Augusto Blanca Gil

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Composer and singer, founder of the Cuban Nueva Trova. Painter. Set designer and theatrical actor.

He was born in Banes, province of Holguín. In his hometown he studied guitar from a very young age and gave public performances as an amateur. In his early adolescence, he founded the quartet "Los nocturnos" following the prevailing scheme of these groups. In 1962 he moved to Santiago de Cuba to study fine arts, influenced by his mother, a teacher and painter; at the same time, he began his professional artistic life as a singer with the Orquesta Típica Juventud, in which he remained until 1970.

In 1967 he graduated from the Provincial School of Fine Arts "José Joaquín Tejada" in the specialties of drawing and painting and began working as a set designer for the Conjunto Dramático de Oriente, directed by Argentine Adolfo Gutkin, who was also his acting professor.

That same year he won a prize for his set design of the staging of Una libra de carne, by Argentine playwright Agustín Cuzzani.

In addition to being a composer and actor, he has been a general theater designer (set design, costumes, lighting, props) and actor. Augusto Blanca reconciled these two vocations, for trovadoresque music and for theater, with the founding of Teatrova, directed by Gutkin, together with actress María Eugenia García, in 1973.

In 1984 he moved to Havana and continued his theatrical experience, together with the development of his trovadoresque work.

His work in theater (for children, youth and adults) has been linked to the groups Teatro Estudio, Teatro Mío, Okantomí, Trébol and other companies. He has also written plays such as Romance de Arlequín and Corista and Triada bajo la luna llena.

Particularly successful was his version, together with actress Corina Mestre, of Momo, the work by German writer Michael Ende, premiered on November 24, 1991 at the Sala Teatro Hubert de Blanck. For it he won the Grand Prize "Rita Montaner" for best male performance and music at the 1991 Festival of Lyric Scenes.

He also won the Original Music Prize at the 2006 Festival of Theater for Children in Small Format in Santa Clara, Cuba, for the work Papobo, by playwright David García, mounted by Arteatro. That same year he was awarded the Caricato prize for the musicalization of this work; the following year, 2007, this contest awarded him a Prize for the music of The Wizard of Oz, staged by the Hubert de Blanck group.

His musical projects, reflected in a varied discography, have taken him to several countries in Latin America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, where he has shared the stage with figures of song such as Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, Vicente and Santiago Feliú, Noel Nicola, Sara González, Joan Manuel Serrat, Miriam Ramos, Lázaro García, Víctor Jara, Daniel Viglietti, Víctor Heredia, Ángel and Isabel Parra and Nora Blanco, and with actors and actresses such as René de la Cruz, Yanara Moreno, Jaquelin Arenal, Mijail Mulkay, in addition to the already mentioned María Eugenia García and Corina Mestre.

In addition to these solo albums, Augusto Blanca is part of various anthologies of Cuban trova and Latin American song. One of the record productions in which he has participated is the album Definitivamente Jueves, EGREM editions, where together with Ariadna Amador, he sets to music the verses of poet Waldo Leyva that are performed, among others, by Silvio Rodríguez, Isaac Delgado, Sara González, Miriam Ramos, Liuba María Hevia, Santiago Feliú, Rochy Ameneiro and the musical authors themselves.

His songs are part of the repertoire of outstanding singers from Cuba, Argentina, Venezuela, Germany, Uruguay, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, among which are found, in addition to the most important Cuban interpreters, Juan Carlos Baglietto, Chris Dooer, Nora Blanco and Miriam Quiñones.

He has participated in several international festivals, such as the Festival of Political Song in Berlin, the Festival of the Newspaper La Unitá in Italy, Carifesta in Barbados, the Luna de Otoño Festival in Mexico, the Barna Sand Festival in Barcelona, and the Poetry Festival in Venezuela, among others.

In 2003 he was awarded by the Superior Institute of Art the Diploma for Artistic Merit. In 2005 he received the TROVA Prize at CUBADISCO for his production Luna trovera. That same year the Cultural Center "Pablo de la Torriente Brau" awarded him the Pablo Prize "for the poetry and humanity of his songs, for his beautiful artistic career, inspiring new generations of Cuban trova."

In 2007 he won a Prize at the Festival of Habaneras that year held in the capital of the island. Augusto Blanca is part of a generation of Cuban musicians descended from the rich trovadoresque legacy of the Island that transformed and renewed Cuban song. His creative work is recognized as one of the fundamental ones of the Cuban Nueva Trova Movement. He was a founder of this movement along with Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés.

For his uninterrupted artistic work he holds the following distinctions: Medal for the first 10 years of the Nueva Trova, Medal for National Culture, Nicolás Guillén Plaque, José María Heredia Plaque, Majadahonda Distinction, Alejo Carpentier Medal.