14th FESTIVAL FLAMENCO CIUTAT VELLA 2007.
OPENING
The ‘wicked’ festival
Silvia Calado. Barcelona, May 22nd, 2007
2007
Ciutat Vella Flamenco Festival. Full schedule of performances
Nothing that happens at the Ciutat
Vella Flamenco Festival is usual. Neither the program,
nor the poster, nor the stage, nor the audience, nor the
organization... Not even the opening. ‘La fanfara
malèfica’, with a mixture of pasodobles and
other ‘pleasant evil sounds’, comes from the
street enticing the crowd. Like the flutist in the story.
They go into the Pati de les Dones, spread out amidst
the people who are already unintentionally becoming a
part of the festival. It has now had fourteen editions,
which Luis Cabrera, founder of Taller de Músics,
of course sums up positively. And rightly so, since it
has managed to mobilize the flamenco ambience in Barcelona
and the surrounding area. And it has done so with an open
perspective, outside of the shut-in -“although necessary”
- orthodoxy. That’s where the slogan comes from
for this edition: ‘Maldades’ (‘Evils’).
La fanfara malèfica
(Photo Daniel Muñoz)
A green devil announces the bill whose
main attraction, as Cabrera explains, is a tribute to
Carles
Benavent, “a musician who created the way to
play electric bass in flamenco a relatively short time
ago. He’s been taken as a standard, but it didn’t
use to exist. And he is due recognition”. Pepe Habichuela
& Josemi Carmona, Son de la Frontera, Israel Galván,
El Junco, Ultra High Flamenco, José Maya... also
appear in the main program, which is held every night
until next Saturday in the courtyard of the Contemporary
Culture Center of Barcelona (CCCB), located in the Raval
neighborhood, “a center of cultural agitation in
the city, where exhibits, lectures and all kinds of encounters
on culture, society, art, philosophy... coexist”.
Moreover, if you look up and observe the glazed wall which
is behind the bleachers, you can see the reflection of
the sea.
Luis Cabrera, founder
of Taller de Músics
(Photo Daniel Muñoz) |
|
| |
|
But the festival goes beyond that. Every
evening at around eight o’clock in the hall, a curious
red-carpeted underground place, a showcase is opened for
young Catalan cantaoras. At midnight, for the rumba. Some
one thousand two hundred people are expected to take part
in the festival every day. One thousand two hundred people
of a “transversal audience”. That modern word
defines them. Though, translated, it could be said that
they’re eminently young, unbiased and very ‘dance-crazy’.
The figures don’t grow due to reasons of space,
so that “our growth is in the quality of the program”.
And in this fourteenth edition, a curious regard at the
origins began.
The group from Lérida, Rumberes
dels Garrotan, vindicates not just the rumba catalana,
but also the existence of traditional Catalan flamenco...
in Catalan. And the thing is, as the group’s musical
director explains, there are gypsy communities which only
learned Spanish under Franco’s repression. So their
lyrics por tarantas, guajiras, garrotín and of
course, rumbas, are in the language of their ancestors.
Though the musical accompaniment, except when flamenco
guitar takes a seat, is mainstream. Also appearing at
the opening concert was the group La Troba Kung Fú,
an eclectic group that weaves rumba catalana with styles
as different as funk and reggae. They already have their
crowd who hum the lyrics and move to their beat. Whatever
it might be. It didn’t take long for the seats to
disappear. Time to dance!
La Troba Kung Fú (Photo
Daniel Muñoz)
