El Grec fills Barcelona with theater, dance, music and circus | Catalonia

The Grec Festival opened this Sunday night with the play Carrer Robadors an edition that will program around a hundred shows in 37 spaces in Barcelona. It is a more extensive edition in days and spaces, with Africa as its leitmotif; like the inaugural work, adaptation of a homonymous novel by Mathias Enard by Julio Manrique in which the journey of Lakhdar, a young Moroccan to Barcelona’s Raval, is narrated. The premiere (in which 70% of the capacity was met) was attended by the mayor, Ada Colau, and the counselor Natàlia Garriga, among other personalities.

El Grec, which runs until July 31, will feature more than thirty theater shows, about twenty music, about fifteen hybrid scene and as many dance, six circus and two cinema. The festival will maintain the centrality in the Teatre Grec and will emphasize the dialogue between local creators and international artists who have inspired and created from Barcelona.

The 2021 edition of the Grec will recover a dozen shows scheduled for 2020 that were canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic as The House of Spirits, directed by Carme Portaceli; Pedro Paramoby Mario Gas; The seagull, by Àlex Rigola, among others.

In the musical section, the Grec will recover the Omara Portuondo concert, the only one canceled last year, and will have performances by debut bands at the festival such as Sopa de Cabra and Love of Lesbian, those in charge of closing the festival. The fourth edition of the Grec Ciutat will offer proposals in museums and facilities in the city, one of the highlights being Rimini Protokoll’s performative proposal at the CCCB.

The edition is still marked by the restrictions derived from the pandemic – the capacity is set at 70% – but the festival has not renounced the presence of international creation, with more than twenty proposals by Peter Brook , Brett Bailey, Fatoumata Diawara and the Groupe Acrobatique de Tangier. The festival has a budget of 3.3 million euros and wants to support the theater sector and the local fabric of the city, with more shows in more places in the Catalan capital.

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