Duo Pukra

brief description

Huayno is a pre-colonial musical and dance genre from the entire Andean mountain region spanning not just from Peru but also with variants under different names in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and north Argentina and Chile. It is musically characterized by a highly syncopated inner pulse, usually played in a minor pentatonic, hexatonic or diatonic scale including repeating stanzas followed by poetic, clever and playful semantic counter-points about Mother Nature and Love. Nowadays, Huayno is interpreted in Andean villages and towns as well as on the streets and subway train stations worldwide and is not limited to special events, performed by a great variety of musical ensembles & styles. Duo Pukra was founded in 2006 by Dr. Numa Armacanqui, ethnomusicologist, orthopedic surgeon and a leader of the Andean Indigenous community here in the Midwest who dedicated many years to researching, archiving and disseminating the music of the Pukra region (located in the regions of Ayacucho and Huancavelica in present-day Peru), as part of the Kichwa Indigenous nation. He wrote and published two books on the songs and tales of the ancestral origins of the Armacanqui family from Laramarca, Peru - titled: Kachicachicha Tukullaspaymi and Willasqaykichik, which are the first books of their kind to transcribe what has been only an oral tradition of that region. In honor of the memory of their culture, since 2022, Natalia and Richard Armacanqui have decided to continue cultivating the traditional Huaynos of their family to continue this tradition of collective wisdom and to share their culture and teachings as first-generation Andean Americans.