Before becoming a global phenomenon in the 2000s thanks to artists like Aventura, Monchy y Alexandra and Prince Royce, and before being declared an \u201cintangible cultural heritage of humanity\u201d by UNESCO in 2019, bachata was \u2014 and continues to be \u2014 the soundtrack of the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n
The importance of the genre to the people of the Caribbean nation is at the heart of \u201cAgridulce,\u201d a music documentary that had its world premiere at this month\u2019s South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. Filmed over the course of five years, the feature follows four young students at Academia de Bachata, a music conservatory in the beachside resort town of Cabarete. It\u2019s the only school of its kind in the world.<\/p>\n
Academia de Bachata was founded in 2013 by music producer Benjamin De Menil. After traveling to the Dominican Republic to record for nearly three decades, De Menil says he wanted to create something that would ensure that the next generation continues the traditions of bachata.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of the things I loved about the bachata musicians I was working with early on is that they were such natural musicians. There was never any sheet music, so whenever we were going to record I would say, \u2018Let\u2019s do this song and it goes like this,\u2019 and they would listen to it for a little bit before they figured it out and they were playing it,\u201d he said. \u201cI thought that we could somehow harness that energy in a more organized and educational format and make a school where we\u2019re helping young children become professional musicians within this genre that has a lot of opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
De Menil partnered with DREAM Project, a nonprofit organization that did work in Cabarete, and launched Academia de Bachata in 2013. Since then, the school has provided hundreds of children with a free musical education.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of things we were trying to figure out along the way about what the best way to teach this music was because this wasn\u2019t your typical conservatory. We were focusing on the traditions passed on rather than some style of music that there are already textbooks for.\u201d<\/p>\n
To make \u201cAgridulce,\u201d De Menil, who produced the film, reached out to Frank Pavich, director of the 2013 \u201cJodorowsky\u2019s Dune,\u201d the cult classic documentary about avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky\u2019s quixotic and failed attempt to adapt Frank Herbert\u2019s 1965 sci-fi novel \u201cDune.\u201d It didn\u2019t take much to bring him on onboard.<\/p>\n
\u201cBen contacted me and told me about the project. I responded with what\u2019s Bachata?,\u201d the Croatian American director said. \u201cI had never even heard of the musical genre. And then he sent me some music. He sent me footage that he had shot of [Cabarete] and of the school. And it was unlike anything I\u2019d ever seen. It was so colorful and so incredible that I just wanted to jump on right away. I was like, \u2018Great, when can we go down there and start shooting? It was really that fast.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pavich says now he hears bachata everywhere.<\/p>\n
\u201cI live between Switzerland and Croatia and now that I know how to pick it up, I hear it in cars passing by a cafe in Geneva and in Croatia,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s everywhere, it\u2019s infiltrated everything in the best way possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAgridulce\u201d is an ethnomusicological documentary \u2014 it captures the music of a specific place and people and shows how the tradition is kept alive \u2014 that also doubles as a coming of age story. The film follows students of varying ages \u2014 Edickson, Frandy, Orianny and Yerian \u2014 out of the classroom, showing us moments of intimacy with their families and friends while also giving us a slice of quotidian life in Cabarete.<\/p>\n
As such, \u201cAgridulce\u201d doesn\u2019t shy away from the political tensions of the beachside resort. Much like in the U.S., immigration is a contentious topic in the Dominican Republic \u2014 the country shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, which has seen an exodus of its people over the decade.<\/p>\n
De Menil and Pavich said that nearly a third of Academia de Bachata\u2019s student body is of Haitian descent, and that they would have had to go out of their way to not include one of them in the film.<\/p>\n
This tension plays out in the storyline of Frendy, a magnetic student of Haitian descent who uses bachata to fit in.<\/p>\n
\u201cMany young people are in that position of being made to feel they don\u2019t belong at that time in life when a person most wants to find their place,\u201d De Menil said. \u201cWe see that music can help kids, particularly immigrant kids, find belonging.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe film ultimately speaks to the way that culture and shared history contribute to the development of authentic, lived creativity,\u201d said South by Southwest consulting programmer Jim Kolmar. \u201cIt\u2019s something innate and inevitable, and \u2018Agridulce\u2019 really explores that beautifully. Obviously it\u2019s full of incredible music, but the deeper cultural context is essential, and seeing it through the perspective of the students at Academia de Bachata helps us connect the dots.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before becoming a global phenomenon in the 2000s thanks to artists like Aventura, Monchy y Alexandra and Prince…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":358479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[20853,173572,173571,173573,64563,146,878,173575,85,46,28344,409,173574,1266,4313,1331,2028,135322],"class_list":["post-358478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-genre","tag-academia-de-bachata","tag-agridulce","tag-de-menil","tag-dominican-republic","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-frank-pavich","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-kid","tag-music","tag-only-school","tag-people","tag-student","tag-tradition","tag-way","tag-world-premiere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/358479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}