I confess that, when I read that the inaugural show of the Grec consisted of a fusion of circus, dance, and choral singing, I thought like an imbecile that it would be one thing after another: now they will dance, now they will juggle, now they will sing. But the work directed by Darcy Grant, with music by Ekrem Eli Phoenix performed by the Girls' Choir of the Orfeó Català, functions as a unicellular organism with a powerful poetic charge. Rain threatened, and the rain fulfilled its threat, but we were able to see the depth of the show with a heavy heart and a growing sense of wonder, no longer acrobatic, but aesthetic. A show that should tour to all cardinal points of the world.
The Australians, dressed in white, mingled with the singers dressed in black in a beginning of recitative monody over numbers that don't quite pronounce four and start again. And it is that the unfinished, the error, the coitus interruptus, is a masterful constant throughout the work: falling, getting up and going back to it. Sometimes you think that human tower has made kindling but in truth it has fooled you and told you that these very young bodies will fall and make mistakes as many times as they decide. A work about fainting, getting up and lying on the ground, counting to fou and not wanting to continue, surrounded by an enigmatic and unsettling musical piece that accompanies the scenic vertigo. With some license towards the Cant de la Senyera, evidently, because the spirit of the Orfeó also hovers above its songs and above the ropes that suddenly cross the entire amphitheater.
This type of Australian castellers create a climax of tension that seemed unimaginable only with bodies, without accessory objects, without artifice, we are us and with us we will make their eyes pop. Suddenly two human towers connected by an enxaneta that forms the bridge can evoke the towers of the Sagrada Família, or now the tops of four towers are exchanged with a jump, or now a pillar is formed with a simple jump from the ground, or now one of them walks over three enxanetes as if they were a ladder. Or now, also, the bodies are keys of an organ that groan when one steps barefoot on the bellies.
The show, which has already won several international awards, seems made more in the Catalan style than in the Australian. You didn't know if the action unfolded more cirquedusoleil-like or more furadelsbaus-like, that is, more Mediterranean, but it achieved a constant scenic beauty. Sobriety but warmth, musical abstraction but tenderness, acrobatic forcefulness but a comprehensible and coherent narrative. Even Montjuïc's famous stone stage projected the shadows of the virtuosos primitively, almost Altamira-like. The work is a constant and blatant homage to Humanity and the possibilities of the body, not only in acrobatic feats but also in its moving and aesthetic capacity.
In the audience, all of Barcelona and the brand-new municipal representatives. Colau still has much more popular favor than Mayor Collboni, if we are to judge by the applause. And the rain stole the last part of the show from us, but it left us wondering if it was still possible to improve it or increase its difficulty. But one only had to review recent politics a bit, all of them seated in their places, to be convinced that it is always possible to perform the most improbable acrobatics.