Culture

On Sunday night Pet Shop Boys presented their 12^th studio album, Electric, at the summer music festival of Cap Roig, which takes place every year in Calella de Palafrugell, in the Costa Brava. The band performed an extraordinary show which included lighting effects, such as laser light beams, colourful theatrical smoke, and screen projections. Combining synthpop style, house and techno with more recent dance tracks, they have managed to evolve over the years but at the same time preserve their distinct style and continue to be revolutionary with every release. Cap Roig Festival is taking place from the 4^th of July to the 15^th of August and is combining worldwide-known artists and local musicians, such as Elton John, Bryan Adams, Placebo, James Blunt, Antonio Orozco and Els Pets, among others.

This year's edition of Barcelona's performing arts summer festival, Grec, attracted around 80,000 spectators and achieved a 58.15% capacity utilisation in the shows which require payment. According to provisional statistics, taken before the event was over, for the 79 shows that made up the summer festival there were 136,291 seats available and 67,623 tickets were sold, filling 49.61% of the potential capacity. However, overall there was total of 79,254 spectators. Last year 66,466 people attended the shows which required payment and 55,766 tickets were sold. The total number of spectators who attended the festival this year, both paying customers and those who went to free shows, amounted to 127,471 people, whilst in 2013 there were 119,000 individuals.

The 12^th Edition of Sala Montjuïc, an open air film festival which takes place every summer in Barcelona, is in full swing, and organisers estimate that over 30,000 people will have attended the event by the end of its five week running period. The festival runs from the 6^th of July to the 8^th of August and hosts evenings of live music, short films and feature length movies three times a week. An average of 2,000 spectators a night attend the screenings, which are located next to an old military castle on Montjuïc, a small hill facing Barcelona's harbour. Families can rent deckchairs, bring food and drink and enjoy watching the film whilst seated on the lawn alongside the castle's wall, in what used to be the ancient moat. This year one of the highlights included a special screening of the 1927 German classic Metropolis on the 18^th of July which was accompanied by a live jazz band.

Barcelona-born photographer Joan Fontcuberta presents his first major exhibition in the UK, ‘Stranger than Fiction’, which represents an overview of 30 years of his artistic work on nature photography. It opened on Wednesday at London’s Science Museum's Media Space and will be running until the 9^th of November. The six-part collection of pictures and artefacts aims to examine the presumed reliability of photography and shake the viewer's consciousness by mixing fact with fiction, science with art, and persuasive storytelling with a deep questioning. After London, the exhibition will travel to the National Media Museum in Bradford (northern England) from the 19^th of November 2014 to the 8^th of February 2015.

The Bachcelona Festival kicked off on Sunday with a concert by renowned harpsichord duo Ton Koopman and Tini Mathot at the Catalan capital's Palau de la Música concert hall. The performance included the famous ‘Art of Fugue,’ one of the most celebrated compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach. The festival, which is designed to showcase the work of the great composer, will run in Barcelona until 27 July 2014. Koopman, a specialist in Baroque music and great interpreter of Bach’s work, gave attendees an intense and enjoyable musical evening, and was accompanied by his wife Mathot. The pair are noted for the authenticity of their performances, which sometimes even use exact replicas of instruments used by Bach.

Three of Catalonia´s most popular music groups played in Central Park in New York City on Sunday 21^st July as part of the SummerStage Festival. The three Catalan performers, Mishima, Txarango and Headbirds, participated in the event under the slogan ´Catalan sounds on tour´, with the aim to internationalise Catalan musicians and performers. The festival is organised by New York´s City Parks Foundation with the object to raise awareness of the richness of different cultures, and this year includes the participation of the Ramon Llull Institute (IRL), Catalonia's public body to promote Catalan language and culture abroad.

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA) is expanding into the nearby Àngels Square in the heart of the historic neighbourhood Raval. On 17^th July the museum unveiled the details of its future plans, which are designed to increase the flow of visitors to the art centre. These include increased exhibition spaces and the expansion of the existing MACBA Study Centre. The project is estimated to cost a total of €2 million, 1.5 million of which will be provided by Barcelona City Council, and it is hoped that this will increase the number of visitors to the museum by 15% per year.

On the 16^th July Barcelona art centre Caixaforumopened its last major exhibition of the season entitled ´Beauty captivates. Little treasures from the Museo del Prado´. The exhibition contains 135 small canvases from the great artists within Madrid´s museum collection such as Velázquez, El Greco, Rubens, Goya and Tiziano. It will run for almost six months, until the 5^th of January 2015. The exhibition will enable visitors to contemplate the virtuosity of great masters of painting from the 14^th to the 19^th century dealing with small-scale works. It is the second largest collection of works that a host museumhas exhibited from the Museo del Prado, one of Europe's largest art collections.

The 26^th edition of Girona´s Film Festival runs from the 15^th to the 19^th of July and will screen 175 films; a mix of feature films and short movies from 35 different countries. The festival will kick off with the restored version of Josep Maria Forn´s Los Culpables, shot in Girona in 1962. The event will also contain a new section entitled ´Made in Costa Brava Girona´, which will showcase new and old films shot in the north-eastern part of Catalonia. The festival is made up of 14 sections, six of which will include the presentation of non-monetary awards. Acclaimed Spanish designer, Javier Mariscal, will be a member of the judging panel.

In Girona there are 65 music festivals and more than 250 performances scheduled throughout the year. Often, however, these festivals are not marketed effectively abroad and there is a lack of international promotion. Therefore, the Costa Brava Tourism Board has facilitated the creation of a single brand, through a website that brings together all of the different musical delights on offer in the region, in order to make these events more accessible and better advertised. For now, the site costabravagironafestivals.com gives the music festival programme for Girona, but has a goal to expand to include theatre, circus and dance events.

The director of the Dalí Theatre-Museum, Antoni Pitxot, stated on Monday that he does not contemplate changing the functioning of the museum in the event of Catalan independence. "I think there will be no conflict because the museum was created by Dali and an intelligent leader would never put any obstacles to the continuation of his great work" said Pitxot, who was a close friend of the artist until his death in 1989. Pitxot also stressed that the museum and its collection is "not divisible". In his last will, Salvador Dalí named Spain as the universal heir to his property, and the state negotiated with the Catalan government to leave 134 works of art in Figueres and bequeath 56 to Madrid.

In the last week of August, over 600 amateur actors from across the world will be descending on Girona for one of the liveliest dramatic art summer festivals, the International Festival of Amateur Theatre (FITAG). In the 14th edition of the festival, taking place from the 26-30 August, 33 performances will be staged over just five days, at various venues in the Girona capital and surrounding towns such as Figueres, Lloret de Mar, Palamós, Palafrugell, Maçanet Selva and La Jonquera. 15 of the participating theatre groups are local companies from Girona; a further 5 are from the rest of Spain and 11 are international. The aim of this year’s festival is to bring together the culture and theatre from different immigrant communities and strengthen international exchanges.

Six Catalan performing arts companies have introduced their projects at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (GDIF) 2014 Showcase and a further three have taken part in the official program of the festival, thanks to the collaboration of the Culture Department and FiraTàrrega with GDIF. The 2014 edition of the renowned street arts festival will run from 20-28 June, showcasing some of the most interesting street theatre on the continent. Its director, Bradley Hemmings, told CNA that FiraTàrrega has "influenced the structure and development" of the show, one of the largest in the UK, and he was looking forward to receiving fresh Catalan projects.

Just 36.3% of Catalans have Catalan as their main language, according to a survey presented on Friday by the Catalan Ministry of Culture and the Catalan Institute of Statistics (Idescat). The survey examining language use in the population of 2013 found that 31% of the Catalan population had Catalan as their mother tongue and a slightly higher percentage usually converse in Catalan as their main language: 36.3%. Nonetheless, 55.1% of those surveyed reported having Spanish as their mother tongue, with 50.7% using Spanish as their main language. In 2003, 46% reported having Catalan as their main language, but this fell to 35.6% by 2008. Additionally, the report found that 94.3% of Catalans surveyed in 2013 could understand Catalan.

Sónar, Barcelona´s ‘Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art’ came to end on Saturday night with a total attendance of 109,000 people, the second best in the festival’s 21 year history. However, it is a 10% less than 2013 record figures. 53% of those attending the 2014 edition were foreigners. Sónar by Night on Saturday has claimed the ability to make the masses dance with a program marked by disco anthems from Nile Rodgers of Chic to performances by Rudimental and DJ Snake. Massive Attack were among the best performers of the night, in their second concert after the opening day. Multiple simultaneous stages with performances from some of the biggest names in electronic music gave national and international festival-goers a lot to choose from.