My mother-in-law returns enthusiastic from a concert by Los Sírex that filled the Atlàntida in Vic and it's clear we need to know the secret of Antoni Miquel Cerveró, Leslie, who at 82 years old continues at the helm of one of the longest-lived rock'n'roll bands in the world: 65 years active, ahead of the Rolling Stones. "Los Sírex, Los Gatos Negros, Los Mustang, Los Salvajes, Los Cheyenes... We are the ones who opened the doors of fresh air to this country," he says. Just hearing him, it's evident that he has a lot to say and an overwhelming charisma. "I have a blast on stage, I release all the adrenaline. I've never been interested in learning to sing, it's come to me superfluously, but I've spent money to learn to communicate with the audience. At concerts I feel loved and respected; it's my diet, being close to people," he explains.

Actress Francesca Piñón was an introverted child. "Reading and cinema saved me. My childhood was spent reading and watching films," she says. As a child, she took refuge in reading, and it has accompanied her all her life. "At twelve, my grandfather made me read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky..., and I got used to that literature. It wasn't until adolescence that I discovered contemporary authors on my own. And now, with age, I've gone back," she explains. She defines herself as a "nineteenth-century" reader: her literary century is the 19th.

Pep Parés was a popular face of the first Televisió de Catalunya thanks to two iconic characters: the adventurer Oliana Molls (1985-1987) and our first ecological consciousness, Captain Lettuce (1994). At that time, he was also the face of a sport as little known until then as mushing, and he directed the Pirena sled dog race for 22 editions (1990-2012). Furthermore, Parés continued to work as an actor (the last professional play was "The Jewish Woman, by Bertold Brecht, in 2003-2004) and chaired Amnesty International in Catalonia (2007-2011). He also mobilized for the National Pact for the Referendum.

The actor and activist Pep Parés goes to bed every day an hour before he wants to fall asleep to have enough time to read. He likes novels and essays, especially thought on contemporary life, such as the Manual of Civility by Victòria Camps and Salvador Giner or The Art of the Mind by Francesc Bofill, "a former student of Montserrat with whom I coincided in the La Claca company, who had extraordinary culture and wrote proverbs, quotes and aphorisms from all over the world". "It's one of the books that have marked me," he assures. Together they made the mythical show Mori el Merma, a free adaptation of Ubú Roi with puppets by Joan Miró, "the first profane work that entered the Liceu in 1977", says the actor.

The theater director Àlex Rigola does not conceive of summer readings as light readings. "Light literature just doesn't get to me. Books like The Girl on the Train seem unbearable to me, very hard to read, because there are only actions," he explains. What seduces him is more the "how it is told" than the "what." That is, the style, the voice, in short, high-flying literature. "I look for art in the narrative of writing more than in cinema. Sometimes emotional cinema takes me away, and on the other hand, in literature, I need the text itself to have quality," says the director of the Heartbreak Hotel theater.

I wonder who picks up a book in a beach library or pool library (and which book) and I dedicate myself to finding out by visiting the service that every summer, since 1992, opens on Castelldefels beach. I don't want to be mysterious, spoiler alert: nobody. I didn't see any book loans this Thursday afternoon. However, all the other things that also happen in libraries and are often invisible and as appreciated as this sea breeze happen here: knowledge, community, and Catalan. The three Cs that matter to us.

It's July, but classes haven't ended for everyone. There are 143 secondary school students from Barcelona (and their teachers) who, defying the temperatures, have extended the school year for three extra weeks to do an intensive Catalan course. After last year's pilot program, this summer the Barcelona Education Consortium has expanded the initiative with seven groups of about twenty students between 12 and 16 years old, most of whom need to consolidate their B1 Catalan level. They are all young people who have arrived in the city in the last year, mostly from Latin America but also from Morocco, China, Pakistan, or Ukraine. During the school year, they have attended one of the ten accelerated welcome classrooms (AAA) in Barcelona's high schools. Unlike the 238 ordinary welcome classrooms in public and private schools, the AAAs are designed for newly arrived secondary students to have an intensive immersion in Catalan for four months before joining their assigned educational center.

It is likely that nothing would have united Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Solal Mariotte if it weren't for the dance and music of Jacques Brel (1929-1978). She is a renowned 66-year-old Flemish choreographer, one of the great names in contemporary European dance, creator of some seventy shows, founder of the company Rosas and the P.A.R.T.S. school. He, a 25-year-old French dancer, trained first in breakdance, then at the Annecy conservatory and Keersmaeker's school, where they discovered their common passion for the Belgian singer. "Jacques Brel is part of my history, while he discovered Brel on YouTube when he was a teenager," explains the choreographer. "She has taught me everything," admits Mariotte, provocatively. He is joking, but really few artists so young have had the opportunity to create and perform a duet with a living totem of dance, in a project with a large budget and an extensive tour, which arrives at the Teatre Grec this Thursday and Friday.

It seems to me that the event was announced as the presentation of Empar Moliner's latest novel, but no: it ended with the writer performing a monologue standing up worthy of stand-up comedy, telling a story that she assured could only have one ending to be good, a bang-ending, the kind she also uses in her columns for ARA, in her stories, and, I see, in her events. The audience laughed because they felt treated by their favorite writer who, in fact, ended up inviting everyone "to a free hop" at the party we're having for subscribers next week at Damm.

The singer Aitana and Antonio Díaz, El Mago Pop, have acquired the Aquitània Theatre in Barcelona, a 326-seat venue located at 33 Sarrià Avenue. According to a statement, the objective is to "generate new opportunities for professional creators in the sector, promote the production and exhibition of new shows, and contribute to the strengthening of Barcelona's cultural fabric." The programming will focus on "new proposals, new audiences, and new generations of creators."

New ruling against Catalan in schools. The Supreme Court (TS) has ruled that Spanish cannot be excluded from the signage of public educational centers in Catalonia. It does so by annulling a section of a document on the organization and management of educational centers for the 2022/23 academic year, which was approved by the Generalitat in July 2022 and stated that "the signage of the center's spaces is in Catalan, Occitan in Aran, and in Catalan Sign Language if applicable, which are the reference languages of the educational system." The Supreme Court rules against a judgment by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC), following an appeal filed by the Assembly for a Bilingual School of Catalonia with the support of the Prosecutor's Office.

The powerful voice of Bonnie Tyler, who poured her heart out in Total eclipse of the heart, and the cracked voice that surrendered to heartbreak in It's a heartache, has finally fallen silent. As confirmed by the BBC, the Welsh singer has died at the age of 75 in Portugal, in Faro, where she had settled to live during the seasons she was not performing. Her discography leaves behind a handful of immortal hits, a vocal surgery, an unexpected revival, and a steadfast dedication that has kept her on stage for practically half a century uninterrupted. "I'm never going to retire. What do you want me to do? Stop and die? I love performing too much," she stated in a television interview in the summer of 2024. Tyler continued to tour, filling halls mainly in Germany, France, and Central European countries, much more so than in her native United Kingdom.

Most of the world's languages use the same patterns when naming the things around us. An international study led by Pompeu Fabra University and published in Nature Human Behaviour states that languages tend towards lexical economy and, therefore, try to reuse known words or parts of words, as long as the context allows and does not generate confusion. According to the researcher from the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Thomas Brochhagen, language economy is "a cognitive bias" that over time shapes all languages, which speakers do not do consciously or plannedly. The brain tends to seek the fastest routes for communication.

The restaurant and cocktail bar Jok, hidden on a mezzanine in Barcelona's Eixample, with its modernist decor and rosé velvet sofas, seems like the perfect setting for the cutest Victorian podcast out there. I'm going to see the "Punkis Decimonòniques" precisely on the day they disband: this will be their last show after five years of delving into the best novels by Victorian female writers, most of which have recently been published in Catalan by Viena, in collections such as Club Victòria and Petits Plaers. Indeed, their editor, Blanca Pujals, along with the then bookseller of La Carbonera, Carlota Freixenet, are the "Victorian ladies of the 21st century".

Art historian and cultural manager Maribel López (Barcelona, 1973) has been chosen to direct the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona through an international competition. Having been the director of the Arco art fair in Madrid for the last eight years, she will return to her hometown, where she took her first professional steps. Maribel López will thus succeed Marko Daniel, who has been director of the foundation for eight years, until this past June, after the board of trustees "announced four months ago, by surprise, the end of his tenure just one month after renewing his contract for three years. López's name is a departure from the trajectory of the center's directors, who had always been experts in Miró and avant-garde art (Francesc Vicens, Rosa Maria Malet, and Marko Daniel), while his profile is more linked to management. López will have a four-year contract, extendable by two more, and a salary of 115,000 euros annually.

Àlex Rigola wanted to recover the magic of A Midsummer Night's Dream which he premiered in a macro-production in Düsseldorf in 2014. The idea was to place a production with a large cast in a small room like the Heartbreak Hotel theatre. "When I think of Grec, I think of a festival, a party and, therefore, Grec should serve for special things to happen in the city's venues", argues Rigola, who was a candidate to direct the festival. With this maxim, he premieres a show that requires a special commitment from all participants, both interpretative and economic, because even filling the room doesn't make the numbers add up: twelve performers will perform throughout July on a stage for seventy seats (which are practically sold out).

A new editorial category has emerged this summer in bookstores: books for playing in Catalan. Shops have even set up a new arrivals table to accommodate the avalanche of illustrated activity book publications, which are already climbing the bestseller lists.

The challenge that Àngels Gonyalons has in hand in the new show she premieres at the Grec Festival is so complicated that, before starting, she has a request: "I hope the audience turns off their mobile phones and the watches that turn green and seem like aliens in the stalls. It's a great acting challenge and a very delicate mental gymnastics, and I'm training a lot so that nothing distracts me, but...", she says, and asks theaters to invent a method for confiscating mobile phones before entering. The director of the Teatre Romea, Josep Maria Pou, believes it is "a lost cause". The actress resists: "There is a certain connotation of 'I paid for the ticket and I do what I want', and no: you are going to a very important and delicate ceremony, and there is a code, you are not in your dining room with a bowl of popcorn".

The requirement of C2 level Catalan for new teachers will not be effective next academic year. Education has once again suspended the obligation to have this certificate due to a lack of qualified individuals who can "guarantee the right to education", as confirmed by the department to ARA. While it was announced in December that all teachers wishing to enter the teaching pool for the 2026-2027 academic year would have to prove their C2 Catalan, this Thursday a resolution published in the Official Gazette of the Generalitat goes back and modifies the linguistic conditions for interim staff.

Mario Gas (Montevideo, 1947) is one of the great names of the Catalan stage. Since his debut – he counts 18 years, with the direction of Asalto nocturno (1965), although he had been acting since he was eight – he must have directed about 150 productions. He has been an actor, director, voice actor, set designer, lighting designer and creator of legendary shows, such as Sweeney Todd and The Beauty Queen of Leenane. Around 80 years old, he continues to be combative and fighting from the theater. Until June 28, he interprets the autobiographical cabaret at La FàbricaLa lluna és blanca, muy blanca… and has just published memoirs, Conversaciones con Mario Gas (Fundamentos), written by Santi Fondevila and Teresa Petit. With him, we review fifty years of our theater.