Calixto Bieito, Florentina Holzinger, Àlex Rigola and Angélica Liddell head Grec 2026

BarcelonaA hundred shows in 58 venues in Barcelona will make up the program for the 50th Grec Festival, which will take place from June 29 to July 31. This year, the most important performing arts event in the Catalan capital is celebrating, and for this reason its director, Leticia Martín, has devised a program thinking about "how to make the present serve to read the past and imagine the future". The 2026 Grec "will not make the past a monument, but a tool" and will have "Montjuïc at its heart but will extend throughout the city", says Martín, who has promoted the creation of a festival archive to gather all the material from this half-century of life.

According to the mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, the Grec has the challenge of "being a space of resistance against the darkness that wants to return" and of "reclaiming the role of culture as a generator of spaces of freedom". The festival will open with a macro-production of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht directed by Marta Pazos, put on jointly with the Teatre Lliure and starring Nao Albet, Eduard Farelo, Miriam Moukhles and Júlia Truyol. The budget for this edition is around 4 million euros, up from 3.6 million last year.

International artists

The Grec will be a magnet for top-tier artists from around the world with proposals such as The True Story of Richard III from the Teatro San Martín of Buenos Aires, directed by Calixto Bieito. Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker will return to the festival with Brel, a show made from the songs of Jacques Brel, and Angélica Liddell will present Seppuku, the beautiful and provocative staging about the figure of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima which she premiered at Temporada Alta. In theatre, the new creations by the Brazilian Christiane JatahyUn julgamento, which is inspired by Ibsen's An Enemy of the People and stars Brazilian actor Wagner Moura (nominated for an Oscar for The Secret Agent), and by the Italian Romeo Castellucci, who presents a show made with only a chair and some masks. Also returning to the festival will be South African Ntando Cele, this time with a critical account of the legacy of neocolonialism titled Wasted Land, and the dance company of Israeli Hofesh Shechter with Theatre of Dreams.

Among the names that will visit the Grec for the first time is the Chinese choreographer Tao Ye, winner of the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, who will present two choreographies based on enumeration and repetition as language. Austrian Florentina Holzinger will debut in Barcelona with Ophelia’s Got Talent, a piece that fuses dance, acrobatics, and extreme actions to explore the myths of water and femininity. The South Koreans Elephants Laugh will be at the festival with Muljil, a piece inspired by the women divers of Jeju Island, and the also South Korean Sung Im Her will bring 1 Degree Celsius, a reflection on climate change through dance.

From Mexico, the Grec is programming the autobiographical piece by Anacarsis Ramos

My Mother and Money and from Colombia, Andrea Peña will arrive with Bogotá, a scenic investigation into death and resurrection through dance. In this area and from the international scene, there are two more proposals: the Cameroonian Zora Snake will present Combat des lianes, which connects endangered ecosystems with human vines, and the Brazilian Leandro Souza will bring the creation Musa insistente. As for circus, the Grec has programmed shows by Julian Vogel, Xampatito Pato Company, and Portmanteau.

Local Talent

The festival is both a space for production and exhibition of artists from our land such as Àlex Rigola, who will premiere his vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, a production inspired by Andy Warhol's Factory and set in the 60s. The playwright and director Llàtzer Garcia will bring Grans bardisses (Quim Masó Prize) to Espai Lliure and Dobrin Plamenov Vachev will present A la colònia penitenciària, with which he won the Adrià Gual 2025 prize. The actress Àngels Gonyalons will play all the roles of the auca in The Picture of Dorian Gray, directed by Marc Rosich, and Oriol Broggi will lead L'Albada by Jaume Viñas, a piece about memory and family with eleven performers on stage.

The Cultura i Conflicte team, led by Joan Arqué, has focused on the testimony of Verónica Estay Stange, niece of a Chilean dictatorship repressor, to build the show No miris. And the director of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, Carme Portaceli, will join the festival with Bovary, a reinterpretation of Flaubert's classic. Emma Vilarasau and Jordi Boixaderas will form an interpretive tandem in La truita, directed by Ferran Utzet. Also in theatre, the proposals of directors and playwrights such as Eu Manzanares, Oriol Puig Grau, the company La Ruta 40 and Teatre Nu stand out.

Regarding musicals, Jordi Oriol will repeat as director of La nit del músic alt and Jumon Erra is preparing a small-format production titled Després de nosaltres. In dance, we will have established names such as Lorena Nogal, Núria Guiu, Mal Pelo (who will debut at the Teatre Grec), Alberto Cortés and Mabel Olea, while in circus the new creation of the company "eia" will be presented and Escarlata will return with La gran plantada from Circ d'Hivern.

Singular shows and music

One of Leticia Martín's objectives is to make the Grec a space "for the investigation of its own languages" and, for this reason, she has programmed diverse proposals that escape conventional scenic categories. This is the case ofThe Pact of Forgetting by Sergi Casero, a performance about the silences of the dictatorship, and the trilogy of gesture theatre by Kulunka Teatro. Under the umbrella of singular shows, there will be proposals in spaces not commonly used for the performing arts, such as the Macba chapel, which will host a creation by Los Voluble; the Museu Tàpies, with two proposals by Dora García, and the Arxiu Fotogràfic, with a piece by Lluís Vecina.

In music, the concerts of Yerai Cortés, Roger Mas with the Cobla Sant Jordi Ciutat de Barcelona, Sébastien Tellier, and Raül Refree with Walid Ben Selim and Vincent Moon stand out. Furthermore, the Teatre Grec will be the stage for a solidarity performance with Palestine featuring artists such as Ferran Palau, Clara Peya, and Amaia Miranda. And the Sagrada Família will host Arrels de llum, a free concert that will also serve to commemorate the centenary of Antoni Gaudí.