Democracy and Theatre in Catalonia Since 1975

Abstract

Grec Festival, Barcelona, Spain, June 27–July 31, 2021.Urban legend claims that Cava sold out in Catalonia on November 20, 1975, the day General Francisco Franco died. Theatre practitioners saw the dictator's demise as a call to arms, with 1976 marking the birth of two institutions that continue to play a key role in Barcelona's dramatic landscape: the Teatre Lliure [Free Theatre] and the Grec Theatre Festival. Critics, practitioners, and journalists from the era were alive to the political significance of the festival and theatre more generally. Even the nomenclature—Grec is Catalan for Greek—was far from incidental. Named after one of the venues, the Greek-style auditorium built on the Montjuic-wooded hill for the 1929 Universal Exhibition and neglected under Franco, it also evoked the close relationship between Athenian democracy and theatre. While not, as is often claimed, banning works in Catalan across the board, the government in Madrid and major theatre impresarios relegated them to the status of provincial curiosities. Featuring plays as well as concerts in both Castilian Spanish and Catalan, the inaugural Grec Festival favored works that had previously been prohibited or at least faced obstacles. Attended by nearly 30,000 spectators, resistance against institutional and linguistic colonialism exercised by the centralized state can retrospectively be seen as a key step towards Barcelona establishing itself in democracy as the theatrical capital of not only Catalonia but also Spain.In the twenty-first century, theatre and democracy have become collateral victims of the bitter stand-off between the Madrid-based central government, under the control of right-of-center PP from 2011 to 2018, and the Catalan regional government, the Generalitat, increasingly controlled by hardline secessionists. In the build-up to and aftermath of the 2017 unconstitutional referendum, expressing anything other than unconditional support for the independence movement was construed as a betrayal equivalent to, say, a director from London's National Theatre rallying for Brexit. The analogy, however, only goes so far. In private, far more theatre practitioners in Barcelona had doubts about independence, or at least the means through which the Generalitat set out to achieve it, than their counterparts in London did about the desirability of EU membership. Many of Catalonia's leading lights were keen to seek refuge far away from the firing line. Lluís Homar, a founding member of the Lliure, for example, took on the directorship of the Madrid-based Spanish National Classical Theatre Company in 2019. More controversially, opinion remains divided as to whether Lluís Pasqual's resignation from the directorship of the Lliure in 2018 following accusations of bullying was the result of a witch-hunt given his refusal to align himself with the nationalist cause or long-overdue recognition of unacceptable conduct. Following mounting pressure from current and former students over a culture of inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment, the director of the Institut del Teatre, Catalonia's leading drama school, Magda Puyo, eventually resigned in February 2021. Claiming she had investigated complaints, Puyo accepted responsibility for the toxic culture under her watch.Amidst such turmoil and the ongoing pandemic, the Grec Festival has proved resilient. Spain's initial lockdown was one of the strictest in Europe. Madrid opened up quicker than Barcelona, but there was a more rapid return to normal theatrical activity in both cities than in the vast majority of European capitals. Between June 27 and July 30, 2021, 107,888 people attended over a hundred socially distanced performances that comprised the forty-fifth Grec Festival—to put this into context, attendance was 137,737 for the 2019 edition and 23,572 in 2020, with a drastically reduced program and capacity. Almost inevitably, there were setbacks in 2021. Covid-19 regulations made the original interactive format of José y la Barcelona disidente [Jose and Dissident Barcelona], which mixed Catalan and Castilian in a real-life story of the experiences in the 1980s of a young gay man born in Andalusia who would die of AIDS in 1993, untenable. Ticketholders for the sold-out multimedia performances—complemented by an exhibition in the Barcelona underground—at the Lliure were offered their money back or the opportunity to experience the play without actors for seven instead of twenty-three Euros; the theatre was roughly a quarter full on the night I attended.The Generalitat has historically been criticized for neglecting the urban theatre Festival. When championing the latest edition, Barcelona's mayor, Ada Calau, wasted no opportunity to stress that it was taking place in spite of a lack of regional government support. An advocate of cultural tourism, with no desire for the number of cruises docking in the city to return to pre-pandemic levels, Calau boasted of showcasing diversity, a theme also highlighted by Cesc Casadesús, the Festival's artistic director, who spoke repeatedly of the need to pay attention to African Barcelona and to listen to Africans living in Catalonia alongside the descendants of Africans.The opening gala performance was a trilingual (Catalan, Castilian, and Arabic) theatrical adaptation of the Barcelona-based French novelist Mathias Enard's 2012 novel Rue des voleurs [The Street of Thieves] directed by Julio Manrique—who has since gained visibility appearing as a theatre director in Pedro Almodóvar's 2021 film Madres paralelas [Parallel Mothers]. The Street of Thieves a paean to multiculturalism centering on the journey of a young lad who flees from his native Maghreb to live in the Raval neighborhood situated just off the iconic Ramblas.Invited productions included Dear Winnie, which was directed by Junior Mthombeni, whose father was a former ANC resistance fighter. A musical homage, the work premiered in January 2021 at the KVS, one of Brussels’ most multicultural and vibrant theatre spaces, and homed in on key moments in Winnie Madikizela- Mandela's biography: imprisonment during Apartheid; accusations of murder, fraud, and adultery; and Desmond Tutu's plea for her to apologize at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In another production, South African director Brett Bailey transported the Biblical tale of Samson to a dystopian present characterized by uncontrolled capitalism, migratory crises, and xenophobia, incorporating choral and electronic music as well as opera. Elsewhere, Odile Sankara—a renowned singer, director, and playwright from Burkina Faso—staged a multicultural showcase drawing on local traditions with Catalan residents from different African countries employing their first languages.Since 1976, concerts have been performed at the Grec Theatre, and the 2021 program included a near-sell-out performance by Concha Buika. This Las Vegas Tina Turner impersonator-turned-darling of the global world music scene was born in Palma de Mallorca to parents from Equatorial Guinea (a Spanish colony until the 1960s). Although Germaine Acogny's company had previously performed in Catalonia, Casadesús claimed it was a historical injustice in need of redress that the seventy-seven-year-old Senegalese dancer had never personally performed in Barcelona. With an eye on future sustainability, the festival championed a progressive agenda with productions aimed at children, as well as their parents, focusing on themes of immigration and sexual identity, giving voice to young refugees or trans-characters. Press releases and promotional materials highlighted that fifty-five percent of the 2021 program had been directed by women.Catalan culture and society are at a crossroads but focusing on a few headline- grabbing productions runs the risk of distorting the nature and extent of change. Caixa Bank began selling tickets for the Grec Festival in 1988, the first year that box office sales broke the 100,000 mark. A hallmark of the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games was the collaboration of public and private institutions, and the cooperation of capital (both economic and symbolic) between the two sectors is more entrenched in Catalan theatre than elsewhere in Spain. The Grec provides an umbrella and funding for productions (some but not all of which would be staged anyway) at a network of the city's bustling theatres, the majority of which are run by Focus. For over thirty years, this group has successfully operated as a self-proclaimed business organization with an artistic vocation.The big draw at the Teatre Romea was an adaptation of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, a novel currently being adapted for a Netflix film as part of the streaming giant's efforts to boost their Mexican portfolio. Gushingly praised by rural novelist Julio Llamazares in his column for El País, Spain's newspaper of record, as an outstanding production of arguably the twentieth-century's greatest novel, irrespective of language, the Romea production was programmed for the Grec in 2020, but had its premiere postponed to autumn at the National Theatre in Madrid, before arriving for a residency in Barcelona for the 2021 festival. This was a return home in multiple senses: director Mario Gas was one of the organizers of Grec 1976, while among the framed posters in the foyer of the nineteenth-century Italianate theatre is an advert for an evening of theatrical entertainment in honor of his maternal uncle, the Catalan matador and actor, Mario Cabré (1916–1990), a heartthrob who had an affair with Hollywood starlet Ava Gardner, among others. Pau Miró, an alumnus of Barcelona's Institut del Teatre and Sala Beckett (an alternative space located in the gentrified Poblenou district, a post-industrial area transformed by the 1992 Olympic Games) adapted the novel, having previously directed it for a more low-scale production at the Beckett.In interviews, Miró commented that after emerging from Spain's first lockdown he felt as if he were in the deserted town of Comala, the setting of Rulfo's novel originally published in 1955. A key precursor to the Latin American literary boom of the following decade, Pedro Páramo depicts Juan Preciado's quest to fulfil a promise made to his dying mother: to return to her hometown in order to force his father, the eponymous local cacique, to pay for reneging himself of parental obligations. Inspired partly by a trip made by Rulfo from the metropolis to the impoverished and depopulated area of Jalisco where he was born, the mass urban migration and modernization that transformed Mexico into a post-World War II industrial powerhouse, and its violent rural past, resurfaces in the novel as a spectral and uncanny force. Being relatively brief and dialogue—or, to be more precise, monologue-heavy— facilitates the task of adaptation, with Miró retaining almost all of the novel's narrative content. The production featuring just two actors, Vicky Peña (Mario Gas's wife) and Pablo Derqui, playing multiple roles circumvented any need to reduce the array of characters out of practical necessity, yet required careful planning in terms of both the staging and adaptation to ensure continuity and to avoid confusion.Sebastiá Brosa's set design was elegant and simple; wooden stairways and chairs provided a frontier-equivalent to a drawing-room drama at sold-out performances for an urban bourgeois audience. Photographic images and animation projected onto screens located at the rear of the stage, as well as the presence of skulls, conjured an eerie atmosphere, yet the production adhered more to realist conventions than the source novel. Peña was remarkable, respecting the specificities of individual characters while imbuing them with a collective pain, pathos, and poetry in this town without pity. Her understated performance, with sensitive attention to diction and gesture, clashed with the much younger Derqui's less calibrated stage presence. A tendency to shout and over-gesticulate often reduced the production to unintended melodrama, an all-too-easy pitfall given the bare bones of the plot relate back to Páramo's decision to avenge the town and its inhabitants for his rejection at the hands of his one true love, Susana San Juan—a marked woman in the eyes of the judgmental locals due to an incestuous relationship with her father.Barcelona promotes itself as being Spain's most cosmopolitan city, a magnet for Castilian-speaking migrants from both Latin America and elsewhere in the peninsula. The Grec Festival has both benefitted from and contributed to this melting pot, but retaining the city's (inter)national appeal, providing an outlet for emerging voices, and defending theatre in Catalan is a fraught balancing act. On the one hand, the Beckett prides itself on nurturing new talent, whilst some new plays in Catalan premiered at the Grec in 2021. Conversely, these were not generally given a prominent platform and tended to be modest in scope. Hence, at the local theatre in the well-to-do Grácia neighborhood, a nationalist stronghold, El temps que conta [The Time That Matters], written and directed by actress Virgínia Sànchez, was an engaging but hardly groundbreaking family melodrama about two very different brothers—one an ostensibly successful businessman with a largely fabricated heterosexual love life and the other a bright wheelchair-bound slacker—who have drifted apart but reunite for their father's funeral. Polite awkwardness gave way to outright hostility that was subsequently resolved by smoking marijuana and nostalgic dancing to Nirvana records.Creating an original performance in which the text is not paramount has given Catalan theatre an entryway into global theatrical currents and conversations. Companies such as La Fura del Baus, Els Comediants and La Tricicle Theatre have become international reference points in multimedia performance. Under the purview of the Generalitat, and unsurprisingly not included in the Grec's program, an exhaustive retrospective exhibition housed in the modernist Palau Robert building from May to October 2021 was dedicated to La Tricicle. Founded in 1979 by three mime artists, who began to perform sketches in the street and alternative venues, La Tricicle's house style incorporates elements of commedia dell’arte, clowning, silent cinema, and screwball comedies. Their professional breakthrough came with being offered a last-minute residency in 1982 at the Villaroel theatre, a space renowned for premiering oppositional and experimental works in the late Franco period. The following year they became household names throughout Spain after parodying heartthrob crooner Julio Iglesias on a popular television entertainment show.Idiosyncratic as this trajectory may be, it is indicative of Catalonia being at the vanguard of sketch comedy in Spain. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of T de Teatre [T for Theatre], the company restaged one of their most critically and commercially successful works, Delicades [Delicate Women], which had premiered at the 2010 edition of the Grec. Comprised of a series of bittersweet incidents set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, the production was largely inspired by the recollections of the grandmother of invited playwright and director Alfredo Sanzol. Performed in Catalan in Barcelona, a Castilian-language version then toured Spain and Latin America, establishing a signature style for Sanzol, who in 2019 was made director of the Centro Dramático Nacional (National Dramatic Center) in Madrid. His latest prize-winning production there, El bar que se tragó a todos los españoles [The Bar That Swallowed All Spaniards], similarly uses sketch comedy and family memories to revisit Spain's recent past.Reviving past glories was also the tonic in Gran Reserva [Signature Range], a greatest hits compilation of sketches by the Rhum & Cia Theatre and Circus Company that, since 2014, has staged their dual-language productions in Catalan or Castilian, depending on location. On the night I attended in Barcelona, the auditorium was only around a one-third full. Spectators responded politely to scatological humor and a running gag about an Argentinian who won't stop talking repeatedly being killed in a variety of ways, but the most enthusiastic response occurred at the end as in contrast to the strict Covid protocol in evidence throughout the festival, the master of ceremonies eulogized the need for human connection. Amidst call-and-response hallelujahs, he called on the congregation to hug and kiss whoever was by their side, irrespective of whether they knew them or not. The audience all did as instructed.Translating works from the non-Castilian theatrical repertoire into Catalan has been a mainstay of the Barcelona scene since the Grec's beginnings. The first known translation of The Seagull into Castilian appeared in Buenos Aires in 1920. Chekhov arrived belatedly on the Spanish stage, the centenary of the Russian's birth in 1960 proving to be a turning point. By the time of the centenary of his death in 2004, Chekhov was regularly performed in Spain and Catalonia. The program at the Villaroel Theatre for the 2010 edition of the Grec included a Catalan-language translation of a new version of The Seagull by British playwright Martin Crimp. Having previously staged Ivanov (2017) and Uncle Vanya (2018), Alex Rigola adapted and directed The Seagull in one of the flagship productions at this year's Grec, enjoying a high-profile residency at the Villaroel.Rigola's (re)turn to Chekhov cannot be separated from a broader shift in his work towards greater stylistic and scenic minimalism; mise en scène increasingly playing second fiddle to the actor and written word. The overhaul of The Seagull was sufficient for Rigola to receive billing as co-author alongside the Russian master in a production that can readily be seen as a more accomplished companion piece to his 2018 staging of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People with Madrid's young independent Kamikaze Theatre. It was staged shortly after his resignation—in protest against the repression of the Catalan secessionist movement by central government—as artistic director of the Spanish capital's subsidized Canal Theatre.The depiction of Dr. Stockman as an unequivocally good martyr was symptomatic of a binary reductionism in the adaptation of Ibsen for contemporary Spain, the complexity of serious ethical and political issues reduced to spectators being invited to offer referendum-style “yes” or “no” responses. Demolishing the fourth wall through audience participation and the frequent presence of celebrities was a poor substitute for dramaturgical labor. Earnestness pervaded the discussion with Rigola's own symbolic sacrifice in democracy's name looming large.In many respects, An Enemy of the People constituted an aesthetically and politically unsuccessful attempt by the middle-aged Rigola to ingratiate himself with a hip and younger Madrid audience. The Seagull, staged in a once-radical theatrical space on the edge of Barcelona's gentrified gay district, weaved generational conflict into the plot. Production values for this lean ninety-minute production in a space resembling a trendy Manhattan theatre were basic: screens used for texts and images necessitated seats being placed on just one side of a centrally located stage. There were no scene changes, with a few simple props such as a desk and chairs carefully placed so as not to divert attention from the actors and their ceaseless self-analysis.The actors all performed stylized versions of themselves paired with archetypes inherited from Chekhov. Rigola's The Seagull has been performed in both Catalan and Castilian with a revolving cast responding to local inflections. For example, constant references were made in Barcelona to Chantal Aimée's appearances in works directed by Calixto Bieito. A perk of watching the Grec run was the chance to see Rigola himself on stage as a twenty-first century surrogate for Trigorin. The Russian Nina was transformed into an idealistic young actress, who first meets the on-stage Rigola while doing a course at the Beckett. If Trigorin berates himself for being no Tolstoy, Rigola said that he was no Angélica Liddell, whose work he had championed in his institutional role as director of the Canal. He emphasized this point (in one of the production's numerous tightly scripted moments designed to give the impression of spontaneity and direct communication) by addressing the audience to stress the veracity of the claim. The Chekhov- Rigola protagonist appeared ambivalent as to which was the worst fate: to meander with mediocrity towards retirement or to be rendered obsolete in a world that he doesn't understand and doesn't understand him. Highlighting surreptitious seduction within this exchange between an older established man and younger woman was genuinely tense given ongoing arguments in Barcelona as elsewhere surrounding grooming.To what extent is it a radical gesture by Rigola to question his own privilege as long as the doors to the Grec and other prestige institutions remain as open to established practitioners as they are closed to much emerging talent? A perpetual reverb of one- upmanship and self-flagellation can verge on self-indulgence, a criticism that could be leveled against both Rigola and Liebestod, the production Liddell was invited to stage in 2021. In an extended dramatic monologue, the performance artist railed against her own mediocrity and that of the audience and the current climate. With access to generous funding and prestige performance spaces across Europe, the Catalan-born Liddell is a licensed heretic who claims to have been ignored in Barcelona for many years prior to being invited to stage her anti-MeToo theatrical reinterpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter at the Grec in 2020. Premiered at the Avignon Festival, the taurine-themed Liebestod draws on the figure and suicide of matador Juan Belmonte, whose life lost meaning after arch-rival Joselito was fatally gored. The inclusion of Liebestod at the Grec was doubly counterintuitive given the 2011 Catalan ban on bullfighting and Liddell's opposition between the holy taurine art and a domesticated theatre, emasculated in her opinion by a puritanical democracy.The Grec Festival was born with a very precise remit and goal that key “performance indicators” suggest it has satisfied. Following post-Franco normalization, the Barcelona theatre scene has undergone a remarkable transformation from provincial backwater to a major player in the national and international arenas. It is, therefore, entirely reasonable that it aspire to set the agenda in the Spanish and Catalan contexts with regard to theatrical interventions in transnational movements such as MeToo or Black Lives Matter. Conversely, resting on anodyne cosmopolitan laurels while being engulfed in the echo chamber of parochial politics has had a stultifying effect. For the first time in decades, a case could be made for Madrid having a more vibrant theatre scene than Barcelona. With strong brand recognition and an enviable loyal local audience, the immediate future of the Grec Festival is not in doubt. The 2021 edition demonstrated foundations solid enough to withstand a global pandemic. As it enters a comfortable middle age, this venerable institution must articulate with some urgency a non-chauvinistic and future-orientated raison d’être if it and theatre in Barcelona more generally aspire to remain a point of reference at home and abroad.