El Dia del Nino

When spring comes, and the weather borders on sweltering, it's festival time in Las Vegas. This Saturday was the Dia del Nino festival at the Winchester Cultural Center. We went mostly because there was going to be a performance from a group focusing on pantomime and puppets. It looked interesting on paper.

It turns out that this wasn't really a children's festival like the week before. It was more of a Hispanic cultural thing. There weren't really any rides or games, but a local Mexican restaurant had food for sale, and there were a few booths from environmental agencies. On an outdoor stage were cultural performances: a Paraguayan dancer who performed with bottles balanced on her head, a troupe who sang some folk songs and danced, etc.

Before the performance of Tafar (the pantomime group), the restaurant, Benito Michoacan, I think, had games for the kids. For girls, if they could hula hoop for a count of 20, they would win a prize. Zorah didn't want to try because she can't hula. Of course, it turned out that you would get a prize even for trying, so she got very upset. Fortunately, she was given another chance after the games on the stage. I am hoping it will serve to remind her that trying and failing is better than doing nothing.

Anyway, here are some pictures from the performance. Zorah absolutely loved it. It was a lot of fun, with a lot of humor and audience interaction. When they spoke it was mostly in Spanish, but luckily rudimentary enough that I could translate for Zorah. In the skit below, three birds compared the size of their eggs.

In the one below, a woman becomes a puppeteer and a puppet.

And in this one, death is dirty and stinky and needs a bath. They grabbed a volunteer from the audience to wash his feet since he couldn't reach them.

I loved it. Not something you see every day. After the show was over, we found no reason to linger, and headed home.