The Grec 2025 Festival was the Grec of mothers. Mothers were the protagonists, like the Moeder Courage by Belgian Lisaboa Houbrechts, the Medea by Milo Rau, the Mommy by the Albanian Mario Banushi, Helena Tornero's ghost mother in You promised me a love story and finally, the Hecuba by the current director of the Avignon Festival, Tiago Rodrigues, which closed the Teatre Grec de Montjuïc programme on Tuesday in a highly applauded performance, but which also saw quite a few spectators leave.

The 49th edition of the Grec Festival will end on Monday, August 4, with 124,837 spectators and an average 80% occupancy, as announced this Tuesday by the Councilor for Culture of the Barcelona City Council, Xavier Marcé, and the director of the Grec Festival, Leticia Martín, six days before the end of the Montjuïc amphitheater, Hecube, not Hecube, from the Comédie Française.

They followed the concert hypnotized and without realizing that their body was yielding to the songs of Dipotry, Pau Riba's double album which was honored at the Teatre Grec this Tuesday, with a sold-out crowd. First, there were the eyes, which, in concert, opened like a flower. Then, the small, uncontrolled nods of approval from the head, which moved to the shoulders and spread to the arms. The couple expelled energy through their hands and began to float through the air. First, she stood up, and half a second later, he did. It was at the end of the concert. They had been dancing on stage for a while, but the audience struggled to get going.

To say that Mario Banushi pays tribute to his mother in his new show, Mommy, which arrives at the Grec Festival after its international premiere at the Avignon Film Festival, forces us to ask: what mother? Banushi was born 26 years ago in Greece, the son of immigrants. When he was just eight months old, his mother took him and his sisters to Albania. There, his grandmother raised him until he was six, while his mother worked in Greece. "That builds your character; those are very important years," he says. Every summer, he traveled to see his father, stepmother, and the rest of his paternal family. "The fact that my parents are immigrants and that I come from two countries has affected my work and is one of the reasons why I do wordless shows, because I was always forced to choose: what is my language? What language do I dream in? What language do I like to speak? In the theater, I didn't have to choose," he explains. For him, the stories told to his family related to immigration sounded "like listening to Chekhov or Shakespeare." "They're like my classics," he reveals. She has decided to tell the world.

Unlike his controversial, harsh, and violent works, Milo Rau (Bern, 1977), one of Europe's most politicized theater directors, arrives in Barcelona with a cheerful affability and hardly any sleep. He has just premiered two shows at the Avignon Festival: the comedy The letter and a national event: The Pelicot Trial, a four-hour-plus performance about the trial of Dominique Pelicot and fifty other men, which took place in Avignon—the Pelicots' village, Mazan, is 40 minutes away. Before leaving for Italy on his personal perpetual world tour, he has two works at the Grec Festival: on Sunday at the CCCB he presented the film The new gospel (The new gospel, 2020), about the exploitation of immigrants in Italy, and this Monday at the Teatre Lliure in Montjuïc shows the brutal Medea's Children, a version of the Greek tragedy about a child murderer who slaughtered her five children in 2007 in Belgium.

Two shows with unconventional formats built on words. The surprising Manual for beings live shows from the emerging company La Mula, which swept the board with its first show (Thauma) and the History of love from the veteran Agrupación Señor Serrano, who far from following beaten paths seek new narratives with a creation of ambitious title and less surprising results.

"It's just about sitting back and being overwhelmed by the music," says Simon Halsey, music director of The veil of the temple, The masterpiece by composer John Tavener (1944-2023), which will be performed at the shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Barcelona this Saturday (9 p.m.) as part of the Grec Festival. This is the first time the work will be performed in Barcelona, and it will be performed in a reduced version of two and a half hours, as the original, premiered in London in 2003, lasts almost eight hours. The piece will be performed by the choral family of the Orfeó Català—the heart of the Orfeó Català, the Cor Jove and the Cor de Noies—and the Albada and Roig Korai choirs, with solo voices led by soprano Montserrat Seró. "Beautiful sounds that will fill all parts of the building," explains Halsey.

You already know that the devil's great genius is to make you believe he doesn't exist. You also know that, whatever the soul, everyone has trafficked and traffics with it to achieve desire, comfort, pleasure, or power. Splendor Goethe's Faust is permanently relevant, and the very free version that William Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company created in 1995, featuring a Faust traveling across the African continent, keeps the denunciation of human evil fresh in the international context of wars and genocides in which we live. The African Faust, like his European counterpart, is a dissatisfied wise man who wants to recover his youth and energy to win over his Margaritas. He makes a pact with the devil and travels through an Africa of satraps, shooting at everything that moves.