Barcelona’s independent artistic scene relies on Antic Teatre as one of its most supportive venues. This year’s contributions to the programme are a sample of the theatre’s most innovative, inter-disciplinary work, while for Grec+ they have prepared a week of particularly ground-breaking proposals by a selection of artists who have risked creating new, personal languages and who will show us the future of performance arts.
July 8th and 9th at 9pm (Sunday 8pm)
OSCAR GÓMEZ MATA – Cia L’ALAKRAN
La Conquista de lo Inútil
(New drama)
Some people will dive 122 meters underwater in order to claim a record for holding their breath, even though such an onerous task seems to lack any obvious utility. The fact is that humans are capable of putting superhuman effort into the most trivial and useless actions in return for the most negligible results. Why? This is the question Oscar Gómez Mata asks, while inviting all enthusiasts on stage: that is to say, anyone who believes in their own capacity for changing others or the things that surround them and who acts as though what isn’t is, in fact, essential. The conquest starts here!
July 13th to 16th 9pm (Sunday 8pm)
MOS MAIORUM
Mos Maiorum, el costum dels avantpassats
(New drama/ Documentary Theatre)
This piece of documentary theatre is about the drama surrounding migration and, more specifically, about the many daily tragedies that take place on the border between Spain and Morocco. Who are these people who risk everything to reach our continent? We are given the answer by a group of actors who, using the Verbatim technique, faithfully reproduce on stage genuine sound recordings, documents and interviews. Everything you hear on stage was previously recorded by the Mos Maiorum team on various journeys to Melilla, Nador, Tangiers and Ceuta, as well as in Barcelona and Malaga.
July 20th to 23rd 9pm (Sunday 8pm)
ANTIC TEATRE’S COMMUNITY ARTS PROJECTS WITH LOCAL RESIDENTS
La Bellesa
(Community arts project)
Author and director Marta Galán takes on a community arts project featuring residents of the Casc Antic neighbourhood, providing a fresh approach to a proposal that Antic Teatre has been running for more than five years. About the concepts and avenues being investigated, she says: “During rehearsals we explored the idea of age and we placed it in relation to these bodies, heavy with age, and to these observant minds, simmering with a common, unshakeable history: the essential memories of working women, mothers and daughters, that are ignored by the official recorders. Our working process has explored this beauty and found ways of letting it show through a series of texts, images and actions. They say that beauty exists when something moves us; that it’s a place where the eye can rest because it understands and can breathe – an instant of revelation.”
GREC+
A selection of risk-taking artists who search for their own ways of explaining the world bring their performance projects, notable for their individual forms of expression and signature styles, to Antic Teatre.
July 27th 9pm
AMARANTA VELARDE & ALBA G. CORRAL
Mix-en-scene
(Choreographic audiovisual Dj Set)
Mix-en- scene is an acoustic, visual and choreographic experience in which Amaranta Velarde plays a live dj set and dances, accompanied by visual projections generated in real time by artist and creative technologist Alba G. Corral. Throughout, the artists reproduce, adapt and mix samples of notable and iconic moments in the history of dance, music and visual arts. The piece experiments on stage with chronology and the superposition of artistic styles and principles.
July 28th 9pm
LAILA TAFUR
Monstruo
(New body languages)
An artist who stands for undefinability as a virtue and deformity as beauty, and who uses movement to ask questions about the body and its surroundings. In this piece she explores the way that sound affects the body, the sounds produced by the body itself, the sounds that the body remembers and the sounds that everyone can hear: silence. A look at how the body interacts with silence and its own limitations, by an artist who has worked with Xavier Le Roy, Lipi Hernández, Jerome Belio, Taiat Danza and Vero Cendoya, among others.
July 29th 9pm
VERÓNICA NAVAS
Hasta agotar existencias (Ensayando para que la muerte de mi madre no me pille desprevenida)
(New drama)
The thought of her mother’s hypothetical sudden death is the artist’s starting point for a show in which she tells of the feelings and consequences arising from such an event. Using a selection of narrative and visual props, Verónica Navas makes us consider the relations that exist between mother and daughter, social and gender inheritance and the way that women build their own identities. The author uses performance arts but also draws inspiration from comic books and cinema. Her previous work includes TOQUE-rrr- TOQUE and site-specific creations such as Un paseo colectivo performed with Xavier Manubens.
30 de juliol 20:00
ALEJANDRO CURIEL
All by myself
(New drama)
In a society where it’s unclear whether a long-standing bachelor is a Norman no-mates or a liberated single, a group of friends have got together on a sofa to talk and sing to us, accompanied by a keyboard. The group is capable of reading a GayRomeo entry to the backing of a flamenco couplet, or of practising the kamasutra by halves (that is, with the half that is left under the skin of a single individual) and of dreaming of reinventing nostalgic Sunday promenades with “the girlfriend”.