Guillem Albà: "I have returned there many times when I was older, always drawn by the good memories"

When the clown and stage creator Guillem Albà was almost six years old, his parents performed with the puppet theatre company L’Estaquirot Teatre: “They did summer tours specifically to take us with them, my brother and me, and to be together, also with our grandparents, until the time of the performance, when we all went to see the show,” he recalls. They stayed for a few days in different coastal towns like Calella, Sant Feliu, or Palamós, but he has always associated those summers with Blanes. He admits he couldn't explain in full detail what Blanes is like, even though he has returned there as an adult, always drawn by the memory of those holidays.

Vilanova is his town, it’s where his family is, where he has done absolutely everything, carnivals, major festivals, the Nativity plays… “It’s a hugely important place for me, but if I have to choose one in Catalonia, I’ll go with Blanes, it amuses me. Everything came together there, the days without school and a space of freedom where everything fit, we always had a good time and had no worries.” They stayed at a campsite, the grandparents would go to the market to buy meat or fish for a barbecue. With his parents and grandparents they would meet for meals, and the rest of the day they were out and about on their bikes, at the beach, the pool, playing ball and board games, eating ice cream, walking, and making friends with children they didn’t know at all and have never seen again: “They were movie-like summers,” he says convinced. They always went to the same place, Camping Roca, where you only had to walk a little to cross the promenade and reach the beach. It was on the promenade where the parents had their little theatre, a wooden tent. They all slept in the same caravan: “It was tiny, I don't even know how we fit when the grandparents were there”. He explains that this was a transitional period for his parents, who came from more hippy years, which he would have loved to live through, and then they went by van and performed in theatres. It was in Blanes where he remembers being very young and very nervous because they let him handle a rod puppet, “it was a mushroom, I had to raise it and hold it. I was thrilled, everyone was watching what I was doing!”. The premiere came about after a previous, improvised and unauthorized intervention, in which the audience started laughing when they saw him appear with a puppet from behind the curtain.“Then everything was easy and the function was the least important,” explains Albà. When evening arrived and the sun was going down, it was time for the theater, but before that they had enjoyed the day off together in Blanes.