Dagoll Dagom: "There must be more public effort that connects tourism with autochthonous productions"

--- The other day, watching the first scene of Mar i Cel, with the inquisitors decreeing the expulsion of the Moriscos, I felt, like a good part of the audience, that we were witnessing a current scene. Therefore, the question is: what would Saïd and Blanca be doing today? How would they be living the moment?

--- Joan Lluís Bozzo: We are right there. Not since Mar i Cel, but since the crusades. They are two worlds that confront each other and wish each other death.

--- Anna Rosa Cisquella: And right now Trump is demonstrating it. But well, Saïd... We did Maremar, where we adapted Shakespeare's Pericles to the theme of people migrating in dinghies, and there I met a Syrian boy who would be the equivalent. I believe that Saïd, specifically, is not a hooligan, and Guimerà draws him in a way that I would say that, if he arrived in Barcelona today, he would try to integrate. Because he has sensitivity and, although he has a tough situation, he is not a brute. And Blanca... that would be more difficult.

--- Of course, Blanca is us.

--- A.R.C.: Blanca is a posh girl who falls in love with a foreigner, and that's where the difficulties come from.

--- J.L.B.: Guimerà is just transferring the theme of Romeo and Juliet, right? Two clans at deadly enmity, but in the case of Shakespeare's Verona it's a more absurd enmity, between families, that leads two people to death. Guimerà, on the other hand, places it in the midst of the Morisco-Christian conflict (Moors and Christians, to put it plainly) that has been there since Don Pelayo and the Reconquista.

--- A.R.C.: Bru de Sala, when we started Mar i Cel, used to say that the next world war would be this one.

--- But the message of the play is that love triumphs, isn't it?

--- J.L.B.: Well... triumph... they both die. Love leads them to death! It ends badly, although the children who come to see us, when Blanca stabs herself, applaud. Because they see Blanca's revenge against her father. She does what she had to do.

--- A.R.C.: In the first Mar i Cel, in '88, we received a letter from a girl who said she had a Palestinian boyfriend and her family didn't accept him, but thanks to the play, she had managed to make her parents understand. And these things, sometimes, happen. Mixed loves.

--- J.L.B.: Not many, though, right? I must say that my kid goes to a high school in Granollers where 80% are Maghrebi and the barrier is there. It's there. And by the way, there's no way they'll speak Catalan. They're friends, right? They form a group. They assimilate. But they assimilate in Spanish, and this must be said.

--- A.R.C.: Now then, the handicap there is religion.

--- J.L.B.: We are a bit ignorant, too: we consider Maghrebis as Arabs, when they consider themselves very far from Arabs. They are Berbers, and they were dominated by Arab culture. And they can even be empathetic with Catalonia for that reason. In contrast, Latin Americans, who were dominated and exploited by the Spanish, come here with the motherland and you can't get them out of that.

"It's very hard for me to accept that my language and my culture suffer for things it cannot control"

--- A.R.C.: Our roots are mixed, my father had a physique that could perfectly look Moroccan.

--- J.L.B.: One only needs to look at the surnames: Moreno, Mauri, Murillo (morillo)...

--- Well, but we also have some Matamoros.

--- J.L.B.: Also, also.

--- A.R.C.: In my father's village, in La Segarra (which was an old border with Moorish lands), there are legends of the castle lady having relations with the "Moor." This was already happening, then. It's all very funny.

--- J.L.B.: Well... funny, but it can end very badly.

--- It's like a pendulum, isn't it?

--- J.L.B.: The right speculates, but they don't help much either (the image of the fundamentalists, especially...).

--- A.R.C.: Even the attack on the Jews of Israel.

--- J.L.B.: What is needed is to put things in order a bit.

--- A.R.C.: But the inquisitors also "ordered," right? I mean, it can be something uncontrollable. We are condemned to be a mixed people.

--- J.L.B.: But Catalan will go to hell, right? With this demographic pressure and without its own State... We are fading away, and this is very hard for me to accept. That my language and my culture suffer for things it cannot control.

--- A.R.C.: But this, your country, is precisely the one that demands people from outside to come, right? We need people.

--- J.L.B.: True, but we should be able to manage that they have to learn Catalan. If Germany itself suffers for its identity...

--- But we are the first to decide to do musicals in Spanish, to be more cosmopolitan or for market reasons.

--- A.R.C.: We have always defended that it can be done in Catalan. And it really can, with success. However, you have to choose the musical you do well.

--- J.L.B.: All this has created a lot of controversy, and from there, the Generalitat was persuaded to provide aid. But it's true, it is necessary to choose the titles and works well if we want good results in Catalan.

"Tourists miss out on Barcelona's theater scene"

--- A.R.C.: Of course. Scaramouche, for example, didn't do as well as we thought. We tied.

--- J.L.B.: Where we lost a lot of money was with Flor de nit. It was a musical that is now highly valued, but in which we lost a lot, because we had another expectation and spent a lot. I would say we lost everything we had gained with Mar i Cel.

--- A.R.C.: It's very hard to make hits, isn't it? Here and everywhere. The world is full of revivals, precisely because of that.

--- The Lion King in Madrid won't leave even with hot water.

--- A.R.C.: Marketing costs a lot of money. And, therefore, if you have a positioned product, you've already gained a lot. You save a lot, without having to do the campaign for a new product. Besides, here we don't have international superstars.

--- J.L.B.: Here people don't feel as obliged to see a musical as they do in New York. Our audience cannot compare. And, besides, tourists go there anyway even if they don't know English. American tourists, here, on the other hand, say "I'm not going to see Mar i Cel because I don't understand it".

--- A.R.C.: Well, recently I saw the case of a Romanian girl who had come without understanding it. It means she has crossed the border of Catalan people.

--- J.L.B.: But it's very hard to do this with the strength of a State against you. For example, the congress audience is usually cultured people with purchasing power, who have a few free days in an unknown city. In London and New York, those people go to musicals. We should be able to fish here, and we don't. They don't come.

--- A.R.C.: The Barcelona City Council makes no effort for cultural tourism to be integrated into the city's offerings.

--- J.L.B.: Everything ends up in Gaudí.

--- A.R.C.: That theater appears on the city's website, right? Nothing appears! Flamenco appears!

--- -Not bad.

--- A.R.C.: Or to do shows for the summer, affordable, aimed at tourists (dance, visual...), but for that, continuity is necessary.

--- But there is Barcelona Obertura, between the Liceu, the Palau and l'Auditori.

--- A.R.C.: With music it's easier.

--- J.L.B.: Because of the language. La Traviata is full of foreigners.

--- A.R.C.: There are ways to do things, if one wants to. For example, promoting "don't miss Mar i Cel, the city's musical," put into English, would cost nothing. Or each year, for the City Council to create a page where each season there would be two shows aimed at tourists, even if they were temporary... There are things! And no one is doing it, tourists miss out on Barcelona's theater scene.

"La Cubana opened many doors for the country's theater companies"

--- J.L.B.: We already tried it, going to Broadway. I was in a mythical office on Broadway, talking about it. But American cultural protectionism is very strong, and they have very solid unions. We told them we had a ship, costumes, etc., and they told us no: that they had to assemble the ship with workers from there. And the costumes had to be sewn there. And the orchestra, the same. Apart from the preferential treatment they have with the English. "We don't buy: we sell," they said!

--- A.R.C.: You also don't find a theater in Madrid to do a musical, because there are companies in Madrid that have them monopolized. The biggest ones. In 2014 I went to many fairs, we did the "come and see" for them to come, but there was no way.

--- In the literary and publishing world, something similar happens, I must say.

--- J.L.B.: Of course. You'll see their authors in all the duty frees of all the airports in the world. But what about Rodoreda? Difficult.

--- A.R.C.: And they have an immense industry, with incredible marketing tools.

--- In 2010 you made the series La Sagrada Família. I am a neighbor of the neighborhood. I ask you the same question as with Mar i Cel: where are these characters now? Where would they be?

--- J.L.B.: Gentrified. The apartment, rented and re-rented. And perhaps earning a fortune, for the views. But they live outside.

--- A.R.C.: It was a middle-class family. Yes, I suppose with problems. But more than selling or renting, they should set some limits and have aid. Because housing is a right. Or rent it, agreed, but at a reasonable price.

--- J.L.B.: But if they rent or sell at another price, there's no need to criminalize them. Everyone has a hard time and does what they can to be better, it would be all that was missing.

--- -And Oh, Espanya and Oh, Europa? Where would we be now?

--- A.R.C.: We were very optimistic, with the idea of Europe. Perhaps too much.

--- J.L.B.: It must be said, the English increasingly believe they made a mistake by leaving. The idea of Oh, Europa came to us from an anthology program by La Cubana called Aquest cap d'any, TV3 no fa res. It went so well that they proposed we do the same the following year, which was the year the monetary union was made, I think in '91. And since there were 12 countries, each country was a chime. And it was so liked that it led to a series.

--- A.R.C.: It's that La Cubana opened many doors for the country's theater companies to TV3. At that time there were few production companies, and suddenly someone believed that companies could also make television. Jet Lag, Plats Bruts, Les Teresines.... Now the landscape has changed a lot, now they are production companies. In theater it's the same, it's moving from companies to production companies.

"Mar i Cel has become a kind of Barça, like an institution"

--- A.R.C.: The same would happen, but there would be more discussions on the bus.

--- J.L.B.: And in places, we wouldn't be entirely well received. So we bet on Spain, but I stopped betting a little before the Estatut. We went to perform Mikado in 2006 in Valladolid, which included a joke about COPE, and there was a big whistle at the premiere. And they made us remove it from the show.

--- A.R.C.: However, nowadays, the organized bus trips surely have discussions and end up saying "Well: about this topic, it's better not to talk."

--- J.L.B.: We wanted to sing a hymn to fraternity among the peoples of Spain.

--- A.R.C.: Fraternity is there, in many people. But this topic cannot be brought up. I still believe in federalism.

--- J.L.B.: Independence, woman.

--- Well, the fact is that now we have neither one nor the other.

--- J.L.B.: In fact, the director of TVE, Ramon Colom, told us it was an impossible idea. A show about Catalans traveling through Spain, on TVE? It wasn't feasible. Later, Joan Bas achieved it for TV3, but he came from a PSC that was then more PSC than PSOE.

--- A.R.C.: Something fundamental for Mar i Cel, in fact, was the help from TV3.

--- J.L.B.: And from Pujol, it must be said. His directive to help, despite the reluctance of the Department of Culture. Which, by the way, has come to see the show.

--- The proof of its success is that you are now restaging it, on your own and without aid, with great success. Am I to believe that you will now leave?

--- A.R.C.: Yes.

--- J.L.B.: Yes. Don't you see us, how we are? Miquel and I are already retired; she was the one who had the idea for the restaging.

--- A.R.C.: We had a three-year agreement with the Generalitat and I decided that we had to continue, after the pandemic, and extend it.

--- It's a fantastic ending. And, on top of that, you've touched on the topic. And Guinovart's music doesn't just hold up well, it seems new.

--- J.L.B.: Mar i Cel has become a kind of Barça. Like an institution. But you can't foresee this.

--- A.R.C.: This happens with operas. Look at La Traviata.

--- J.L.B.: La Traviata is a work that is performed every night somewhere in the world. And it started as a failure!

--- A challenge for Mar i Cel. Every night somewhere in the world.

--- A.R.C.: For now, it will be a lot if we manage to get people from outside to come see us. We are here every night, ourselves.