Adventure Divas

Puppy Love: Tales from the Peru Tour

Women travel to Peru to meet a diva and unwittingly bring her dog a soulmate

Mon, July 30, 2007

Susana Baca de la Colina is Peru’s prima diva, in the old fashioned sense, but she’s also an adventure diva, who’s turning her virtuosity into institutional change. She invited our group of women travelers to her beautiful seaside home in Chorrillos, which she shares with her musicologist husband Richard Pereira and the biggest, blackest and most affectionate Great Dane ever.

Susana Baca is an internationally renowned performer and has revived and nurtured Afro-Peruvian music to the degree that it is now intrinsic to the country’s musical landscape. She showed us around her impressive library and talked about the young artists she mentors - and about the new building, complete with sound studio, she and Pereira are just completing that will house their Instituto Negrocontinuo (Black Continuum Institute). Over tea and sweets, Susana tells us she expects to stop touring soon because she wants to devote more time to the Institute; she’d like to “create more and perform less.” Our visit with Baca was delightful, save for the antics of the Great Dane.

The Dog fell in love with Jorge. Our translator.

Susana seemed not to notice when The Dog sat down on the sofa beside Jorge, the only man in the room. With her long black legs (much longer than Jorge’s), planted on the floor in front of her and her butt firmly against Jorge’s, she was quietly prim and well-behaved - if you don’t count the fact that she occasionally turned her head and licked Jorge’s ear. Jorge had to give up his teacup because whenever he spoke, The Dog picked her paw up off the floor and put it on his knee as if to say, “hush, now, dear, you’re here with me!”

We lapped up all Baca had to tell us about her Afro-Peruvian music revolution - meanwhile while the dog-on-man sub-drama kept us in stitches.

To learn more about Baca and her music (though probably not about her dog) check out www.luakabop.com and www.afropop.org or listen to her Grammy winning album, Lamento Negro (best folk album, 2002).