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.

Ten years ago, a jolt impacted the family of playwright, director, and actor Jaume Viñas (Barcelona, 1987). Following that shake-up, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins began to hold a series of family lunches and dinners where, all of a sudden, everyone opened up about things that had previously been kept in the shadows. "My sister and I realized that our two grandmothers had suffered a lot," explains Viñas. That experience sowed the seed for L'albada, the playwright's most ambitious production, which will be performed from June 25 to July 30 at the Biblioteca de Catalunya under the direction of Oriol Broggi and as part of the Grec festival. With around forty characters, the production spans three generations and is a grand family story that delves into the silences, memory, and legacy derived from the Civil War. Viñas prefers not to explain the nature of the family jolt so as not to reveal the play's ending.

Leticia Martín (Granada, 1978) was appointed two years ago new director of the Grec, Barcelona's most important performing arts festival. This year's edition – the 50th – is the first that she has programmed from scratch and allows us to see the artistic line the festival will follow. Martín is working to expand the Grec and make it reach Barcelona residents who are still unaware of it, while also wanting the festival to be a window into the contemporary scene of the present and a support for local creation. Why did you run for director of the Grec?

Two years ago, director Ferran Utzet and actress Emma Vilarasau were looking for allies and producers to stage an ambitious project: to bring to the stage La truita by the Frenchman Baptiste Amann, a family tragicomedy that required eight performers on stage. Finally, they found the company Bitò, the Teatre Poliorama, and the Grec Festival as accomplices, and the production is about to become a reality. La truita will be performed from June 27 to August 8 at Poliorama within the Grec and will then inaugurate this same theater, where it will have a run from September 8 to October 18, with plans to tour Catalonia in 2027. "It is a great spectacle that requires a team of phenomenal actors. We wanted to do it on a grand scale, it is demanding in terms of casting and also the scenic device," states Utzet. For the production, he has used a translation by Carles Batlle, who is the one who discovered the play to him.

A 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.

It's rare that the press area at the Teatre Lliure is so crowded the company presenting the show that it's practically bursting at the seams. This Monday was no exception, but the overcrowding was justified: the Grec Festival and the Teatre Lliure are celebrating their 50th anniversary in 2026, and to mark the occasion, they've decided to pull out all the stops with a massive production. The Three-Royal Opera by Bertolt Brecht. It will be directed by the Galician creator Marta Pazos, responsible for shows that have left their mark on Barcelona, ​​such as the opera Alexina B and the García Lorca montage The public. Dani Espasa will assume the musical direction of the show, which will feature a live orchestra, choreography by Mabel Olea, and 12 performers on stage, including top names such as Nao Albet, Eduard Farelo, Míriam Moukhles, Júlia Truyol, and Roc Bernad. "It will be a celebration born from pleasure, joy, and hope," says Julio Manrique, director of the Lliure. Letícia Martín, director of the Grec Festival, adds that "a show of this scale was perfect for both openings: the festival itself, on June 29, and the Lliure's season."

"Now, finally, we'll be able to see it in Barcelona," celebrates Leticia Martín, director of the Grec Festival in Barcelona. She's referring to Forever, a masked production directed by Iñaki Rikarte and produced by Kulunka Teatre, the National Drama Center, the Arriaga Theater in Bilbao, and the Victoria Eugenia Theater in San Sebastian. The play, which won the Best Direction and Best Author awards at the 2024 Max Awards, will run for five performances from July 23 to 27 at the Teatre Condal in Barcelona. "We have to seize this opportunity," says Daniel Anglès, the theater's artistic director.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona It is thought to be a comedy about Shakespeare's youth, and, as usual, it is not known exactly when it premiered. What is clear to biographers such as Peter Ackroyd is that it is a work written at breakneck speed, with the resulting inconsistencies, inspired, as is usual with Shakespeare, by other preceding writings and ultimately with the satirical air of the romantic drama of the 16th century. And hence the unexpected ending, which seems to mock those works, since when it comes to choosing between love and friendship, Shakespeare opts for the friendly relationship between Proteus and Valentine, leaving Julia and Silvia, the two young women of marriageable age, in Decla's magnificent proposal, with a pinch of salt. In other words, a friendship forged over years of adventures and secrets cannot be equated with falling in love, no matter how beautiful the girl may be.

The director of this contemporary look at Bertolt Brecht's classic Mother Courage, Lisaboa Houbrechts, arrives at the Greek Theatre preceded by a certain fame for having grown up in the kitchen of Jan Lauwers' Neecompany and worked alongside Alain Platel and Ivo Van Hove, all of them protagonists of the best Belgian theatre. Also for her other contemporary views on Medea in the Comedie Francaise or on Orpheus and Eurydice directed to Hanover. In those shows he mixes - I want to believe successfully - visual arts, music, text, choreography and performance.

It's rare that three big names on the international scene coincide in Barcelona with their most cutting-edge shows. The Grec Festival has made it happen by programming this weekend productions by two great figures in contemporary dance, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Christos Papadopoulos, and one of the most unique voices in contemporary theater, Carolina Bianchi. The first two arrive to sold-out venues, and in Bianchi's case, she's about to sell out.

It had been many years since actress Emma Suárez had a theatrical project in hand, and even more so since she had set foot in the Goya Theatre. "The last time was with Get off at the Moor, in the 80s. I was a teenager, now I'm a lady," the actress recalls. Although cinema plays an important role in her professional career with films such as The red scab (1993), The gardener's gos(1996), The next skin (2016) andJuliet(2016), Suárez was eager to return to the theater. Now he does so with the stage adaptation ofThe back room, the novel by Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000), coinciding with the centenary of the Spanish writer's birth. "The text gave me goosebumps, it moved me, it provoked me, I felt something very powerful, fear and vertigo at the same time," explains Suárez. The show premiered in February at the Teatro de La Abadía in Madrid and will be at the Teatro Goya until July 27, as part of the Grec Festival.

Three women from three different decades in different cities and three lives marked by a novel: Mrs. DallowayThree lives encrypted in a few hours, like in Virginia Woolf's novel. Mrs. DallowayThe other is that of Mrs. Laura Brown in 1949, when she is reading Virginia Woolf's book and preparing a birthday party for her husband. The third is that of Clarissa Vaughn in 2001, when she goes to see her friend and childhood sweetheart, the poet Richard, who has just received an important literary prize while battling a very aggressive AIDS disease.

There are two reasons why Josep Maria Pou (Mollet del Vallès, 1944) threw himself headlong into carrying Giant by Mark Rosenblatt on the Catalan stage. The most selfish reason, admits the actor and director of the Romea Theatre, was discovering that the protagonist was Roald Dahl (Llandaff, 1916 - Oxford, 1990). "Strange and complicated. The role seemed written for me," jokes Pou. The other reason—the main one—is the theme of the show. Giant, which premieres on July 5 at the Teatre Romea as part of the Grec festival, recreates a day in the life of Roald Dahl in August 1983, just after he published an incendiary review against the Israelis in the magazine Literary ReviewIn that text, Dahl referred to the 1982 conflict with Lebanon and said that during the invasion, "everyone started hating Israel."

The artistic universe ofArnau Tordera (Tona, 1986) has no limits. The musician and composer was the first to create a musical theater show centered, from beginning to end, around the sardana. "Until now, there have been some experiments incorporating the copla and the tenora, but this is the first dramatic work that uses these elements to convey the entire show," Tordera emphasizes. With this in mind, he conceived Sardana Superstar, which premiered in October at the Fira Mediterrània and is coming to Barcelona's Teatro Condal from July 2 to 6 as part of the Grec Festival.

Marc Salicrú's (Mataró, 1993) inspiration often lights up when he's behind the wheel, traversing lonely roads and highways that transport him to imaginary worlds. "There's a kind of grandiloquence and epic effect when a brigade suddenly appears cleaning the road or paving the road. A small micro-world is generated that you don't fully understand, and then, as you drive by, it's already disappeared," explains Salicrú. His desire to capture this mysterious atmosphere has led him to create one of the most genuine and unusual shows at this year's Grec Festival. Interference 02. Brief approach to the exit from the county route through the rear arch gate. Travel at 110 bpm., by Teatres de Campanya, will be a mix of urban concert and stage act involving around 300 people at the Arc de Triomf in Barcelona on July 5 and 6 at 8:30 p.m.

If anything has changed your life National Dance Award 2024 The key to success for dancer and choreographer Lorena Nogal (Barcelona, ​​1984) is that she has "learned to say no." "I've had opportunities and job offers that were very interesting, but I couldn't fit them into the schedule I'd already set up last year because I would have been left without a life. There's something about it that grabs you and you like it, but at the same time it's somewhat enslaving," she says. And despite the hustle and bustle, she never stops.

What do we do with the monstrosity of others? Can we come to understand and dialogue with someone who has hurt us? What role does the community have in dealing with those responsible for abject actions? Theater often serves to seek answers, or at least to bring questions to the stage and make them resonate with the audience. This is the driving force behind two Grec Festival shows led by monsters: Who killed my father?, by Édouard Louis, directed by Pau Roca and starring Dafnis Balduz; and The monster, by Josep Maria Miró, directed by himself and starring Àurea Márquez, Joan Negrié and Albert Prat. The first premieres on July 1st at the Heartbreak Hotel (they will have three performances and are already sold out, but they will return in the fall) and the second will be at the Sala Beckett from July 3rd to 27th.

The Greek 2025 It began on Thursday in the Montjuïc chamber with the premiere of a French proposal that combines dance, music and circus from a creator who has visited the festival twice with well-rehearsed shows: Minute (2018) and Celuy who knocks down(2023). But world premieres are dangerous. Even more so if, as we have learned, the production has been through many nerves upon its entry into the Grec. While this one The Little Circus It has some rather attractive poetic and visual ingredients that give a glimpse of what the show might be like in the future (once it has made its way to the road and revisited the connector and rhythm issues that were evident at Montjuïc), the truth is that the opening performance was rather lackluster, as evidenced by the brief and muffled applause.

Whether you believe in love or not, the Grec stages await you to question it. This year's extensive festival program includes a series of shows designed to unravel romantic love and reveal its intricacies, but also to reflect on the mark that falling in love leaves on us, or simply to remember why we are so captivated by a couple who loves endlessly.

Opening night and nerves—the good kind—on Montjuïc mountain. "Anything can go wrong at any moment," warned acrobat and stage designer Yoann Bourgeois at the presentation of The Little Circus, the contemporary circus offering that opened the 49th edition of the Grec Festival this Thursday at the Teatre Grec. Once the show premiered, it was clear that the French artist's caution was not false modesty. The stage design had to work like clockwork so as not to detract from the show's impossible acrobatics. Nothing could go wrong. And it didn't. Created by six artists: Yoann Bourgeois, French singer-songwriter Pomme, and dancer Marie Bourgeois, The little cirque has successfully overcome the challenge of kicking off the Catalan capital's grand showcase of the performing arts.