"Old Havana: city in movement" is the name of the meeting that offers to dancers the plazas, parks, museums, balconies and columns of the city which they transform into street stages, according to choreographer Isabel Bustos, director of the festival and of the Cuban company Danza Teatro Retazos (Theatre-Dance Snippets).

To achieve an interaction between dancers and spectators in their residential milieu in such a way that one and the other integrate the landscape with its history and architecture, is the aim of the dance-based meeting that seeks to culturally animate urban spaces.

Along with Cuban professionals and groups of amateurs from around the Island, artists from 16 countries, among them Spain, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, will dance. Everybody, as happens each year, strives to leave an aftertaste to juggle for the variety of the manifestations displayed and the blending of the works with the history, architecture and design of the places where they appear.

Apart from dance, the event will take exhibitions, courses, concerts, performances, workshops and art videos to the streets of San Ignacio, Mercaderes, Oficios and Obra Pía; to Armas and Vieja plazas, to the patios of the Simón Bolívar, Oswaldo Guayasamín and Benito Juárez home-museums and to Las Carolinas and Rumiñahui parks.

Sponsored by the Historians Office of the City and the Havana Theatre and Dance Centre, the International Encounter of Dance in Urban Landscapes "Old Havana: city in movement" forms, since 1999, a part of the network "Cities that dance", made up of over ten European and American metropolises.

This festival serves as the introduction to The Days of Dance, an event that will keep Havana in movement with performances by the best national groups in various theatres of the capital during the first days of May.

(www.cubanow.net)