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Events in Barcelona -
Concerts
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 12:16 |
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The first glimpse I ever got of Florence Welch was a pale redhead in white hotpants and sequins riding a silver moon through a sea of fog and singing You've Got The Love.
Just another popstress, I thought.
Then I saw the video for Dog Days Are Over and things got a whole lot weirder. Stomping drummers, harp-playing druids, Florence in war paint and a kimono, Florence in glitter and something that looked like Cate Blanchette's costume in Lord of the Rings. And lots of fog. I still couldn't put my finger on what kind of music this was. Her Myspace says "catastrophe choir crash," whatever that might mean. Some critics have compared her to Kate Bush. My boyfriend calls it "surreal voice-driven femme pop." On her album Lungs (winner of Best British Album of the Year at the Brit Awards 2010) you get epic vocals, a pinch of soul, harps, choirs, drums, metallic clanging, strings, stamping feet and beating fists, broken glass, even a lamb. And yet this cacophony blends together quite smoothly.
Florence has stated that she wants her music "to sound like throwing yourself out of a tree or off a tall building or as if you're being sucked down into the ocean and you can't breathe." It's dramatic, swelling, turbulent emotion. It's pop making love to a volume of gothic fairytales. It's girly and mainstream one moment, decidedly strange the next. Kind of like the white hotpants versus the harp-playing druids. "I feel that life's like a consistent acid trip, those times when things keep coming back," Florence says and I believe her.
Saturday, March 13th at 20:00h
Sala Bikini, Av. Diagonal 547 (Les Corts)
Tickets: apparently tickets are sold out, but where there's a will, there's always a way.
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Culture in Barcelona -
Cinema
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 19:18 |
Thirteen is a peculiar number. An awkward age, generally speaking. Unless you're a film festival, particularly a short film festival, in which case thirteen constitutes a remarkably mature age that few ever reach. Curt Ficcions, which kicks off its 13th edition at the Cine Alexandra tomorrow,  has shown a lot of stamina in an arena that gets increasingly crowded with every passing year. As more and more aspiring filmmakers armed with digital cameras and a pirated copy of Final Cut bombard festivals, more and more festivals crop up to accommodate them. The result? Lots of lousy festivals with lots of lousy movies. But at the venerable age of thirteen, Curt Ficcions has weeded out the worst offenders, leaving us with a tidy selection of their pick of the best Spanish short films of the year. Don't be put off by this edition's poster and slogan (No somos tontos, somos cortos), admittedly a bit lame, because the films look promising. (Side note: the press release contained a lot of stills that are probably more intriguing than this little beach scene. I admit it was picked for purely personal reasons as I sat pressed against the space heater, wrapped in a woolly scarf, while typing up this post.) Back to the festival. A novelty this year is the introduction of an international section with special programmes dedicated to Mexican and Portuguese short films as well as a selection of twenty shorts by directors from around the world. Given the dismal forecast for the next few days, few things sound better than curling up in a warm cinema with a bucket of popcorn and watching marathon sessions of movies.
March 12th-18th
Cine Alexandra, Rambla Catalunya 90
Tickets: 2 EUR/session
The still is from Mariano Salvador's competing short film La Boya.
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Culture in Barcelona -
Exhibitions
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Sunday, 31 January 2010 18:20 |
Calling someone's art "unclassifiable" is one of those things critics love to do, but in the case of Canadian artist Rodney Graham it's actually true. In attempting to define Graham's body of work, words like cerebral, referential and multidisciplinary come to mind. So do witty, clever and  inventive. Graham's fascination with perception, popular culture, history and technology are evident throughout his work, particularly in his installations involving obsolete (or soon to be obsolete) machinery. For example, in Rheinmetall/Victoria 8 (2003) a "typewriter and film projector face off against one another with the latter projecting a film of the former". But aging or defunct technology are not the only protagonists of Graham's art. The diversity of his choice of media is well-known: books, found texts, video, sculpture, mechanical devices, optical toys, camara obscura, printed media, musical texts, painting, photography...Graham's exploration of our social and artistic past and present refers to everything from pop music, art history, philosophy and literature to individuals like Freud, Picasso, Poe, Büchner, Donald Judd or Jeff Wall (with whom he was in a band, UJ3RK5, in the 1970s). Graham is currently working on a series of film installations with director Harun Farocki entitled HF/RG. The retrospective Through the Woods at MACBA covers his work from 1978 to 2008 and is presented in collaboration with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The Picasso Museum is also participating in the exhibition with a selection of Graham's paintings (a medium he only started working in recently) from a series called Picasso, My Master, a humorous tribute to the legendary artist.
Until May 18th
MACBA
Plaça dels Àngels 1, 08001 Barcelona
Image: Possible Abstractions by Rodney Graham
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Events in Barcelona -
Concerts
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Thursday, 04 March 2010 15:31 |
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Readers of this blog might wonder if I'm on the payroll of the Apolo (or the Mercat de les Flors for that matter), given that I promote their stuff all the time. Well, I'm not. I wish I was. I don't even get free tickets (that's how honest - or stupid - I am). But in light of such outrageous favoritism, I've decided to shine a light on some of our other local spots.
 I don't know about you, but I find the Razzmatazz site cryptic. For example, I can't tell you whether the Whomadewho gig on Friday night is a live concert or a DJ session or whether the Danish trio will actually be there. The band's website didn't mention any details, just that they're heading to Spain "to host their own tomato festival". I feel dizzy. Maybe you can figure it out. Anyway, if they do show up, it's bound to be a lot of fun. Pop-disco-funk-electronica with bouncy beats and energetic basslines - happy, friendly dancing music. A bit of New Wave, the occassional falsetto and synth nods to 80s pop, even castanets and an oboe. Rumor has it that they perform in spandex skeleton suits. Gimmicky? Yes. But a lot of fun.
Friday, March 5th (at what time? your guess is as good as mine...if you find it on the Razz site, let me know!)
Sala Razzmatazz, Almogavers 122 (Poble Nou, Metro: Bogatell or Glories)
Cover: 12 EUR
Lovers of Django Reinhardt or Manouche jazz in general might already know about the Barnouche gypsy jazz jam sessions at the Electric Bar. If you don't, here's the skinny: Barnouche is a local quintet (violin, clarinet, 2 guitars, bass) that weaves a rich musical tapestry with threads of gypsy Balkan music, traditional Jewish melodies and classic jazz. For those of you who have never been to the Electric, it is one of Barcelona's true locals, still obscure enough to be deeply authentic, and run by people who really, really love music. Particularly offbeat, non-mainstream music. (I once saw an unforgettable cabaret act with a French woman playing a saw so beautifully and so weirdly I felt like I'd entered a different dimension.) For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about - jazz Manouche is a swinging style of acoustic jazz created by the gypsies of northern Europe. And Django Reinhardt is the godfather of jazz Manouche and perhaps the greatest jazz guitarist that ever lived. (If you've seen Woody Allen's Sweet & Lowdown, Django is the musician that Emmet Ray - Sean Penn's character - is obsessed with.) Not to say that Barnouche comes anywhere close to the musical magnificence of Django, but if you want something laidback and local to fill your Sunday evening then this is a good bet.
Sunday, March 7th (and every other Sunday in March) at 21:00h
Electric Bar, Travessera de Gracia 233 (Gracia, Metro: Joanic)
Cover: 3 EUR
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Culture in Barcelona -
Exhibitions
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 16:39 |
If you're wondering (like I was) what differentiates an atopia from a utopia or dystopia and go looking for it in the dictionary, you'll probably end up at atopy, which refers to a familial predisposition towards certain allergies. Although allergic might be a word that many of us find appropriate in describing our feelings towards city life, it is not what the CCCB exhibition Atopia: Art and City in the 21st Century has in mind. If you search a  little further, you'll stumble upon a German sociologist by the name of Helmut Willke, who defines atopia as a "generalised Anywhere, a form of society in which place and places do not matter anymore." At first this might sound incredibly liberating, but upon closer examination, it produces a certain amount of anxiety in most people. Sure, we all love to travel and many of us like calling ourselves global citizens, but in the end most of us still consider ourselves as being from somewhere. Or have a deeply ingrained mental picture of a certain place we identify with. What happens when this imagined place and its real counterpart drift further and further apart? When a city ceases to be a place of human interaction and encounters? When a city loses the function it originally embodied for us as people? We enter a state of urban malaise, precisely the condition explored by the artists showing in the CCCB's exhibition.
Displaced, isolated people in crumbling concrete structures littered with the remnants of a more settled, comfortable past life. A chandelier, a table lamp, a globe - alien in an empty space of gray decay. Unsettling superimpositions of intimate, veiled scenes being sucked into vast cityscapes. Wastelands, empty streets, helpless shrinking figures. The vision these 41 artists have of our modern urban existence is disturbing, alienating, but not in a violent, visceral, Ballardian way. Something closer to a mute, inexplicable despair.
The exhibition is showing 168 pieces (painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation) by international artists like Sergio Belinchón, Hicham Benohoud, Nuno Cera, Oleg Dou, Andreas Gursky, David LaChapelle, Rogelio López Cuenca, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Thomas Ruff, Carey Young, and others.
Until May 24th
CCCB, Montalegre 5, 08001 Barcelona
Tickets: 4,50 EUR
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Culture in Barcelona -
Theatre
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 17:07 |
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Touted by critics as the "the theatrical revelation of the season," the play La función por hacer, a free adaptation of Luigi Pirandello's classic Six  Characters in Search of an Author, is coming to the Villarroel this month after a hugely successful run in Madrid. Barcelona is the company's second stop on its national tour, meaning audiences have less than a month to catch this acclaimed production.
In a time when special effects and impressive production values are too often used to mask a lack in content, poor writing or lamentable performances, it is refreshing to come upon a play like this, which does a lot with deceptively little. A bare set design consisting of a square carpet, a trestle covered by a cloth and a broken bench. Six stellar actors. And the kind of writing that makes you laugh and think at the same time, all the while producing the sensation than a lot more is happening on that stage than meets the eye.
Performed in Spanish.
From March 3rd-28th
Teatre Villarroel, Carrer Villarroel 87, 08011 Barcelona (Eixample)
Tickets: 22 EUR - 26 EUR, click here for showtimes.
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Culture in Barcelona -
Dance
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Written by Aisha Prigann
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Thursday, 04 March 2010 11:58 |
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Time and again, the Mercat de les Flors makes good on its promise to bring fascinating, international dance performances to Barcelona. It's latest series Lanzar [El Cuerpo] a la Batalla is, in my opinion, one of its most interesting and socially relevant. Of all the arts, dance is most often considered a purely aesthetic, personal, emotional form of expression. Or, by less charitable souls, dismissed as high-minded vanity, offering precious little in terms of narrative or broader meaning. Seeing the work of Ea Sola might change their minds.
Exile and identity loss are two of the French-Vietnamese choreographer/performer's recurring themes. Not surprising given that Ea Sola had to flee her country during the Vietnam War. Largely self-taught, she began her career in exile in the 1980s. Drawing on traditional Vietnamese culture, music, dance and history, she creates pieces that deal with war, emigration, the pain of being an outsider. After spending fifteen years in Europe, she returned to Vietnam, where she works with local dancers and musicians, crafting performances like Drought and Rain, Vol. 2, which explored the Vietnam War, its aftermath, and how local and Western culture collide in modern-day Vietnam.
Ea Sola's latest solo performance, Air Lines, is a clear-sighted and socially conscious appeal for an open and free world. Powerful corporal language, simple yet evocative set design and images from Martyrs du Golfe d'Aden (a documentary by Daniel Grandclément about the dangerous voyage people embark on to reach Europe from Africa) come together to protray the "cruelty of our societies, the difficult life of displaced people, who have no rights and live on the margins of a country's laws simply because they're immigrants." A moving statement, made entirely without words, about a timely issue that concerns us all. Ea Sola performs the piece to live music and percussion by frequent collaborator Nguyen Xuan Son.
March 5th-7th, 21:00h (except 7/3 at 19:00h)
Mercat de les Flors, Lleida 59 (Poble Sec, Metro: Espanya or Poble Sec)
Tickets: 16 EUR
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