05/26/2026
Workshop description:
June 7th · 1:30pm · Railyard Performance Center 💃🏽✨
Afro-Peruvian Festejo Class
Dance to the Afro-Peruvian sounds of the box drum “el cajón”, cajita, and quijada, and learn the vibrant dance of Festejo — one of Peru’s signature coastal dances that emerged to visibilize, represent, and uplift Afro-Peruvian culture.
Traditionally danced in social gatherings and harvest celebrations, Festejo carries deep connections to fertility, abundance, sensuality, courtship, and community celebration. It continues to stand as a powerful symbol of resistance and empowerment.
In this class, Cynthia Paniagua guides students through the roots, cultural significance, history, and ritual of the basic steps, building toward a high-energy, connected dance experience.
Cynthia Paniagua is a dancer, choreographer, and educator whose work reflects her Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Andean, and Nuyorican heritage. Her practice weaves contemporary movement with Peruvian traditional dance, exploring cultural identity, Andean cosmology, spiritual practice, and Latine lived experience as a first-generation New Yorker.
As featured in the documentary Soy Andina, she has traveled extensively across the U.S. and Peru researching Peruvian folk dance, sharing her story, and teaching workshops. She is a Fulbright scholar who has spent over 15 years living between Peru and the U.S., researching ritual dances as living archives of ancestral memory, resistance, joy, and social transformation.
Her work has connected her with dance communities across the Andes, Coast, and Amazon in Peru, as well as Ecuador, Colombia, and Puerto Rico. Cynthia is a member of Bombazo Dance Company and a featured dancer in In the Heights. She was also the first choreographer commissioned by the United Nations Symphony Orchestra for the Andean work El Cóndor Pasa at the UN Forum for Indigenous Issues (2019).
She is the founder of Kaypacha Dance LLC and director of Dance Your Ancestors, a program dedicated to connecting Peruvians in the diaspora to their roots through ancestral dance exchange and cultural travel.
