The playwright Àngel Guimerà (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1845 - Barcelona, 1924) took practically two years to give his approval for Terra baixa to be performed in the United States. "I don't think he took this project very seriously and he didn't know who Mrs. Fiske was," explains Sharon G. Feldman, a professor at the University of Richmond (Virginia). For a decade, she has traced the journey of Guimerà's works in North America to confirm their impact on theaters at the beginning of the 20th century. The result is explained in Guimerà a Amèrica. Set dones per a un fenomen transatlàntic (L'Avenç; translated by Pere Bramon), a book that demonstrates that Terra baixa and Maria Rosa made a mark on the North American stage.

The Colombian writer Margarita García Robayo (Cartagena de Indias, 1980) was awarded this Thursday with the 44th Herralde Prize for Querida Sharik, an epistolary novel about a woman looking for her origins. For the jury, which granted the award unanimously, this "splendid" book proves that the writer "is at the best moment of her career." Editor Silvia Sesé defined the work as "a reading that unsettles and fascinates," and highlighted "the ironic, cruel tone, which nevertheless ends up becoming committed to the characters." The award, granted by the publishing house Anagrama, is endowed with 25,000 euros and the publication of the novel, which will reach bookstores next week on Wednesday.

Chilean playwright Pablo Manzi wrote Human Stampede after the Chilean Social Outbreak, the massive demonstrations that the country experienced between 2019 and 2020 as a protest against the high cost of living, socioeconomic inequalities, and the crisis of legitimacy of the political system. "We see that something similar is now happening in Central Europe. This protest is emerging, but there are still no words to articulate it," says Manzi. That is why, he adds, this is a very good moment to premiere the Bonobo company's show on European stages. Human Stampede arrives this Friday at Canal de Salt, as part of the Temporada Alta festival, and will then continue its tour through Italy. "When we came last year with Temis, we already detected that our themes were in dialogue with your political reality," adds Manzi.

Eva Baltasar (Barcelona, 1978) has written a new page in the history of Catalan literature this Monday. The writer has been awarded the Médicis Étranger prize for the French edition of Ocàs i fascinació, translated by Annie Bats at the Verdier publishing house. Baltasar's novel thus becomes the first Catalan work to receive this prize, which on previous occasions has recognized internationally prestigious authors such as Milan Kundera, Julio Cortázar, Thomas Bernhard, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Umberto Eco, Enrique Vila-Matas, Han Kang, and Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir. Awarded since 1970 by a jury of ten French writers and literary critics, the Médicis Étranger is one of the most prominent awards in the French literary scene and is granted to the best translated novel of the year.

In 1976, all the ingredients were on the table of the Catalan performing arts for a new contemporary Catalan circus to appear. The death of Franco gave wings to the young artists who, for some time, had been waiting for the opportunity to grasp freedom, go out into the street, and create. "We were born as a utopia," says Adelaida Frias, from Circ Perillós. When she looks back and thinks about those days, the artist recalls, above all, "a kind of joy, a need for overflowing imagination, a desire to move, of a changing era". With Comediants, Joan Brossa, Carles Santos, and Els Joglars as pioneers and benchmarks, at the end of the 70s there was an explosion of new companies such as Circ Sèmola, the Poltrona brothers, Picatrons, and La Tràgica. The latter marked, on October 6, 1976, the beginning of the Catalan contemporary circus with the premiere of the show Tripijoc joc trip, starring six auguste clowns and performed during the Sarrià Major Festival, in a tent at the Pati dels Caputxins.

We meet with Carles Sans (Badalona, 1955) in a venue on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona with walls full of posters and stage photographs, sofas on one side of the room and a very large table on the other. "Forgive me if it's not very bright, it's a space I mostly step into at night," says Sans, who adds that they meet here once a month with Paco Mir, "president of this association of golfers". For decades, Sans has lived against the grain, working mainly on weekends and show nights and traveling up and down with his shows. Now the comedian and former member of El Tricicle says goodbye to the stage with Me'n vaig!, a monologue directed by José Corbacho that will premiere on November 4 at the Teatre Poliorama, and which can be seen until January 10. The show arrives after Per fi sol!, with which he sold more than 180,000 tickets.

"Millions of people are treated as if they were animals, while others of us have been educated to see other human beings as if they were," says the Madrid-born playwright Juan Mayorga. This is the starting point that fuels his latest show, Palabra de perro, created based on El coloquio de los perros, by Miguel de Cervantes, and starring Cecilia Solaguren, Jimmy Castro, and Jorge Kent. The play, which is being performed until November 8th at the Teatre Romea and is directed by Rakel Camacho, links the original text with contemporary society to question some of its certainties through the gaze of two dogs.

Around the time of the premiere of Bach, in 2004 at the Espai Lliure, the dancer and choreographer of Mal Pelo María Muñoz (Valencia, 1963) became pregnant with her son Sam. "I can practically say that I grew up with this piece," the boy explains. Two decades later, the Ramis-Muñoz family –formed by Pep Ramis and Maria Muñoz and their children Martí, Paula, and Sam– has united to transform that Bach into a joint creation that emphasizes the idea of transmission in dance. The new version of the show, titled Bach en família, premiered in Paris in February and now arrives at the Canal de Salt for two performances, which will take place this Thursday and are part of the Temporada Alta festival. It is no coincidence that this creation by Mal Pelo reaches Catalonia through the Girona festival. Throughout the 35-year history of Temporada Alta, the company has performed there 24 times. "They are the group that has stepped onto the festival's stages the most times," highlights the event's director, Narcís Puig.

While actor and director Pau Roca (Barcelona, 1982) was saying goodbye to Every Brilliant Thing –a monologue he has performed intermittently since 2018, in hundreds of shows–, Miki Esparbé (Manresa, 1983) was taking notes frantically from the stalls. “It is beautiful to see how this play can go through the performer, because the message gets across, whether they do it one way or another. But Pau has done it so many times that he has an impressive stage presence,” explains Esparbé. He will debut on November 4th at the Teatre Borràs, taking the lead in this text by Duncan McMillan that bets everything on a single actor and the audience. Without scenery and with the house lights on at all times, Every Brilliant Thing takes one of the great values of theater to the extreme: the fact that it is a shared and changing experience.

The Argentine company Piel de Lava already raised expectations four years ago, when it performed for the first time at the Temporada Alta Festival with its star show, Petróleo. That piece, which questions masculinity through four workers on an oil rig, became the most anticipated play of the festival. Now Pilar Gamboa, Elisa Carricajo, Laura Paredes and Valeria Correa –the four members of the company, who share authorship, direction and performance of all their productions– return to Catalonia for a double bill. Petróleo will be performed for the first time in Barcelona, this Monday and Tuesday at La Villarroel, as part of the Flaix de Tardor Festival, and will mark the debut of Piel de Lava in the Catalan capital. And taking advantage of the connections between Flaix de Tardor and Temporada Alta (both festivals are promoted by Bitò), the company will also premiere its latest production in Girona, Parlamento, which can be seen on Friday at the Teatre de Salt. All performances of both shows are already sold out.

The audience attending the performances of I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Gran Teatre del Liceu will encounter a stage led by two large walls, a stone staircase, and a majestic river in the center. The opera by Vincenzo Bellini (Catania, 1801 - Puteaux, 1835) returns to the Barcelona theater under the direction of Riccardo Frizza—who already led it in the last version, seen on the same stage 10 years ago—, with stage direction by Allex Aguilera and soprano Lisette Oropesa and mezzo-soprano Raffaella Lupinacci in the roles of the two great protagonists, Juliet and Romeo. Considered one of the jewels of Italian bel canto, the work will be performed at the Liceu from October 30th to November 11th.

The Japanese writer Ryu Murakami, known for his works on sex, drugs, and violence translated all over the world, has died at the age of 74, as announced this Friday by his publisher, Gentosha. A master of the psycho-thriller, among his most notable titles is Miso Soup, which the Madrid-based publisher Malas Tierras reissued last year. Murakami debuted in 1976 with Almost Transparent Blue (1976), a novel about juvenile depravity that he wrote while studying Fine Arts at Musabi University in Japan. The book became a bestseller (a million copies were sold in Japan alone) and earned him the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan's most prestigious literary awards.

Among all the names of great contemporary European creators, there is one that returns to Temporada Alta after a few years without setting foot in it. It is the Flemish director Guy Cassiers (Antwerp, 1960) –director of memorable shows such as The Granddaughter of Mr. Linh (2018) and Le sec et l'humide (2015)–, who arrives at the Girona festival with Thésée, sa vie nouvelle, a stage adaptation of the eponymous novel by Camille de Toledo published in 2020. The work premieres at the Canal in Salt, where it will be performed on Friday and Saturday.

The company Enraona Teatre, led by Joan Lluís Bozzo and Mariona Bosch de la Cruz, moves with two great missions: to promote social and therapeutic theatre and to champion musicals in Catalan. Taking up this second passion, they have now launched Les veles s'inflaran!, a show that collects the most emblematic moments from the great shows by Dagoll Dagom and brings them back to the stage. With some thirty performers on stage and co-directed by Bosch de la Cruz and her mother, Mariona Bosch Nuri, the production premieres on November 15th in Martorell. Afterwards, it will tour Catalonia (with performances already confirmed in Terrassa, Calaf, Reus, Tarragona, and Abrera) while waiting to arrive in Barcelona, at a theatre yet to be confirmed.

Stage director Xavier Albertí (Lloret de Mar, 1962) has stepped on dozens of stages throughout his career, but until now he had never worked at the Sala Flyhard. The space in the Bordeta neighborhood is one of the smallest in Barcelona, one of the hubs of the city's independent scene and an opportunity to see the actors' performance work up close. "I had a crazy desire to do something there," emphasizes Albertí. The project that brought him there is titled Innocence and Desire and is a text by Òscar Constantí about the babies stolen from the Civil War to the 90s. It stars Mont Plans, Montse Esteve, and Manel Barceló and runs from this Thursday until December 27th.

When Dídac Flores (1992) and Mikel Herzog Jr. (1995) met by chance on the AVE train from Barcelona to Madrid and discovered that they were both going to the same casting call, they could not have imagined that, three years later, they would have become a pseudo-marriage and would be living through an overwhelming success together in the Spanish capital. For three seasons now, the performers have played all the roles in Murder for Two, a musical by Kellen Blair and Joe Kinosian that swept the PremiOFF awards, the Broadway World Spain awards, and the Teatro Musical awards. The show, directed by Zenón Recalde, is performed at Teatros Luchana in Madrid and, starting this Tuesday, it arrives at the Teatre Goya, where it will hold performances on Mondays and Tuesdays in November.

"Except for women, we are worse off now than we were ten years ago," says theater director Sílvia Munt to underline the importance of continuing to perform Arthur Miller's plays on stage. Starting this Friday, Munt directs at the Teatre Goya View from the bridge, with David Selvas and Laura Conejero at the helm. Their version of the play arrives ten years after the one that Georges Lavaudant did at the Romea Theatre, with Eduard Fernández as the protagonist. "We have taken the play through a place that helps us connect with today's world, with this flawed and ancestral heterosexuality, with the domains of power. Now this A View from the Bridge it can happen on any corner you want in this world. Seeing it helps us understand it", highlights Munt. "With the passage of time you see it differently. The second feminist wave and the perspective on masculinity, ten years ago they weren't there. This new vision deeply oxygenates the work and makes it continue to resonate with us", states David Selvas.

From this Friday until October 29, Barcelona becomes a magnet for major international spectacles through the Flaix de Tardor. The second edition of the festival kicks off on Friday with two simultaneous proposals. At the Teatre Akadèmia, Enrico Ianniello will premiere Mamma by Annibale Ruccello, an exploration of traditional motherhood through the portrait of four women played by Fabrizia Sacchi. In parallel, the Mercat de les Flors will host the festival's big dance highlight of the year: How romantic, choreographed by Katerina Andreou and performed by Carte Blanche, the national company of Norway.

Playwright and theatre director Alfredo Sanzol (Madrid, 1972) says that, in recent years, rather than searching for stories "like a miner," what he does is "open windows, listen to others, and give them space." That is how he came across the experience of a friend, Ruth, who had spent the last night with her brother in the hospital before he died of an illness. Suddenly, Sanzol—author of multi-award-winning shows such as La tendresa (2019) and El bar que se tragó a todos los españoles (2021) and director of the Centro Dramático Nacional (CDN)—could not get that story out of his head. After a long process of research and interviewing about twenty pairs of siblings, the playwright wrote La última noche con mi hermano, which arrives this Thursday at the Sala Gran of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and will be performed there until November 1st. The production stars Nuria Mencía and Jesús Noguero and ends its run in Barcelona, after premiering in Madrid and also visiting Pamplona, Valencia, Seville, and Las Palmas.

Changes in the leadership of some of the Grup Focus theaters. Josep Maria Pou, until now director of the Teatre Romea, is leaving the position to take on new responsibilities. Pou will be artistic ambassador for Focus. "The group is sending me around the world to do what I like most: enter a theater and discover new shows, new ideas, new creators, new ways of telling stories. I will be a privileged observer and when I find something exciting, fun, and extraordinary that deserves to be shared, I will do everything possible to ensure it reaches any of the Focus stages," said Pou during an event held by the group with the media.