The Temporada Alta festival will celebrate a new edition between October 3rd and December 8th and will once again turn Girona and Salt into capitals of the performing arts. Great international masters, radical voices, and cult companies will meet there. We offer you a selection of the proposals that should not be missing from your agenda.

L’Espai Texas, the project remodeled by architect Francesc Guàrdia with two cinema rooms and a theatre with 200 seats, presents a new season featuring names such as Sílvia Munt, Víctor Borràs, Toni Gomila and Roger Coma, as well as figures from the humorous scene such as Oye Sherman and Andrés Fajngold. The theatre located on Bailèn street in Barcelona bets on contemporary Catalan dramaturgy and will revive successful titles such as La pols, by playwright Llàtzer Garcia, awarded with the Premi Crítica Serra d'Or.

The scenography has a first and last name, doubly. At Llorenç Corbella i Burgués (1997), alias Passerell, and to his father Llorenç Corbella i Sambola (1958) a generation separates them, but a vocation, some projects, and even the same Tàrrega study unite them. We are talking about the art of scenography, about circuits, and, obviously, about the Street Theatre Fair.

One of the great names in Catalan cinema and theater, Francesc Garrido, died this Sunday night at the age of 56, as confirmed by the actor's circle to ARA. Garrido was known for his roles in films such as Smoking room, Mar adentro and Balandrau, vent salvatge, and series such as La sala, Vida privada and Jaguar. He also had a solid theater career, with notable performances in productions such as Àlex Rigola's a propòsit d'The Master and Margarita, by Bulgakov; The Video Nobody Sees, by Martin Crimp, under the direction of Carme Portaceli; The Alchemist, the adaptation that Michael De Cock made of Opus nigrum by Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as participating in different works by Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Ibsen.

After the success of the comedy 53 diumenges at the Teatre Romea in 2020, Cesc Gay (Barcelona, 1967) premieres a Spanish version of the play at the Teatre Condal, where it can be seen from September 9 to 27. The director already adapted the story a few months ago for the homonymous original Netflix film and now returns to Barcelona with a cast formed by actors Julián López, Pepa Charro (La Terremoto de Alcorcón), Xavi Mira and Candela Serrat, in the roles played in 2020 by Pere Arquillué, Marta Marco, Lluís Villanueva and Àgata Roca, respectively.

The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will listen to Charli XCX's new album. Music, fashion, film is the eighth album by the British pop star and a new, more rock-oriented turn in her prolific career. After dominating with the Brat summer, Charli Aitchison abandons green and embraces black and white to remain almost the only singer of her generation who plays with the mainstream while navigating the margins and experimentation. A singer who is living her particular artistic zenith, having more fun than anyone.

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Perhaps because they conceived it as a game during one of the toughest recent times, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, playwrights and directors Sergi Belbel and Roc Esquius wrote a long-running comedy and one of the most celebrated recent successes at Sala Versus Glòries. Angle mort premiered in 2021 and the audience soon showed their enthusiasm. The play won the Teatre Barcelona award for best proximity show and was reprogrammed, year after year, at the Barcelona venue. This August it is in its fifth season, with performances until September 13.

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Venezuela is the paradigm of theoretically rich South American states subjected to historical political disjunctions between left-wing spaces, which, wrapped in the flags of revolution, promise and do not deliver, and right-wing spaces abducted by the rules of maximum profit that promise and also do not deliver, between the defense of identity —they call it patriotism— and selling to the highest bidder. Today's Venezuela is Venezuela between, on the one hand, the inoperable and incapable Chavista dictatorship sold to the American mafia by the executors of the utopia and, on the other hand, the siren songs of an opposition led by a candidate who trusted the same gang mafioso that doesn't even let her return to her country.

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The week ahead, with Jordi Garrigós

Some of the things we hope not to miss in the next seven days

I will finish McCartney: the hunt for the lost bass, about the mysterious disappearance and recovery of Paul McCartney's first bass, a Höfner 500/1 bought in Hamburg in 1961 for only 30 pounds. This marvel sounded on the original recordings of Love me do, she loves you and the early Beatles classics. A road movie musical about the greatest pop group of all time.

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50 years ago, a group of artists joined forces with one goal: to reclaim the Grec Theatre and put it at the service of the people. From that collective impulse, the Grec was born, a festival that in the last five decades has become a showcase for the best international shows and, at the same time, a springboard for local creation. We take advantage of the anniversary to rescue the festival's behind-the-scenes history from the hands of artists and directors who have been part of it all this time.

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Lluís Pasqual spoke today on El suplement about the controversy over using a recording of Judit Martín imitating Montserrat Caballé as if it were a real recording by the soprano. For the first time since the comedic actress denounced it on the podcast La ruina, the theater director has given explanations about this case and has denied wanting to impersonate Caballé's voice in the tribute held for her at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in 2019, organized by himself. "Impersonating is a very strong word," he told Roger Escapa. Furthermore, he defended that he would do it all again just as he did. "I did nothing illegal," replied the director, who described the whole affair as "gossip."

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The Ebrenc Litterarum Fair of Literary and Book Events will be held this year between May 28 and 31 in Móra d’Ebre, and will combine book presentations, exhibitions, and literary events. Since last year, the director of Litterarum has been Lluís-Xavier Flores, who has promoted the search for complicity throughout Catalan-speaking areas by opening sub-seats in other towns and cities, such as Morella, Calaceit, Tortosa, or Reus. “One of the challenges is to attract more programmers to the fair and for it to become again the fair of its beginnings, considered strategic by the Institution of Catalan Letters”, states Flores.

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One of the most admirable achievements of Catalan playwrights in exile is their persistence in continuing to write theatre, despite knowing almost for certain that they would never see it performed in Catalonia. Ambrosi Carrion (Sant Gervasi de Cassoles, 1888–Cornellà de Conflent, 1973) was one of its foremost exponents. With about fifteen unpublished stage texts, Carrion also cultivated poetry and essay writing and built a literary career of over 30 works. Despite this, only one of his plays written in exile has been performed in Catalonia –La dama de Reus (Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, 2008)– and his name has remained in the shadows for decades. With the intention of making him present and vindicating him, Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona has published Teatre inèdit de l'exili, a volume containing three unpublished works by Carrion, prepared by professors Josep Camps Arbós and Francesc Foguet Boreu.

]]> This Saturday I had the good fortune to see in Lloret de Mar I count every step I take on the ground, a monologue that Lluïsa Cunillé wrote especially for the actor Oriol Genís, directed by Xavier Albertí. The play is of a delicacy that we only find at the highest levels of art, performed by three top personalities of Catalan theatre. I am very grateful for the idea of a Xavier Albertí cycle in Lloret, his city, and I hope more towns would program theatre with this ambition.Now that it is Saint George's Day, few people will buy theatre books, even though theatre is perhaps, together with poetry, also little sold, the most rigorous form of literature. What can we do if culture (which in Latin means cultivation) involves burying and watering a seed that is not seen but is there, and with much more life inside than the plants already grown and ready to be consumed. Theatre has given us tragedy, the most essential form of human consciousness.And, therefore, few people will buy, and I'm sorry, a recent book from Arola Editors (an editorial harmed by the scandal of denied subsidies for Catalan books, but with an impressive catalog, of incalculable importance for our theatre),  Ansietats teatrals reunides, by Esteve Miralles.

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Cabosanroque's theatre (Laia Torrents and Roger Aixut) has eluded theatrical conventions by moving towards visual and sonic proposals that are very difficult to classify. A performative theatre that develops musicovisual artefacts playing with tempos and metrics, with sound and silence in fully contemporary scores and scenic spaces of strong plasticity. In their creative territory there is a deliberate absence of literature, although they have made shows about Verdaguer, Rodoreda and Brossa with little human presence. This changes in Mil tres, say cheese, a kind of stimulating contemporary opera based on the character of Don Juan and the music of Mozart.

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The show L'herència, directed by Josep Maria Mestres and premiered at the Teatre Lliure last February, became this Monday the big winner of the 28th Critics' Awards for Performing Arts. The production has been awarded best show, best direction, and best supporting actor for Carles Martínez. In this year's edition, beyond L'herència, the awards have been widely distributed among the wide range of scenic proposals premiered in 2025. L'amor venia amb taxi by La Cubana has won the award for best musical and best costumes, Opereta imaginària by Albert Arribas has been recognized as best small-format play and best dramaturgy, while Leshi, by Atresbandes, has won in the new trends category. The Critics' Awards are organized by the digital platform Recomana and are chosen by active performing arts critics. This year, they were presented at a ceremony at the Centre Moral i Cultural del Poblenou.

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I remember going shopping for clothes with my mother who had that habit of everything having to match, everything having to go together. There was that obsession with making sure any piece you bought matched the clothes you already had.This is no longer the case with your daughters. Do you have many arguments about clothes?

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Until the 26th of this month, you have time to go to the Heartbreak Hotel theatre, in the heart of Sants, to see Return to Haifa, the magnificent adaptation of the story of the same name by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, which Àlex Rigola has adapted and directed, with a cast of four actors and actresses who offer literally impressive performances: Chantal Aimée, Jordi Figueras, Ariadna Gil and Carles Roig. Return to Haifa, the original story, is a testimonial novel that recounts the reunion of a mother and father with their son twenty years after they had to abandon him, when he was just a baby, due to the Nakba, that is, the expulsion of the Palestinians from their country, leaving behind all their belongings and also, often, their loved ones. This happened in 1948, just as the State of Israel was founded. The protagonist couple returns there twenty years later (Kanafani wrote the story in 1969; you can read it in Catalan in the translation by Anna Gil Bardají, published by Club Editor) to find their city again, their streets, their home, apparently as they left them, but now in the hands of the occupiers. And to meet their son. The break, the wound, is impossible to repair or heal.Return to Haifa, the play, brings all this to the stage with undeniable austerity and authority. As soon as the spectator enters the small room of the Heartbreak Hotel, they are greeted by Rigola and the four performers, and the director briefly presents the performance: he calls it theatre of urgency, conceived to provide an artistic response to one of the great political and human crises of our time: the genocide of Gaza perpetrated by the government and army of Israel in the face of the passivity, or acquiescence, or complicity, of the international community. It is literary theatre, text-based theatre: the actors and actresses serve the text scrupulously, while dramatizing it with a depth free of any affectation, at the antipodes of any temptation towards emphasis. To say that the result is breathtaking at several moments is accurate. The length of the play is just under an hour, but it reaches far and deep.The infamy of Gaza, of the West Bank, continues its course while the wars in Iran, in Lebanon, in a Middle East set ablaze by Netanyahu and Trump, two war criminals who have led the planet into a black hole full of destruction and corpses, partly for their own profit, partly for the profit of the elites who support them, partly for the delirium of the exercise of absolute and unpunished power, also continue. A little further on is Putin in Ukraine and, below, bleeding as always, Yemen, Somalia, the Congo. Faced with all this, closing oneself in one afternoon to see Return to Haifa in a theater like the Heartbreak, where everything is in close-up and where the actors cannot and do not want to hide (but neither can the spectators), may seem like a simply symbolic response. But it is not so: it is an active response, it means affirming ourselves in humanity and civilization in the face of atrocity and barbarism. And it is excellent theater, among the best that can be seen now.

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With three decades of professional career behind him, actor Albert Triola (Mataró, 1973) knows the Catalan theater stages very well. He has worked with Dagoll Dagom, Guillem Clua, Sergi Belbel and Josep Maria Flotats and has been part of productions that have marked our country's billboard, such as Agost(2012) and Smiley (2014). Now he faces a new challenge, that of performing his first monologue. He does so directed by David Pintó in the production El lladre de llibretes, an adaptation of the homonymous novel by Gianni Solla about a helpless teenager in Mussolini's Italy. The production will be staged at the Versus theater until May 3.

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The brief curriculum he has written, of little more than four lines, does not do justice to his professional career in the performing arts world, which is immense, not only for the large number of roles he has played, but also for the quality of the plays in which he has acted and for the excellence with which he has interpreted each of the characters. "Pep Cruz is theatre made man," critics have said of him. "An actor who does everything well," has also been written about him. "The most popular and beloved of the actors in the Catalan theatrical Olympus," others have added. Born in Girona in 1948 and forged as an actor in this city, Pep Cruz has worked, as a performer, as a director, or as a screenwriter in almost a hundred plays, including Cyrano de Bergerac, King Lear, Forido Pensil or Infantillajes; he has acted in 8 musicals, including the successful Mar i Cel; in 8 television series, such as Ventdelplà and Oh! Europa, and in more than thirty films.

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