festival

Carnival time is here and Catalonia is ready to let its hair down. From the 12^th to the 18^th of February many Catalan cities and towns will be submerged in an explosion of colour: ‘Carnestoltes’. The origin of this eagerly awaited tradition goes back to the early Middle Ages, when Christians enjoyed a few days of debauchery leading up to Lent, the 40-day period of fasting and pious behaviour. Despite conflicting views about the etymology of the word ‘Carnestoltes’, credit usually goes to the Latin form ‘carns toldrem’ (‘farewell to flesh’). One of the biggest carnivals in Catalonia is held in Sitges, a coastal town with about 30,000 inhabitants 30km south of Barcelona, which expects nearly 300,000 visitors during the parades next Sunday and Tuesday.

The crime literary festival BCNegra will celebrate its 10^th anniversary in Barcelona from 29^th January to 7^th February with distinguished authors, such as the British and American thriller writers Anne Perry and Sue Grafton, as well as the Scottish author Philip Kerr. This year’s edition, with a 40% increase in its budget, which rises to €140,000, will be held for the first time at the Liceu Conservatory and will offer more than 50 activities. The event will gather together almost 70 renowned writers from all around the world and will award the Spanish crime fiction author, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, with the 10^th Pepe Carvalho Prize, named after the famous detective created by Barcelona-born Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. 

The Catalan film director Isabel Coixet, most known for her internationally proclaimed films ‘My Life Without You’ (2003) and ‘The Secret Life of Words’ (2005), has been selected to open this year’s upcoming Berlin International Film Festival with her newest work ‘Nobody Wants the Night’. The film, inspired by true events, has been and adapted to the screen by writer Miguel Barros. It is set in early 20^th century Iceland and tells the inspiring tale of two women who risked their lives for the polar adventurer Robert Peary.

On 17^th of January, horses, ponies and donkeys, along with carriages, take to the streets of many cities in Catalonia to celebrate the ‘Tres Tombs’ parade (which would read as ‘Three Laps’). This tradition is in honor of Saint Anthony Abad, the patron saint of animals. Vilanovai la Geltrú, a coastal town 50km south of Barcelona, is one of the places where this festivity is lived to the fullest by local citizens. Year after year it plays host to the biggest ‘Tres Tombs’ parade in Catalonia. This year, nearly 100 carriages and over 300 horses, ponies and donkeys from all over Catalonia showed up at Vilanova on a sunny winter day and paraded through the packed streets of the city.

On Friday, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival opens in Yorkshire, England, and once again the line-up features many Catalan musicians and composers. This is thanks to an agreement with the Ramon Llull Institute (IRL); the public body promoting Catalan culture abroad. The festival is internationally renowned in the fields of contemporary and experimental music, and aims to create exchanges between artists from different countries. Running until November 30, the festival will also have a presence in Barcelona, through cooperation with the British Council and Barcelona’s L’Auditori concert hall. Carlos Casas, Ferran Fages and Hèctor Parra (who was Huddersfield’s resident composer last year) are some of the Catalan artists that are in this year’s line-up. The festival will begin on Friday with Carlos Casas’ ‘Avalanche’, a track that was released at Barcelona’s music festival Sonar in 2010, and has now hit the UK.

21^st edition of the independent film festival l’Alternativa will run from 17 to 23 November in Barcelona. It will show 159 independent films from 45 countries, covering topics such as immigration, identity and collective memory. The festival will be divided into the Official section and the Parallel one. The Official section will feature titles from Romania, Chile, Brazil, Germany, France and Spain, with shorts and feature length films of fiction, non-fiction, animation and experimental styles. While l’Alternativa Parallel this year will be subdivided into five sub-sections: Partly Fiction,Panorama, Small Experiments, and those according to directors Djibril Diop Mambéty/Mati Diop and Anne-Marie Miéville. Within the l’Alternativa Hall, viewers will be able to see screenings, of a range of experimental styles, free of charge. There will also be training and debate in filmmaking. The festival will take place in the CCCB, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, and the French Institute in Barcelona.

The 17^th Mediterranean Trade Fair, specialised in folk and world music, will take place from Thursday to Sunday, expected to attract 100,000 people to the city of Manresa, in central Catalonia. The most international fair of its history, it will feature over 300 art activities, host 107 companies and show 35 exhibitions. Highlights of the programme include the popular Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes and the musical duo Toumani Diabaté -the world famous African harpist-and his son Sidiki. Pluralism and the question of "what is popular culture today" will be the defining themes of this year’s event, which will host over 1,000 professionals, including 30 speakers and 180 cultural projects. The Fair will also be a tribute to the late musician Peret, the ‘father’ of Catalan rumba who sadly passed away in August.

Film buffs and festival fans will be flocking to Sitges these next 10 days, as the 47^th Sitges International Film Festival opens this Friday, a long-awaited event after the success of previous years. Catalan filmmaker Jaume Balagueró will open the festival, with the latest in his popular REC series, ‘REC 4: Apocalypse’. The festival, which already sold nearly 32,000 tickets early this week, has a budget of €1.7 million, 2.5% more than last year. The event is anticipated to have a “wider programme than ever” according to the Festival’s Director, Ángel Sala. While under the umbrella of all things sinister and fantastic, the line-up will include everything from the latest gems to classics of the genre and a wide selection of fictional feature films, shorts and documentaries.

Solsona's International Music Academy (AIMS) is a high level international project, which is also the first and only pedagogical music festival in Catalonia. It was created by the German cellist Peter Thiemann in order to bring together classical music students and professors of acknowledged international prestige who play in Europe's main orchestras. It is an intensive education project which takes place in a beautiful rural environment in Solsona, a town near the Pyrenees in Central Catalonia. This year, the 13^th edition of the AIMS festival is held from the 6^th to the 17^th of August, and includes the participation of 65 students from 20 different nationalities. 30 concerts have been scheduled in ten municipalities of Western and Central Catalonia.

The renowned performing arts festival Temporada Alta has revealed the first big names for its 23^rd edition, which will take place in the cities of Girona and Salt (north-eastern Catalonia), from the 3^rd of October until the 8^th of December. The headliner on the international scene this year is MacbETH, an adaptation by Brett Bailey of Verdi’s opera relocated in the centre of post-colonial Africa and sang by twelve African voices. Pau Miró's adaptation of Angel Guimerà's Catalan classic Terra Baixa (Lowlands) in a solo-performance by the actor Lluís Homar and the play Ruz-Bárcenas, based on the 2013 corruption scandal involving the People's Party (PP), are also amongst the more than 90 shows that will perform in this festival that is a springboard for fresh talent.

From the 6^th-17^th August, Barcelona hosts the 7^th edition of Circuit Festival, an international event directed towards gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people. The aim of this edition is to promote the festival as an "international meeting point", since 80% of last year's 71,000 participants came from abroad. Furthermore, Barcelona will profit from the €100 million that Circuit attendees bring to the local economy.  The organisers of the festival have prepared more than 50 events for its audiences to enjoy. The main party will take place on Tuesday 12^th August at the Illa Fantasia waterpark in Vilassar de Dalt, a town around 20km north of Barcelona city.Both the event's organisers and local hotel owners expect even more attendees at the festival this year.

The Catalan Government has issued a provisional list of the companies that might be granted a license to build and run one of the 6 mega-casinos of the $6 billion BCN World resort to be developed next to Port-Aventura theme park. The surprises are that Catalonia-based Grup Peralada -which runs casinos, luxury hotels, an international performing arts festival and vineyards- is one of the contenders and that the offer with Caesars Entertainment has not been initially accepted. Veremonte, which promotes the entire BCN World project, announced that it had initially presented a total of 3 offers to get 3 casino licenses in association with Melco, Hard Rock and Caesars Entertainment. In addition, there were two non-disclosed additional bids: one from Grup Peralada and one presented by Melco by itself. The Veremonte-Hard Rock and Veremonte-Melco offers have also been pre-accepted, but a third offer from Veremonte and Caesars would be out of the tender, although an appeal might be filed.

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.