Blog de FiraTàrrega

Arts de carrer, Arts escèniques, Comunitat, FiraTarrega 12/06/2017 Àrea de comunicació

FiraTàrrega, a market but still a festival

Per Iryna Malinskaya, alumna del Màster en Gestió Cultural de la Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (UIC) iryshkamal@gmail.com

When getting an opportunity to be involved in organizational process of a performing arts festival, you find yourself thinking: what do I know about concepts and ideas laying deep under the surface? Are these implications obvious to the audience? Have I ever, being a spectator, realized a reason driving to partake in an organized crowded chaos?…

Launched mainly as a popular street festival, today the FiraTàrrega is the international market of performing arts, a place for promotion of new artists, creation, exhibition and training, a meeting point for professionals. But it remains a festivity for the public embodying originally rooted meanings of a festival as public joy and abstinence from daily life simply because of the so-called paradox of a spectator as Jacques Rancière stated – there is no theatre without a spectator.

Thus, being social creatures people have always celebrated their community identity to stay bound to the world whether worshiping gods, celebrating religious unity, prosperity, power, the past, or the future by representing chaos before creation. According to Alessandro Falassi, at a festival people’s behavior corresponds to daily life behavior but modified, inverted, stylized, and “in addition there is the element of symbolic abstinence – for instance from work, from play, from study, from religious observances. At festival times, people do something they normally do not; they abstain from something they normally do; they carry to the extreme behaviors that are usually regulated by measure; they invert patterns of daily social life”. Thence, the FiraTàrrega transforms the town of Tàrrega into an urban stage, a great celebration for the citizens, a destination for tourists for four days in September. The town turns into a space out of space at a “time out of time” when the town is not a space for living but for playing and time goes with a different pace and in a different order; where artists and the audience interrelate with each other by inviting for involvement and participation, observing and acting. And here comes the inverted, disguised reality. The whole town of Tàrrega, its streets, corners, buildings play their role in the festival along with its citizens. Each movement, sound, person gain meaning in view of united Tàrrega community and performing arts community.

The year of 2017 FiraTàrrega invites us to take part in investigation of the past, women roles, social responsibility, social relations, inclusion, friendship, success, role of culture and other significances that can be found attractive to each of us to stop, watch and possibly take part in.

From this moment, I will try to play a role a “spy” from the audience, to understand what, why and how of the performances. My first challenge was Momentos estelares de la humanidad by Electico 28 based on Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History: Twelve Historical Miniatures, which amazed and captured me.

To be continued…