“Bringing art to schools is the aim of the A Tempo programme”, says Salvador Sunyer, director of the Temporada Alta festival, which organizes this educational project together with the Invisible City Foundation, with the support of the Banc Sabadell Foundation. “The activities are free and take place during school hours, to complement this gap that, in our opinion, exists in regular education”, he adds. The lucky educational centers are from Girona and Salt, which for the seventh consecutive year benefit from the expansive wave that Temporada Alta entails. There are 36 artistic proposals, which will reach more than three thousand students.
This educational leg of the festival has several parts, such as Temporada Alta a l’aula, which offers ten shows that will deal with topics such as sustainability, mental health, racism, gender issues or aesthetic pressure. The shows are designed for students of different ages, who can chat with the artists after the work.
As a novelty, A Tempo presents A distancia, a new digital platform that is available to all teachers in Catalan-speaking territories, with materials they can use to introduce the arts into the classroom. In the Artistes a l’aula project, so far face-to-face and now also online, the professionals present their works and explain their work. They are artists such as the company Cabosanroque, the actress Rosa Gàmiz, the playwright and actor Jordi Oriol, the dancers Elena and Marta Masó or the playwrights Aleix Fauró and Isis Martín, from La Virgueria, who present the exercise Construction of scenes from of the impulse.
With the Crea el teu project program, the institutes work for a whole year with an artist, such as Oriol Broggi in a previous edition: “What is important is not so much the result they present at Temporada Alta, but the whole process they do”, remarks Sunyer.
Parallel to the Dramaturgy Tournament, one is held for high schools, with a different dynamic. This year, Albert Forns, Lara Díez Quintanilla and Xavi Buxeda will teach students how to write a play. Four of the works written by the schoolchildren are chosen and a dramatized reading is given in the La Planeta room, by professional interpreters.
The A Tempo project also seeks to introduce poetry to high schools, with the Poetitza’t program. The aim is to motivate secondary school students “to read and also write poetry and develop a creative sensibility”. In this edition, the poets Josep Pedrals and David Castillo will visit the classrooms.
The director of the festival states that many times the teachers in charge of the artistic disciplines “do not know how to introduce them to the class because they have not received specific training to do so”. This is why these resources, the seminar that will be held in Seville and the online masterclasses want to help teachers in this fundamental task of training.
