firatàrrega

Performing arts fair limits its trademark off-program street shows and makes pre-booking compulsory

Performing arts festival hosts virtual events on September 9 and 10

Culture on offer as the summer draws to a close includes Barcelona Gallery Weekend and a five-hour Eternal Sunset performance from John Talabot

Held every year in the western Catalan town, this year's FiraTàrrega boasts almost a thousand professionals from 31 different countries

FiraTàrrega will focus on artistic and social uses of public space from September 5 to 8

The three-day event started on September 6 and will feature an especially international lineup

Catalonia’s international performing arts festival aims to reframe the public space from September 6 to 9

The international festival for performing arts opened its doors on Thursday to a four-day panoply of international and local shows

The international festival for performing arts is to be celebrated next weekend

The Tàrrega Theatre Fair, in the county of Urgell, in Western Catalonia, lowered the curtain on this year’s festival this Sunday. Between the 8^th and the 11^thof September, the town welcomed a programme with 60 performances from 57 national and international companies and 263 sessions in 26 different exhibition spaces. More than 887 professionals, 547 of whom were Catalan, with 180 hailing from Spain and 190 from abroad, took part in this traditional event that every year fills with colour the streets of this city near Lleida. This 36^th edition closed with a positive balance: 14,450 tickets sold, in comparison to the 13,000 visitors of last year, and an occupancy rate above 87% at the theatre shows. A total of 3,315 people stayed at the camping area of the event. The artistic director of FiraTàrrega, Jordi Duran, is satisfied with the results: “It was a show rich in content and we enjoyed the good weather”, he stated. 

Street art is capable of addressing very different people and contexts, and this year’s edition of FiraTàrrega is marked precisely by an ambition to overcome differences and explore the intercultural potential of art. ‘Manifesta’, a large format coproduction of the festival, is the latest creation from Bobskené. A fun and festive song that celebrates difference while mixing text, music and circus, and which audiences will be able to enjoy for the first time on the 8th of September. The text is a multilingual manifesto, written in Catalan, Spanish, French and English, that reflects the seven nationalities of the artists that take part in the performance. “The manifesto makes us question the times that we live in and invites us to relax, to arrive to ecstasy and end up dancing”, said the director of the performance, Ricard Soler i Mallol.

Most of the plays and performances that make up the FiraTàrrega’s programme for 2015 are open air performances, some 80% in fact. From Thursday until the 13^th of September, more than 50 art companies from all over the world will take part in one of the most important theatre festivals in Catalonia. Moreover, 30 of the shows at FiraTàrrega will be premieres. 250 performances held in 25 different venues, mainly outdoors, will turn this small town in the east of Catalonia into a big creative hub with more than 150,000 visitors expected. For the first time this year, three different shows from international companies will be performed on opening day.  

FiraTàrrega, an international event for the performing arts held in Lleida, and the Catalan performing arts scene in general are considered "very inspiring" by British art professionals. On Sunday, they were both back at the Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (GDIF) in London, the UK capital’s leading event of free outdoor performing arts. In particular, five Catalan performing art companies and Mike Ribalta (FiraTàrrega's Head of professionals dept.) participated in the GDIF 2015 Showcase, a meeting of international programmers, in order to present their new projects and seek partnerships. This year, the British festival also has two Catalan productions in its programme: Toc de fusta and Brodas Bros.