Antares Danza Contemporánea, an independent company from Hermosillo, Sonora, dives into the passions and animal features of the human soul to spill them over on stage.

Although some of its members were formed as dancers in other professional schools, they acquired their true structure as interpreters by working with the group founded in 1987.

A main feature of the company is a highly demanding physical training which it uses as a tool for an intense, at times even disturbing, expression.

Antares has participated in festivals in Europe, the United States and South America, and won two national prizes from Mexico’s Fine Arts National Institute and the Metropolitan Autonomous University (INBA-UAM). It has a scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) within the “Mexico on Stage” programme, the most important of its kind in the country.

Together with the Culture Institute of Sonora, the company organizes the international exhibit “A Desert for Dancing.” It has worked as a resident company with the ITASCA Community College, in Minnesota, in Nuevo Mexico, with the Christian University of  Texas, in Venezuela, Colombia and Costa Rica. In 2004 it opened the “Antares Núcleo Escuela,” a school that has currently 50 permanent students. In the teaching field, it has an exchange programme with the Dance Center Columbia College, from Chicago, Illinois.

 Art direction

“I try to extract from each of us the answers to the most basic passions and anxieties to reflect them on stage,” says Antares’ art director and dancer  Miguel Mancillas, who strives to leave aside the self indulgence and conventions of academic dancing.

He took his first dancing steps in 1980 in Sonora. He has studied contemporary, classical, mexican folclore dance and theatre, and danced for two years with the Montreal Dance Company, from Canada. A survey conducted among the dancing sector in Mexico revealed him as one of the ten best dancers of the country in the last century. In 1997 he won the XVIII INBA-UAM prize for the best choreographer and dancer. Since 1999 he works as an art creator for FONCA, where he is also an adviser, juror and curator for both national and international events. At the same time, he is a member of the Arts Council of the Contemporary Dance International Festival held every year in the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico.

“We like to take chances. That is why we dive deeply into the basic aspects of our own beings and seek to condense that experience in the form of dance,” Mancillas says.