Bolero

Bolero is a genre of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.

The term is also used for some art music. In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century.

Spain

The bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana. Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited with inventing the dance in 1780. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar.

Cuba

In Cuba, the bolero was perhaps the first great Cuban musical and vocal synthesis to win universal recognition. In 2/4 time, this dance music spread to other countries, leaving behind what Ed Morales has called the "most popular lyric tradition in Latin America".

Bolero (horse)

Bolero (1975-1986) was a dressage horse and an influential sire. He stood 16.1 hands (65 inches, 165 cm).

Pedigree

Bolero was by the English Thoroughbred stallion Black Sky, who was imported to Germany in 1972. Black Sky was a grandson of the great stallion Djebel, who also sired the very influential My Babu, a stallion seen in many show jumpers and hunters pedigrees in the United States. Black Sky stood at the private stud farm of Schmidt-Ankum, and his offspring were generally talented dressage horses with good rideability, but with very little jumping talent.

Bolero's dam, Baroness, was registered with the Hanoverian Verband. She was half-Thoroughbred through her sire, the large-framed stallion Bleep. Her dam's side includes Hyperion, who in turn traces to Bay Ronald. The dam-sire of Baroness was the stallion Athos, who was known as a broodmare sire of dressage horses, and her damline (Athos-Fliegerstern) also produced the stallions Grenadier, Hitchcock, and Winner.

This breeding combination of a Thoroughbred stallion to a mare that was by a Thoroughbred was prohibited by the Hanoverian studbook at the time, due to the belief that the offspring would be unsuccessful.

Bolero, Sarajevo

Bolero, Sarajevo or shortened Bolero is the name of a theatre show produced by the East West Theatre Company from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Tala Dance Center from Croatia. Authors, choreographer Tamara Curic from Zagreb, Croatia and director Haris Pasovic, created a dance performance in which Sarajevo and choreography impressed with Maurice Béjart's work are in interaction. They were largely inspired by the flux of Sarajevo, Ravel’s music and 'Béjartesque' swinging bodies. Performance included dancers from Zagreb who regularly collaborate with the TALA Dance Centre, actors of the East West Theatre Company from Sarajevo, and the members of the Sarajevo National Theatre’s Ballet Company.

Haris Pasovic, Sarajevo theater director and drama professor at the Academy of Performing Arts, injected this predominantly dance production with occasional humorous monologues, in which the people of Sarajevo tell intimate stories about their post-war lives. This performance was created to commemorate the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.