomore weekend in U.S. box office history.
Worldwide, Black Panther’ added $191.8M with $108.0M of that coming from North American territories over the weekend, according to figures compiled by comScore.

To date, in all markets, the film has racked up an impressive $704m in cumulative revenue in just two weeks.

The Tsars of the Russian Ballet for the First Time in Bolivia

The Tsars of the Russian Ballet will exhibit their art for the first time in Bolivia with three presentations in the departments of La Paz and Cochabamba, local media reported today.

The cast is named for awards received in international ballet competitions, as published by the newspaper Cambio.

The presentations will take place on March 6 and 7 at the Alberto Saavedra Pérez Municipal Theater in La Paz, and on March 8 in Cochabamba, at the Coliseum of the Santa María German School.

The program of the famous cast includes the interpretation of part of the universal repertoire of classical ballet, with pieces like The Swan Lake, The Corsair, The Nutcracker, The Bayadera, The Death of the Swan and other beautiful works performed by notable dancers of the imperial theaters Russians.

Among the soloists are Ivan Sitnikov, Eugenia Abratzova, Yulia Makhalina, Kirill Safin and Sergei Kononenko.

The Zares that visit Bolivia delighted the audience in venues such as the Marinsky in St. Petersburg, the Paris Opera, the Opera of Sydney, the great theaters in New York and the most important in Latin America, including Buenos Aires, Mexico, Bogotá and Lima, as well as in the Middle East, Japan and China.

Cuban Dance Company Receives Nomination to British Award

Cuban dance company Acosta Danza celebrated its nomination to British Robert Robson Award in the Manchester Theatre Awards Monday.

With such recognition, the Cuban company is being inserted in the category for Best Dance Show, together with British emblematic English National Ballet and the Rambert Dance Company, just two years after the foundation of the Cuban dance company.

The Manchester Theatre Awards are among the most prestigious awards of the performing arts in the United Kingdom. For winning, the specialized critics selects the best shows presented in Greater Manchester (county of Manchester) during the year.

In 2017, Acosta Danza performed with critical and public success on October 12 and 14, at The Lowry Theater, in the City of Salford, in Manchester.

The young group presented a program composed of the pieces El cruce sobre el Niagara, by Marianela Boán; Belles Lettres, by Justin Peck; Imponderable, by Goyo Montero; Mermaid, choreography by Sidi Larbi and Twelve, by Jorge Crecis.

Acosta Danza aims to offer integrating shows from the contemporary and the neoclassical, without discarding other expressions, times and styles of dance art.

Jenny and the Mexicats celebrate 10 years with US and Europe tour

Jenny and the Mexicats, a group that demonstrates to us that there are no borders when it comes to music, announced their return to the U.S. with a new tour that will take them to 19 cities starting on February 28. The first stop will be in Washington, D.C. and the dates will intertwine with their European tour where the quartet’s growth and popularity has intensified in the last year, forcing them to extend their tours and their stay.

The group formed by an English woman, two Mexicans and a Spaniard, celebrate their 10th anniversary.

Jenny and the Mexicats is a group that does not look like any other. It is a fusion of nationalities and personalities; a band that had its beginnings in Madrid under the name of Pachucos y la Princesa in June 2008 with a very particular history: demonstrating serendipity at its finest.

by the El Reportero’s news services

The Brazilian film João, O Maestro, by Mauro Lima, inaugurates today the 21st edition of Punta del Este International Film Festival, in Uruguay, where over 50 national and foreign films will be screened.

With the award for the career of filmmaker Silvio Caiozzi in the Sala Cantegril, this film festival will begin, which will run until Feb. 25.

The festival, considered the most important of its kind in the country and among the best in South America, will show productions from the region and Spain, as well as proposals from Japan, South Korea, Palestine and the independent cinema of the United States, among other nations.

In addition to the world cinema productions, 12 films will be in the Ibero-American Competition and for the first time ‘Maldonado Filma’ will be presented, according to the schedule announced by the organizing committee.

This initiative will show a dozen audiovisuals made in the homonymous department of the southeast of the country that were chosen by the Audiovisual Incentive Fund of the Municipality and were finalists in the 48th Film Festival.

The Filmusic Fest, in its third edition, will display productions about the lives of music personalities, which include films such as Vinicius, Yo Sandro y Chavela this year.

As in previous days, the Festival of Punta del Este will deliver the ‘Mauricio Litman’ awards in the categories of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor and Audience Award.

The festival of celluloid will reach other cities in the territory such as Piriapolis and Aigua, among others, the organizing authorities said.
Argentine actor Miguel Angel Sola will be one of the guests of a week film event and will present the film ´El último traje.´

This event has the support of the Ministry of Tourism and is linked to other festivals such as Rio de Janeiro, Florianopolis, Rosario, Gramado, and is part of the strategy for the development of the audiovisual industry in Uruguay.

Mexico’s Vive Latino reveals 2018 lineup

Mexico City’s annual rock festival, Vive Latino, returns March 17th-18th at Foro Sol.

This year’s lineup boasts Gorillaz, Queens of the Stone Age, Morrissey, and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds at the top of its bill. Other notables include Infected Mushroom, Pussy Riot, Kali Uchis, Little Dragon, Mexican Institute of Sound, PVRIS, and Chicano Batman, along with a host of Mexican and Spanish acts.

The 4-day Vive Latino, which began in 2000, is a massive annual rock, alternative rock, and Latin American music festival, that is held in Mexico City’s Foro Sol (Sun Forum), each spring between late March and early May.

Upwards of 70,000 high-energy music lovers each day swarm Vive Latino, endlessly moving, clapping, singing, and rocking to the beats a huge bill of acts playing a variety of genres, some well outside of the mainstream. Latina rappers? The best perform in the Vive Latino lineup. Legendary international bands rock on the main stage and up and coming Latin American artists are also prevalent.

Vive Latino, as the name suggests, started with a focus on Latin American music, but has grown with groups from other regions and in other languages besides Spanish and English, expanding each year to one of the largest and most significant music festivals in the world.

Tickets and other information can be found on the festival’s website http://www.vivelatino.com.mx/.

An estimated half a million people turned out for Sunday’s parade

by the El Reportero’s news services

The Mazatlán Carnival will conclude tonight after five days of celebrations that were marred by a murder on Sunday.

But as of this afternoon that was the only incident of violence at the event whose first of two parades drew an estimated half a million people Sunday evening.
From the start there was a strong police presence on hand, but that was reinforced after an altercation early Sunday morning in the Flamingos neighborhood that left one man dead and another injured.

In response and in an attempt to quell any further violence, the state Secretariat of Public Security strengthened the carnival’s security operations by deploying more police officers to the most crowded areas.

They were joined by canine units trained in detecting narcotics.

Sunday’s parade delighted many thousands of residents and visitors, who spent more than three hours viewing more than 30 floats.

Local authorities reported that on each night an average of 90,000 people, including locals and domestic and foreign visitors, have poured into the streets of the port city.

The 2018 carnival concludes today with a second parade scheduled to start at 4:30 p.m.

Source: El Universal (sp), El Sol de Mazatlán (sp)

The XIV International Poetry Festival of Nicaragua begins with 130 poets

The XIV International Poetry Festival of Granada, in Nicaragua, officially inaugurated on Tuesday, Feb. 13, the largest in Central America and bringing together 130 poets from 60 countries.

“Welcome poets of the world, who are the voices and the soul of your country, all of you are main guests in the land of (Rubén) Darío (1867-1916)”, said Nicaraguan poet Francisco de Asís Fernández, president of the Festival, in his speech from the Plaza de Independence, in Granada, 45 kilometers southeast of Managua.

Fernandez said that “this wonderful cultural project”, from its first edition in 2005 to date, has gathered more than 1,500 poets from 120 countries.

He remarked that 2017 “took drops of blood from our festival”, recalling the deaths of Nicaraguan poets Carlos Rigby, Ana Ilce Gomez, Julio Cabrales and now the recently deceased Claribel Alegría, “the poet who owns the sea who only gave love”, I note.

The poet urged his counterparts to unite “our songs, our energies, ideals and build together an unattainable wall in which indifference, discrimination, perversity, hatred and lack of love for a better world collide.”

Federal iudge indemnifies 21 US graffiti artists

The sentence of a federal judge of Brooklyn favored today 21 graffiti artists with a compensation of 6.7 million dollars, after the demolition of a building considered a world mecca of urban art.

The verdict forces the current owner of the facility, Jerry Wolkoff, to pay the 21 artists the high compensation for destroying the building in 2014 to build luxury apartments instead.

The aerosol murals in the complex known as 5 Pointz, located in Long Island City, were for two decades a tourist attraction and temple of the best and largest outdoor exhibition of street art.

The ruling considers that a total of 45 of the works made on the walls of the building were worthy of being preserved from any negligent act by the Law of Rights of the Visual Artists of 1990, and condemns the owner to the greater indemnity provided.

A year before the demolition, the owner of the building had painted all the white walls in order to erase the graffiti, without having given time to safeguard some creations.

Several experts of contemporary art, cited during the judicial process, certified the quality of the lost works.

Prestigious jury at Viña del Mar Festival

Viña del Mar has the privilege of hosting one of the few International Song Festivals still having an impact, as the edition to begin on Feb. 20 seems to show.

Cuban duo Gente de Zona, Prince Royce, Ha Ash, Zion and Lennox and Chileans Roberto Márquez, member of the Illapu band, and Augusto Schuster, will be part of the jury of the event, to be run until Sunday, Feb. 25.

The 59th Viña del Mar International Song Festival will feature the performances of Luis Fonsi, Miguel Bossé, Carlos Vives and duo Gente de Zona, among others.
Puerto Rican Fonsi, acclaimed for his success Despacito, will perform on Wednesday, February 21, without Daddy Yankee, but with the expectation of singing along with Cuban duo Gente de Zona, something that has already happened in the past.

CNCO, a group emerged in Miami with young people of different nationalities, Chilean dancer and guitarist Schuster, and Puerto Rican reggaeton singers Zion and Lennox, will close the festival on Sunday, Feb. 25.

by Marvin Ramírez and the news services of El Reportero

This week San Francisco dressed in Cañambuco and Fritanga with the music of a Nicaraguan musical group whose mix of rhythms and names of their songs is already causing musical and cultural sensation internationally.

On a long tour of several US states, Grammy nominees, La Cuneta Son Machin made a stop in San Francisco as part of a tour of several California cities, at a concert on Wednesday, Feb. 7 at Slim’s, after they had a presentation on Monday, Feb. 5 at Harlow’s in Sacramento.

In an interview full of flavor and curiosity in the TV studios of El ReporteroTV, the actress and presenter, Vicky Contreras, drew from two of its members – the singer, Carlos Guillén, ‘Bean’, and the bassist, Augusto Mejía, the sentiment and mission of the group, and excited them to play two of their successes in the studio. (The interview will air at the elreportero-TV.com and shared on social media).

Unfortunately, the other members (the other three) could not attend the interview, since they are going to rent they were damaged on the way to the studio, having them to stay to unload and load their luggage and instruments.

The US tour includes the states of California, Colorado and Texas. In California they will perform in several cities, including Orange County, Santa Cruz, San Diego, where they will open the Los Angeles Blues tour.

The group La Cuneta Son Machin is a group of Nicaraguan musicians that since 2009 proposed the fusion of popular music from Nicaragua and Latin America with new musical trends such as rock, ska, hip hop and funk, thus creating a project musical and audiovisual that has generated a great impact in the Central American musical art.

Two of its five members are part of the Mejía Godoy family, a family of internationally renowned artists, which for three generations has come here in the role of popular and social music, with Carlos and Luis Mejía as main figures. Godoy, two singer-songwriters and ambassadors worldwide of Nicaraguan music.

Currently “La Cuneta”, whose penultimate album Mondongo was nominated for the Grammy in 2016, is one of the most important Central American bands with the greatest international projection. The group released its new album, Cañambuco on May 19, 2017 worldwide.

Panamanian cinema to reach national public schools

For the second time, the Panalandia Poor Film Festival will reach five public schools in the country, from February 27 to March 3, with film screenings and appreciation classes on the seventh art.

‘This means that they (the teachers) will be able to use cinema as a tool to teach their children,’ audiovisual producer Said Isaac, director of the event, explained to the press.

Isaac stated that as part of the sample of winning films in previous editions, there will be an exchange of opinions between teachers and students.

He said that this year, Panalandia will be simultaneously present in several cities of the national territory such as David, Boquete, and Volcán, in the western province of Chiriquí; Penonomé, in the central Coclé, and Colón, in the homonymous region, as well as including open-air screenings and live music.

Of the 172 productions registered, 112 national and 43 Central American films were pre-selected, because ‘the Festival is interested in how the stories are told, what the themes are and if the story is their own’, explained the coordinator of the juries Nyra Soberón.

Latin Pop-Rock Groups Los Enanitos Verdes & Hombres G 

Two of the most iconic Latin pop-rock groups from the 80’s and 90’s, Enanitos Verdes and Hombres G, announced today they will bring their “Huevos Revueltos” Tour to the United States this June. The 14-date tour, produced by Live Nation and Frías Entertainment, will kick off June 1 in Las Vegas, NV and include a run of theaters and arenas across the country. The groups will perform at famous venues across the U.S. including the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, on June 2, The Masonic in San Francisco on June 3.

Originally from Mendoza, Argentina, Enanitos Verdes is a legendary pop-rock group for generations of fans throughout Latin America, with a great musical history full of awards, nominations and prestigious recognitions in multiple countries throughout their career.

Hombres G is a Spanish band formed in 1983 and is undoubtedly one of the most prominent groups of the 80s and 90s in Ibero-America.

Tickets will go on sale to the general public beginning Friday, February 9 at 10am local time at LiveNation.com.