Mariela's Music Time
Mariela’s Music Time is an educational, energetic and interactive bilingual performance for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and their families. It’s filled with rhythms and multicultural sounds, along with with the rich traditions of our Bay Area. For the past decade, Mariela has drawn upon her background in music and studies of Early Childhood Education to create a program that not only explores the music, but also addresses the kids’ curiosity by telling the history of the instruments and their cultures. She uses kinesthetic techniques in her bilingual storytelling to make foreign words understood. In no time, the kids are singing in another language as they dance and have fun!
Mariela Herrera was born in Santiago, Chile, and has been motivated to sing and dance since her childhood. She was part of a children’s folk group called Los Maipucitos for more than eight years where she learned about native dances and music and played guitar, harp, flutes from the Andes, and percussion instruments. With Los Maipucitos, she enjoyed traveling and performing in countries such as France, Germany, Ukraine, Holland, Poland, Belgium, Mexico, Argentina, and others. She also joined BAFOCHI (Folkloric Ballet from Chile), and the Arte Chile dance company. She studied traditional Chilean culture at the Catholic University of Chile and took theatre courses at the University of Chile.
In the US, she has participated with the groups Araucaria (Chilean dance), Jaranon y Bochinche, De Rompe y Raja (Afro-Peruvian folk) and Wasska Project.
She is currently an independent performer, educator, and musician for Mariela's Music Time. She moved to the East Bay more than fifteen years ago, and since then has created a career as a dancer and a musician for children. She is well known in the community, especially in libraries, museums and cultural centers where she dances, teaches, and plays with kids.
She has worked as a playgroup facilitator at Bananas - Child care referrals and resources, as a musician and educator with the Aim Program of the San Francisco Symphony, as a bilingual storyteller in many public libraries in California, and has recorded videos promoting healthy habits for the California Child Care Resource & Referral Network.
Her creative spirit has inspired her to keep teaching different melodies that connect cultures with the learning process in this amazing multicultural community named the Bay Area.
Her biggest desire is to continue using music as a vehicle to pursue the cognitive development of children.
