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SEASON 2016/17
The fortieth anniversary begins on Saturday 10 September with an interactive project half workshop, half installation and half show, devised for the occasion by Joan Font of
Comediants. Between 4 pm and 8 pm, all the spaces in Montjuïc and the Plaça
Margarida Xirgu will host one big party.
Between 4 pm and 8 pm, all the spaces in Montjuïc and the Plaça Margarida Xirgu will be
occupied by workshops, labyrinths, life size chess sets, make-up areas, games for
theatrical expression, theatrical creative areas, a band with live music, DJs to start the
dancing...
It will be a party avenue - a party based on the theatre, a new ritual to start the season
that is just beginning, in which we want to take young and old along the most entertaining
journeys in theatrical production. Like all birthday parties, the evening will end with a
special cake...
We will be celebrating our fortieth anniversary, the fact that we are still alive, and still
doing theatre. And above all, that we are doing it with and for you, and that the Lliure
aims to stay unchanged in order to reach everybody.
On 12 September, the Teatre Lliure will host a benefit performance for the NGO
Proactiva Open Arms, with the participation of 60 leading names in this country's theatre.
There will be two performances on the same day, at 8 pm and 9:30 pm, in order to keep
the sea rescue ship Astral active for at least 15 days (in a single day it could be attended
more than 1000 people!)
The NGO. Founded by volunteer lifeguards in 2015 to work in the refugee crisis in the
Greek coasts, the organization set up its base camp in Lesbos, and is currently working
on the new sea routes to Europe that have opened up since the agreement last March
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between the EU and Turkey to close land borders. To do their work, they have been
given a ship, the Astral, which they have converted into a rescue and surveillance
hospital ship, and they have increased their crews to reduce the vessels sinking in the
international waters of the Mediterranean.
The project. We wanted to bring together 20 writers, 20 directors and 20 actors in the
commitment to highlight this major humanitarian crisis, the biggest experienced by
Europe since the end of the Second World War. In cooperation with representatives of
several organizations that have closely followed the conflict, a prior project has been
carried out in order to understand the conditions beyond what we are told by the media
and social networks. We also wanted to reduce the distance between this reality and
ourselves to the minimum, and this criterion has also shaped the performance.
The performance. The performance will take place at the Sala Fabià Puigserver. The
stalls will become a big hall with 20 independent tables able to seat 8 members of the
audience each. A performer will give a monologue linked with the experience of war and
exile at each table simultaneously. The monologues will last for a maximum of five
minutes each, and the performers will move from table to table. We estimate that during
the three quarters of an hour that the performance lasts, the viewers at each table will
witness between 5 and 6 of them, without having to change seat and at the shortest
possible distance.
The objective. The cost of keeping the ship Proactiva Open Arms active for at least 15
days starts at 22,400 €. If we have a full house in both performances with an average
contribution of € 70 per person, we will have succeeded in our objective!
The season in Gràcia begins after passing through the GREC Festival 2016, and with the
conviction that the world it depicts is not very far from where we are now. It is The Nether,
Jennifer Haley's text which has received the Susan Smith Blackburn prize in New York
and seven Ovation Awards in Los Angeles, and has been performed at the Royal Court
in London, Off-Broadway and in the West End. A challenge for moral thought, a
disturbing vision of virtual life.
A new virtual wonderland provides total sensory immersion. Just enter, choose an
identity and enjoy your every whim. A disturbing crime drama and a science fiction thriller
that examines the consequences of living out our private dreams. An examination of
moral responsibility in virtual worlds, and a stark warning about the future of the Internet.
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The play moves between two worlds. The first is an opaque reality, in which a detective
interrogates the creator of a virtual kingdom. A kingdom where your hidden desires can
come true. The second is the same kingdom, where you can literally smell, touch, taste...
and where, to complicate matters even further, adult users connected from the real world
can create avatars and choose their sex and age... any age... This play presents a
high-tech digital world where it is possible to live in a virtual reality and commit crimes
without suffering the consequences. The investigation of a virtual realm and its activities,
which are as realistic as they might be in real life, is slippery ethical terrain if we are free
to explore the remotest corners of our imagination without any limits on our more
perverse fantasies. A clash of wills that leads to a result that no one could have
imagined. A play that is full of suspense, artfully constructed and fiercely intelligent,
which forces us to confront profoundly disturbing questions about the limits of reality.
Just because something does not exist does not mean that it is not real. This is the other
side of the Internet, the web: alternative lives in a future that is already here.
Juan Carlos Martel Bayod
They will be the first to fill the theatres in Montjuïc with three simultaneous shows, which
can be seen in pairs or consecutively. They received the Silver Lion at the Venice
Biennale In 2015 and have fascinated audiences in both New York and Tehran. They are
the Agrupación Señor Serrano.
Four performers, eleven models and hundreds of jelly bears provide the setting for
Katastrophe: a ridiculous fable about human civilization, focused on disasters. In this
setting, the jelly bears suffer from earthquakes, oil spills, wars and extermination. This all
takes place live, with chemical experiments and subversive actions. A large screen
immerses the audience in this pop world of chaos, play and destruction.
A burning shanty town. Funk at full volume. The crisis of the mortgage system. Victorian
England. Nests, dens, caves and mansions. 42,879 foreclosures in 2011. Brickland.
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Horror. A smiling banker. A smiling builder. Nostalgia for home. A lot of video. A lot more
live video. Tahitian paradises. The right to housing. The right to air conditioning. The right
to a plasma television. Spain's doing fine. No more, no less.
Brickman Brando Bubble Boom is a biopic on the theatrical life of Sir John Brickman, the
most important builder in nineteenth century England, and a visionary and entrepreneur
who inspired the first mortgage system in history.
The performance presents extracts from the films The Wild One, Bedtime Story, Julius
Caesar, Guys and Dolls, The Chase, The Young Lions, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather
and A Streetcar Named Desire.
The house where Geronimo is in hiding in Pakistan. An exact copy of this house on a
military base in North Carolina. Another copy of this house in Jordan, where a film is
being shot. The largest search and capture operation in history. A sheriff obsessed by a
white whale. The boys from Take That preparing for a historic mission. Cowboys and
Indians. Aeroplanes and beer. Copies, reflections, imitations and hamburgers.
A Western for the stage in which reality and its copies are mixed up, to draw a ruthlessly
pop portrait of the decade following 11 September, which laid the foundations for the
twenty-first century. Come in and see.
An shrewd musical comedy with a touch of humour by Alfonso de Vilallonga, Baron of
Maldà, touches down at the Espai Lliure after the GREC 2016. In life - and in love - does
every success come from a mistake?
Why is it that when our hero sits at the piano, he cannot play a whole piece, however
easy and well-known it is, without playing at least one wrong note?
Is it simply a question of clumsiness?
Perhaps poor technique?
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Or could it be a conscious, and therefore subversive, intention?
Are there any parallels between the mistakes he makes at the piano and those he makes
in his love life and his professional life?
Why, in love as in life, has he often played the wrong note instead of the right one next to
it?
Why has he always opened the wrong door?
It the wrong note more valuable than the right one?
Is he himself therefore the result of a mistake?
What really lies behind our mistakes?
Various unusual characters from his past and present life appear during his musical and
poetic dissertations, ranging from his illustrious ancestor the Baron of Maldà (the first of
the line) to the cleaning lady and the neighbour across the landing, who will give him
some clues about the enigma that haunts him.
In life, playing the wrong note means choosing the wrong partner, deciding to do just the
opposite of what we should decide, opening the forbidden door, making a mistake,
investigating based on that starting point, and eventually building something new and
surprising - respecting the original form, but changing the content.
There is tenderness around error, clumsiness and imperfection.
If we accept and understand our weaknesses and the reasons for our mistakes, we can
turn them into our fundamental strength.
Philosophically and metaphorically, this show is therefore constructed based on the
wrong note.
Alfonso de Vilallonga
The complete Orestes trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides)
comes directly from Syracuse with a classical spirit and a contemporary format, directed
by Luca de Fusco.
One of the greatest theatrical masterpieces of all time, and the only Greek trilogy to have
survived in its entirety, is brought to the stage by a large company. Only one of the texts
of the Oresteia is usually performed. We are performing it in its entirety in two
consecutive performances, without neglecting the characteristics of Greek theatre,
which bring together words, song and dance. As a result, on the one hand we have a
highly classical play, but on the other, a very contemporary dramatization which brings
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up to date the style of theatre/video we explored in Vestire gli ignudi, Antigone and
Antony and Cleopatra, and continues our collaboration with the choreographer Noa
Wetheim of the Vertigo Dance Company, which with its music and its dance contributes
to making this a spectacle of total theatre.
Luca De Fusco
1938. They are 17 years old and are being sent to the front line in the crucial battle in the
Spanish Civil War (1936-39). The boys in La Kompanyia Lliure are making their debut,
recalling the tribulations of the Quinta de Biberó divisions based on the testimony of
some of the survivors. A tribute.
The Battle of the Ebro was the most decisive of the war, because Franco's troops were
unable to occupy Madrid, which was what Franco wanted in order to obtain international
recognition for his regime.
The People's Republican Army in Aragon had scattered (April 1938), which is the worst
thing that can happen to regular troops because it means that the soldiers panic and run
in order to return home. And they execute anyone who wants to get in the way.
According to Negrín (the President of the Republic) there were no loyal military forces
between the Segre river and Barcelona, which meant that if the Nationalists had attacked
from their bridgehead in Balaguer, they would have occupied Barcelona without any
difficulty and the war would have ended a year earlier. But according to Colonel Blanco
Escolà, the dictator was an incompetent soldier and an Africanist, and against the advice
of his generals, including Aranda, head of the army of Galicia; García Valiño, head of the
army of the Maestrat; and Martínez Campos, head of the artillery - instead of occupying
the rest of Catalonia (he had already conquered Lleida and the right bank of the Terres
de l'Ebre) Franco marched from Vinaròs, where he had isolated Catalonia from the rest
of the Republican territory, to Valencia in order to prolong the war.
Franco's diversion enabled the army of the Ebro, which was formed from Republican
units destroyed in Aragon, to reorganise. The basis of this new army was the V Army
Corps led by Juan Modesto and consisted of the 3rd Tagüeña, 11th Lister and 45th
International Hans Khale divisions. To cover the numerous casualties, the raising of
fresh levies was ordered on April 13, including the 1941 cohort, which was formed by
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those who would have been called up in 1941 when they were 21 years old, but needs of
the war meant that they were called up when they were 17 or 18 years old. The phrase
that they were so young that they were still drinking milk from a bottle - "el biberó" - was
attributed to Federica Montseny. Those lucky enough to survive aged prematurely, and
they paid a high price in lives. Many of them believed they were fighting for the cause of
freedom, according to my father.
Josep Sánchez Cervelló, professor of Contemporary History (URV).
The project that won the competition to adapt Ramon Llull's Book of Beasts mark the
700th anniversary of the author's death comes to the stage. A model musical.
Renard, the fox, is not pleased about the assembly of beasts having chosen the Lion as
king. So just after the coronation, crafty Renard takes advantage of the quarrels at the
court between carnivores and herbivores, and starts to scheme how to take the throne
one step at a time.
Renard or the Book of Beasts is a freely adapted version of Llull's famous work in the
form of a vibrant and infectious musical, with an entertaining adaptation for a family
audience by Marc Rosich and songs composed especially by Clara Peya. With no let-up
in the pace, and featuring a gallery of animals that also includes leopards, bulls,
elephants and even some of the more beastly humans, the play shows children the art of
telling tales, which Llull calls "eximplis", or examples.
The girls in La Kompanyia Lliure are making their debut with the famous text by Josep
Maria Benet i Jornet, the leading light of contemporary Catalan drama. It was premièred
in Barcelona by Josep Montanyès. It returns once again, with Juan Carlos Martel Bayod
looking at the revolt through contemporary eyes.
The story of The Witches' Revolt deals with everything that happens to six women and
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one man during the night of a full moon. They are the brigade responsible for cleaning
large characterless venues; he is responsible for the night-time security and control of
the same places. The women have a shared collective problem, which will bring them
into conflict with the guard, but the problem is almost the only thing that unites them, and
that's why the tiny and domestic revolt that happens may take some rather unexpected
forms.
To paraphrase the tarot, one might say that the forces of the day are confronted by the
forces of the night; the empress is confronted by the high priestess; a rational concept of
life is confronted by a vision of the irrational forces that govern our destiny. The problem
of the limits of human intelligence, the problem of the internal pain that amorous passion
can cause, and the problem of the fear of pain and death gradually become increasingly
important and interfere with each other; all of them will ultimately be critical factors in a
struggle in which the outcome is nothing more than temporary at the end of the play.
Meanwhile, at the edge of the battle, but affecting it, is imagination, the instinct of life,
which offer themselves as an alternative. The play does not aim to provide convincing
answers. It only aims to raise some disturbing questions, to remind us of some of the
aspects of the ideological crisis that surrounds us, and to try to analyse why the witches
unexpectedly come to power.
Josep Maria Benet i Jornet, December 1981
The story of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor who fell overboard from the Colombian
destroyer A.R.C. Caldas when the cargo of contraband it was carrying came loose, and
who spent ten days lost at sea, comes to the stage. When he was young, Gabriel García
Márquez followed the case and turned it into a story a year later. This time around, Àngel
Llàcer and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba are the central character and narrator respectively.
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food
or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich
Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.
That is the very long title of one of the most captivating true stories I've ever read. It was
written in 1955 by a young reporter called Gabriel García Márquez for the newspaper El
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Espectador in Bogota. It is a fantastic adventure that shifts between the tragedy of real
events and the unexpected and cruel sense of humour of the two central figures: the
reporter and the shipwrecked sailor. This excellent report, which transforms every written
word into a three-dimensional image that highlights the immense storytelling talent that
"Gabo" displayed in his earliest work, led me to think that this was a narrative that could
easily be transformed into dramatic material. It is a play, a tale, which immerses the
audience in the loneliness and the struggle for survival of a human being who is about to
die, about to be suffocated by lies and silence, and devoured by the sharks of the
Caribbean and the predators of a dictatorship. And if it is Emilio Gutiérrez Caba and
Angel Llàcer who are telling the tale... then I'm the one who is speechless.
Marc Montserrat-Drukker
We are celebrating our fortieth anniversary by bringing this iconic play by Fabià
Puigserver, which overwhelmed the box office in 1981, back to the stage. Many of those
who were there will be back, and there is no need to remember something if you can
relive it. Nostalgia is much better in the present.
Lluís Pasqual suggested doing Fabià Puigserver's Marriage of Figaro again to
commemorate the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Lliure. The Marriage
premièred in February 1989 and became iconic, and meant so much to so many people.
For the audience who saw it as well as for those of us who made it. With a profound
respect for the production, and with the deepest gratitude for everything that the Lliure
has given me over so many years, I am very excited about attempting to revive a show
that is full of what the theatre meant to Fabià: playfulness, generosity, wisdom and a
huge dose of love and a spirit of public service. I was Figaro the first time around; today,
some years later, I have been entrusted to direct the play. What I enjoy doing most is
trying to pass on that precious spirit of life and theatre to a new group of actors so that
using the testimony of those of us who did it with Fabià, with his proven talent and
enthusiasm, so that they can contribute everything positive that the passing of the years
has added to our profession. With all my love to all those who premièred it in 1989, with
all my love to those of us getting to work on it today - I can only thank the Lliure and Lluís
Pasqual for this beautiful opportunity.
Lluís Homar
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If death gave life to Rhum, in the show with, by and for the clown 'Monti,' it is not
surprising that his colleagues are returning to the stage. Now, in a new show with a lot of
life ahead of it. Health and clowns!
Rhümia is the name of the new show by Rhum & Cia. We also call it Rhum 3, because
people say that "sequels were never any good" in the past tense, but at this stage
nobody in the company dares to think that they might not be in the future. Rhum was a
show that started with a death and ended with life. Rhümia starts with life and continues
fighting against death, because if there is one thing that the Grim Reaper cannot do, it is
killing with laughter. Or that's what we clowns at Rhum & Co. think.
Rhümia is a theatrical creation that is autonomous and independent of Rhum, although it
shares its ingredients of humour, hooliganism and a large dose of tenderness.
It is all surrounded by the magic of the music of these multi-instrumentalist clowns, and
with classic clowns' theatrical entrances and new numbers that will complete the history
of Rhum.
The same family of clowns - Jordi Martínez, Joan Arqué, Roger Julià and Pepino
Pascual - will be joined by the musician, clown and artist Mauro Paganini, who takes over
from Guillem Albà and provides a new perspective for an "unstable" company of clowns
which is following the path they took with Rhum.
Rhümia is a performance of clown theatre with dramatic playwriting that will delight
young and old.
But will death appear?
Rhümia...
The Sixto Paz company presents a Jan Vilanova Claudín play into historical memory,
looking at personal relationships. A performance that was born in the Sala Beckett,
which we wanted to revive.
16 June 1944. Night has fallen. Thirty anti-Nazi resistance fighters are being executed by
the Gestapo in a field near Lyon. Among the group awaiting death, one man appears to
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be the odd one out: he's around sixty years old and looks like an absent-minded teacher.
He is Marc Bloch, a historian of crucial importance for the twentieth century, and the
advocate of a more human history.
Seventy-one years later, in 2015, a young university student falls in love with a girl who
happens to be the daughter of his history teacher. The three characters that make up this
triangle try to understand the relations between them a little better.
Can we get to know the dreams, shadows, or even the silences of others?
"History would help us to cure this weakness. It includes a vast experience of human
diversities, a continuous contact with men. Life, like science, has everything to gain from
it, if only these contacts be friendly. The historian's craft, by Marc Bloch
Understanding is a word that is full of difficulties but also full of hope. It is a word full of
friendship. We judge too much. It is very easy to shout "shoot them all!" We never
understand enough. Those who are different from us, whether because they are foreign,
or a political opponent, must almost necessarily have a bad background. A little more
intelligence in the soul is necessary, even when waging the inevitable struggles; all the
more reason to avoid them, if there is time.
This play aims to pay tribute to a way of understanding and experiencing history, based
on the work of the historian and anti-Nazi resistance fighter Marc Bloch. It aims to make
this science more accessible - a history that is not alien to each of our longings, lights
and shadows, because the subject it studies is people and their consciences.
History can accompany us in the experience of life based on this humanity, and this is
the basis for the creation of this play.
Jan Vilanova Claudín
A key text by the German playwright Thomas Bernhard based on true events. Fascism,
revisited by Krystian Lupa. Extremely topical. Implacable.
Bernhard's portrait of a family poisoned by Nazism; a wide range of symptoms, a sick
and crippled humanity.
It is no longer an ideology, or a historic monster, but instead a spiritual disease of
mankind.
All human feelings, values and aspirations are infected by this virus.
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It is no longer a lack of morality, the amputation of goodness, but instead of sick and
crippled morality, falsified goodness.
The profound illness of contemporary man, which creates disabled individuals according
to Thomas Bernhard's diagnosis.
Brothers affected by the virus of the modern mutation of Nazism, cloistered in a falsified
family existence, in a confined and suffocating prison that they themselves have created
and which they guard, which exudes hatred, fear and the impossibility of being happy.
Krystian Lupa
The third season on the journey in pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale imagined by the
American novelist Herman Melville. Keep an eye out for more news, because you will be
able to see the full version of La Kompanyia Lliure, with two more actors than last time!
Winner of the Butaca Award in 2014 for Plays for Family Audiences.
We travel around the most secret places in the Montjuïc theatre, following the sailors
who are searching for Moby Dick. An unusual adventure in places conceived and
designed by the artist Frederic Amat - a journey that combines navigation and the theatre
and which needs its audience to be wide awake. A very special show for children, with a
capacity of only 30 spectators for each performance!
They were Luca Ronconi's favourite students. They have been a company for nearly a
decade, and they are the most subversive and innovative actors on the Italian scene.
Ricci/Forte and two of their most brutal performances denounce the injustices and
humiliations that democratic legality allows. Warriors of beauty.
In an age of pre-cooked passions, redoubled feelings of grisaille, we have hungrily
satiated ourselves at Dennis Cooper's table with the rough poetry that fills his literary
universe. We have tried to tell a cruel story about adolescence with a Mozartian
shamelessness. And this led almost automatically to breaking down the doors of
so-called sexual normality, banging the drum of the forever-young world, and spreading
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salt in the wounds of a brutally vivid reality. The nocturnal wait of four people who devour
Haagen-Dazs ice cream (the Macadamia Nut Brittle of the title) is embodied in a
dreamlike Tamagotchi, in which scores are settled in a process of identity which releases
and simultaneously distances us from the planet that slides underneath our feet. In this
emotional fluctuation, with no safety belt, we fall sharply downwards into unpredictable
debauchery. The dance has begun; the figures are marked by lacerations, and turn
Mulino Bianco's romantic dream of a happy family into a waking nightmare. We are
ourselves, victims, executioners, the stars of this snuff film that life offers us, desperately
looking for love in an impossible world: because nature, like men, is ultimately malicious
and deceiving. Always.
Winner of the 2015 Critics Award for the Best Play for Young Audiences and for a Young
Actor, and of the Serra d'Or Prize for a Theatrical Production in 2015. Dedicated to Carlo
Giuliani, the young activist shot dead during the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001.
Welcome to global freedom under surveillance. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
Europe, summer of 2001. Ragazzo's home town is being subjected to the most extensive
restrictions of social rights that the continent has experienced since the Second World
War: borders are closed, the Schengen agreement is suspended, demonstrations and
gatherings are prohibited in some areas of the city; hanging clothes to dry on balconies is
prohibited. Arrests. Identity checks. 30,000 police officers patrolling the streets and they
do not allow access to the "Zona Rossa", where world leaders are attending the G8
summit.
Despite everything, Ragazzo is enjoying summer in the city: he has recently squatted a
cosy place with some friends which they have fitted out as a home, he's on holiday, he
has time to listen to music, read, cook, fall in love... and to participate in the World Social
Forum which has also descended on the town, where more than half a million people are
discussing what this "other possible world" that has been imagined as an alternative to
globalisation for some years would be like. His fate will be sealed when he takes the
decision to join the Column of Disobedience, who have decided to undertake a peaceful
action of civil disobedience: breaching the boundaries of the 'Zona Rossa'.
How should he react to this threat? Is a government that has to hide behind
armour-plating when taking decisions legitimate? Who uses violence (and what for)?
What is impunity? Is another world possible?
Ragazzo is a demand for life, for the dignity of personal stories, for the vindication of the
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collective memory and the history that the masters of the world never write for us.
Dedicated to Carlo Giuliani, the young activist shot dead during the G8 summit in Genoa
in July 2001.
Lali Álvarez Garriga
The discrimination and psychological and identity-based harassment based on
repression of the imagination which push people towards self-destruction. Those are the
themes of the play, which illustrates a seed that takes root everywhere but which in
schools in particular, at an age when any future seems possible, establishes its paradox
by exposing the limits of the crowd which we will become. A 'five-voiced massacre for a
victim' to talk about homophobic harassment and to try to combat identity-based
discrimination. A "tribute" to remember the teenager in Rome, one of so many, who
committed suicide by hanging himself with his pink scarf. The theatre thus becomes a
tool for conveying new ways of looking at reality based on respect for the individuals'
choices and natures. A process for engaging in politics, which should be understood as a
responsibility that citizens have within the polis. Without picking up any gun, but instead
making a commitment that becomes an act of courage.
In a starkly beautiful work of transcendence and struggle, Claire delves into the work of
medieval painter Hieronymous Bosch, to explore religion, religious art, and the judgment
of souls and bodies. Through tests of both body and faith, Give Me A Reason To Live
draws upon imagery of disabled people in Bosch’ s apocalyptic paintings to question our
present perspectives on “otherness” and “difference”. Powerfully physical, visually
striking, and set to a mesmerising score, Give Me a Reason to Live invites us to consider
our own empathy, sympathy or indifference, in a work of both generosity and brutal
immediacy.
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We are celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of the English novelist Charlotte
Brontë with Jane Eyre, the great romantic heroine. A woman who is well aware of what
she wants, played by Clara Segura. The production is directed by Carme Portaceli.
What is most marvellous about this character and this novel is the fact that Jane Eyre,
from her birth and without anything making her behave in that way, has the most
impressive instinct within her to overcome adversity that I have ever read about. In the
school for poor girls, where she is sent to get rid of her because she complained about
the injustice she faced from a very early age, she realises that she is incapable of
allowing herself to be abused in any of the ways that abuse may manifest itself. Jane
asks her friend Helen why she allows herself to be punished. Helen replies that she has
come here to receive an education, and that punishment is part of achieving this great
objective. And Jane said "I would not be able to bear that humiliation, I could not forgive
that. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the
wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they
would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a
reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach
the person who struck us never to do it again.”
Jane Eyre is a novel written by Charlotte Brontë in 1847, under the pseudonym of Currer
Bell. If they had used their real names, neither she nor either of her sisters, Emily and
Anne, would have had any of the novels that they wrote published. Or at least they would
not have achieved the success they had (not in the case of Emily and Wuthering
Heights) and they would therefore have been unable to continue writing, which was their
shared passion.
Jane Eyre is a window through which Charlotte Brontë shows us her vision of the world.
Jane discusses the arbitrary difference between classes, and highlights the role of
women in the world. She never allows anyone to forget that they are not an inferior being
due to being poor or being a woman.
But above all, Jane Eyre is a romantic work in which the struggle for freedom is the
impulse that drives the protagonist in a world where it is inaccessible to women. There is
also, of course, a great love story that can only be experienced when the two parties
involved are on equal terms, when love is not a prison, but instead an act of freedom.
Carme Portaceli
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The latest show by the company La Bleda, with Helena Escobar, the eponymous clown
who is the driving force behind a series of stories that have delighted children and adults.
Do you want to know what you can do with your imagination?
We all have superpowers. They are they so well hidden that they are difficult to find, but
they appear when you need them. La Bleda has the strength of an ant that can lift seven
times its own weight, and can disappear simply by closing her eyes, and can save
anyone she wants just by saying "one, two, three, you're saved". But when a "real"
problem arises, or a "real" need, she will have the most real superpower of all: her
imagination.
Jordi Palet
A society that is repressed, which protects itself, lurches into a crisis when someone
returns home and begins to uncover the past. A psychological drama written in 1884,
and Julio Manrique's first Ibsen.
A wounded duck lives with other animals in the dusty attic of a humble house in a small
town in a small country in northern Europe where it's always cold. As if the occupants of
the house, the poor but reasonably happy (that is just an opinion, of course) members of
the Ekdal family, had picked up a piece of the forest or had invented one to provide an
outlet for their fantasies, or their delusions, depending on how you look at it. But, as
grandfather Ekdal warns at one point, sooner or later "the woods revenge themselves".
Many fictions, or at least many of the fictions that I like (and that of course includes
dramatic fiction), consist of this: a community, a specific group of people, persists by
obeying certain rules. Good or bad, they have been established as the mechanism that
ensures the group's survival. The story, or at least the story that interests us dramatically,
begins when someone, the other, the stranger, knocks on the door, watches how the
group in question operates, and at a specific point in time (either out of malice, the desire
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to help, or a disturbing mixture of both) calls these rules into question.
Something like this happens in The Wild Duck (a wonderful and surprisingly little-known
Ibsen that has rarely been performed in this country). Someone knocks on the door and
the poor but reasonably happy members of the Ekdal family decide to open it…
Julio Manrique
The company consisting of Aleix Aguilà, Júlia Barceló, Pol López and Pau Vinyals
present an updated version of Hedda Gabler, which they performed Temporada Alta
Theatre Festival in 2015. Pau Miró's first Ibsen.
"It's so difficult to know what we want and yet we want everything..."
Hedda Gabler is a brilliant woman who tries to fit into a very mediocre cliché. This effort is
devastating for her and for everyone around her. In fact, we already know her story, but
Her father's daughter is another matter. While the essence of the conflict and much of the
plot take us back to Ibsen's original, Her father's daughter involves a complete rewriting
of the classic. An absolutely uninhibited exercise by Aleix Aguilà. Don't be distracted by
the anachronisms. Its particular and modern perspective sheds brutal light on one of the
driving forces that defines our times: the unhealthy obsession to appear and realise
ourselves in virtual spaces. This effort is clearly in vain - frustration and existential
emptiness do not disappear, however many times we click here and there. This leads to
solitude, and to a dangerous self-destructive desire in the case of Hedda. A desire that
comes with a minimal silver lining: individual freedom (not individualism) as the only
antidote to mediocrity. Aleix has made a vaudeville out of all this. A vaudeville that
advances towards the abyss. It is tailor-made for Júlia, Pau and Pol, La Companyia
Solitària, to which I feel a special attachment. Because of its uniqueness, because of the
risks they take in each production and above all, because of the intelligence and the
sense of humour that infuse their work.
Pau Miró
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Last year, in El Rey, they focused on the bias in 'the transition to democracy'. Now they
are going a bit further back, to 1939, to focus on the history of economic power in this
country.
Who governs in Spain? To what extent is political power subordinate to economic
power? Who has economic power in Spain? Why do they have it? Since when? How
have they obtained it? What impact has economic power had on political power in the
successive cycles of our recent history?
These questions are the starting point of Massacre. In this story, which is theatrically free
but which aims to be historically accurate, a powerless man and woman get up one day
with the intention of ending capitalism in Spain. With this in mind, they travel back to
1939 to reconstruct the road between then and now. This time, with their eyes open.
On this journey to try to understand something more, they will become crucial characters
for Spanish economic power in the twentieth century and the piece of the twenty-first
century that we have lived through so far.
The brainchild of Didier Ruiz and the Parisian group La Compagnie des hommes, this
piece is tailor-made for the theatre where it is performed, placing the neighbourhood's
older residents on the stage. A close-up experience of memory. Theatre and a
document.
"I'm interested in what I call small memory - emotional memory, everyday knowledge, the
opposite of the large memory that is preserved in books. This memory, which I think
forms our uniqueness, is extremely fragile and disappears with death." Christian
Boltanski
Old people are a vast reserve of information and memories. Eighty years of life are
equivalent to a multitude of faces, names, bodies and perfumes. Ten old people are ten
times more memory: a genuine media library. They are a library, video library and record
library, all rolled into one.
Making them bring fragments of memory back up to the surface, like old pieces of
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wallpaper we discover when we pull off more recent ones when refurbishing a house.
Saying nothing except for "I remember...”.
Just putting it all together. Making a social documentary that is discussed, theatrical. As
well as remembering that after all, they were not born old but we are getting old. All of us.
Didier Ruiz
With 30 years of experience behind them, this British company continues to reinvent the
theatre. Now they are doing the complete works of Shakespeare on a table, using
household objects. 36 plays condensed into one-hour shows.
Forced Entertainment have long had an obsession with virtual or described
performance, exploring in different ways over the years the possibilities of conjuring
extraordinary scenes, images and narratives using language alone. In a brand new
direction for the company, Complete Works explored the dynamic force of narrative in a
simple and idiosyncratic summary of Shakespeare’s comedies, tragedies, histories and
late plays, creating worlds as vivid as they are strange.
The Swiss director Milo Rau brings to the stage the case of the child killer Marc Dutroux,
which shook Belgium in 1996. A play performed by children. A confrontational
experience which combines aesthetic and moral issues.
Jury Special Award of the Belgium Critics of Theater and Dance Awards on 2015/16
season.
A hundred years ago, Igor Stravinsky wrote Five Easy Pieces to teach his children how
to play the piano. With Seven Easy Pieces, Marina Abramovic was responsible for some
of the most emblematic moments in performance. Now Milo Rau initiates children in
emotional and political absurdity, and the bottomless pits of the adult world. What does
involving children in theatre for adults entail? What does it tell us about power and
submission, theatre and performance, mimicry and humanity?
Five Easy Pieces is an experiment. In five very simple exercises, short scenes and
monologues to camera, the young actors take on different roles: a police officer, the
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father of Marc Dutroux, one of the victims, and the parents of a dead girl. They do so
using the presentations that we have rehearsed with adult actors: a visit to the scene of
the crime, a funeral, a scene in the everyday life of Marc Dutroux's father. First, a
panorama of the history of Belgium unfolds, from the Congolese declaration of
independence to the White March of October 1996. Then the play considers the
boundaries of what children know, feel and are allowed to do. What does observing them
in these scenes mean? What do we do with our own fears, hopes and taboos?
Between 1939 and 1944, the Swiss nurse Elisabeth Eidenbenz saved the lives of 597
children, who were the sons and daughters of Spanish refugees interned in the camps at
Argelès and Saint-Cyprien in Roussillon. A sadly topical play.
The Maternity of Elna discusses historical events that took place at the end of the
Spanish Civil War. In January 1939, almost half a million people fled to France. Many of
them were interned in French concentration camps like the one in Argelès.
The Maternity of Elna (an institution organised by Swiss social movements that provided
money, food and equipment) talks about what a very young woman, Elisabeth
Eidenbenz, did to save pregnant women who had to give birth in conditions of appalling
hygiene, food and health in French refugee camps.
It is rare to be able to talk so clearly and directly about something that is a genuine hymn
to hope. Hope in humanity and in the future of humanity, represented by innocent babies
born in terrible circumstances. Hope in cooperation between people.
Hope in the survival of everyone, without distinction based on their gender, nationality,
race, religion or ideology. Hope in people's simple goodness. Or simply hope (without
any adjectives).
Projecte Galilei
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Written by an artist still in his teens, Ivanov is the story of a man trapped between the end
of a world and the fear of living. Alone, disliked by everything and everyone, unfriendly
and lucid. Alex Rigola's first Chekhov.
It is absurd to talk too much about Ivanov beforehand. It is much better that the version
we present explains itself. It is much better not to define this play, which creates a great
diversity of opinion about its central character and his surroundings. A confusing
environment, like the one we live in today.
Anyway, let's say that perhaps it talks about someone who is imperfect, like us; full of
contradictions, like us; who at a time of crisis and/or stress, questions us about the
meaning of life and about our behaviour.
Kierkegaard said that we are free to make moral decisions to direct our lives, but that our
consciousness of choice makes us anxious.
Sartre said that our consciousness of our existence makes us create our own goal in life,
to give it meaning.
Camus said that our life has no fundamental purpose and that in order to cope with the
anguish this causes us, we must therefore choose between accepting the banality and
absurdity of our existence or ceasing to exist.
We have all had moments of crisis in our lives, each for different reasons, which have
given us anxiety. So we watch what happens to Ivanov and his companions in a society
that is lost, unstable and with values that are tainted. Does that sound familiar?
Are we all right?
Àlex Rigola
Joan Ollé pays tribute to one of his personal heroes, Jaime Gil de Biedma. A reflection
on the Barcelona author, based on his own and others' texts. Literary, dramatic and
poetic.
Jaime Gil de Biedma on stage? Or in his senior executive's office, or in a bar, in the early
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hours of the morning; the important thing is conversation, what is said and how it is
explained, giving pleasure to the listener.
That is the intention: to invite you to listen as Jaime Gil tells us about all his lives through
poetry, diaries, correspondence, interviews... The young poet learned that a poem can
be a dramatic monologue from his teacher Eliot.
Three Jaimes on stage - the youth, the adult and the posthumous version? Or maybe
me, you and us: the persons of the Verb. And she, they, who are also in his words. And
the words of his friends Estapé, Barral, Ferrater, Marsé...
Today, at the Lliure, Catalan poetry in Spanish.
Joan Ollé
The company consisting of Alberto Díaz, Albert Prat and Sergi Torrecilla brings to the
stage a text by Josep Maria Miró on the construction and destruction of memory. To what
extent is an official version accurate? What is lost forever in the process of producing it?
Two sons return home to spend a couple of days. Neither of the two usually visit very
often. When they arrive, without knowing that the other brother will also be there, they
find another surprise: their mother has invited a boy of their age to live there. He is
helping the woman to write a book commemorating the anniversary of the Foundation
that their parents established twenty-five years ago. The two brothers are suspicious and
bewildered that she has chosen as her assistant the son of someone with whom their
parents had some disagreements — at least that is how they remember it and perceive it
— and above all, that she has welcomed him into the family home and that this person,
who they considered to be an intruder, is now living with her life and her memories.
In all the plays I write, I ask myself questions and at the same time try to convey them to
the audience. These are issues that worry me or for which I don't usually have any
answers. They often refer to our history - personal, family or collective - in an attempt to
explain and understand who we are and our current circumstances. On that basis, how
do we construct memory and what is our starting point?
Or paradoxical as it may seem, is the construction of memory an act of destruction? The
protagonists of our play - in a space that combines an intimate family setting and the
public dimension of a foundation created by the parents - are preparing a book. That
provided me with a starting point for talking about a subject as fragile and uncertain as
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the creation of official narratives.
This encounter, and the need to shape a past, highlights different people's perceptions
and the need to reach agreements that are more or less faithful to reality, and lead to a
certain coexistence. As I have discussed in previous plays, the word in turn becomes a
beautiful and dangerous tool for communication, isolation and manipulation, creating
realities, relationships and truths through lies and assumptions.
Since its inception, I have been a observed of the plays and the development of La Ruta
40 theatre company very closely. Its record and commitment when selecting authors,
titles and subjects has always seemed to me to be a statement of intent and a precise
and consistent theatrical perspective, so now it is a pleasure to share this project with
them.
Josep Maria Miró
One of last season's most acclaimed productions returns to Gràcia. The rebel Hamlet of
those with 'no future'. A furiously intergenerational performance featuring Pol Lopez.
"Yes. A new, impetuous, instinctive Hamlet is possible. An excellent play." Jordi Bordes
(El Punt Avui)
"Pol López exhales an unusual purity, shining with sincerity. Fantastic." Marcos Ordóñez
(El País)
"Maria Rodríguez is perfect as a fragile and sentimental Ophelia." Santi Fondevila (Ara)
"You will temporarily forget the previous Hamlets you may have seen." Andreu Sotorra
(clip de teatre)
"A stunning version, which places a mirror in front of us." Xavier Antich (elnacional.cat)
"A play of unquestionable quality." Joan-Anton Benach (La Vanguardia)
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The actor Juan Echanove and the director Gerardo Vera have teamed up to stage
Dostoyevsky's titanic novel. Do you know the dark side of human life? His name is
Fyodor Karamazov.
My long-standing desire to stage The Brothers Karamazov began to take shape on the
day when I was sitting in a café with Juan Echanove. I suddenly saw a flash of inspiration
appear in his eyes, and I was convinced that this shared challenge had begun to possess
him as it had possessed me. There was no going back: Fyodor Karamazov was sitting in
front of me - finally our shared dream of working together would come true.
During a long creative process with José Luis Collado, we succeeded in adapting this
milestone of the universal novel. We were always helped by Dostoevsky, who guided us
and dazzled us with his monument to human compassion and his understanding of the
dark side of men's nature. There is only one way forward in a project like this: listening
with passion, respect and admiration to a Russian, European and universal novelist, who
like all great artists, ultimately only discusses man, looking at him with the most powerful
magnifying glass and the greatest compassion of which he is capable.
Gerardo Vera
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