The popularity of the work of Joan Brossa (Barcelona, ??1919-1998) has always fluctuated between three poles: written, visual and stage poetry. He often combined all three, especially in what has been called paratheatre, to distinguish it from the apparently more formal text works according to the established canons.
Joan M. Minguet has recently curated an exhibition, also developed into a book, Other Brushes. Joan Brossa and the poetry of action, the paratheatre (until this Sunday at the Joan Brossa Foundation’s Free Arts Centre, and published by the foundation with the Barcelona City Council) in which he unfolds the different areas in which he develops : the carnival, transformation from Fregoli, magic, the circus, mimes and fakirs (and bombolaires), the music hall and the striptease -with the presence of Christa Leem-, puppets, Chinese shadows, the cinema and what today we understand as performance. Brossa was a pioneer in bringing these seemingly minor arts to the forefront and placing them on the same level as the rest of his work, but does his shadow – not necessarily Chinese – reach today’s creators?
It is true that productions directly affiliated with Brossa are regularly scheduled, such as Cabosanroque’s No em voi fer Joan Brossa, which the Grec festival recently brought back to the CCCB, or a few years ago the TNC dedicated part of the season to it, but his imprint also contaminates current poetry in the outpouring of poetry recitals that take place everywhere.
According to the president of the Joan Brossa Foundation, Vicenç Altaió, the poet is fully alive and has left a very broad legacy: “You only have to see the current exhibition of the Macba collection to find how present he is; even in pedagogy schools use experimental systems on the language they have to do with it; in the literary field, once it was banished in the seventies by Molas and Castellet, it has great weight”. In the scene, according to him, he goes further because “the multiplicity of creators has a lot to do with it, many end up doing things that he did many years later”, and he gives as an example that the pocket operas that have been made these days at the Ateneu Barcelonès “are very close to post-Brossian poetics”.
For Altaió, “Brossa was a pioneer, but he himself said that he was not avant-garde, but that he was of his time, and it is society that is backward. Then, when society reaches where he was, some of his characteristics fall and others enter normality”.
Lluís Permanyer, on the other hand, believes that his influence is a minority and has not transcended much beyond limited areas and, therefore, he still needs to be vindicated: “He was a pioneer and had a personality that has not had transcendence that would have been necessary At the beginning it was perhaps normal that its avant-garde was more isolated, but from the eighties it began to gain importance and did not have the influence it could have had”.
Minguet, who had mainly studied the visual aspect, also believes that its influence on the performing arts is diffuse, and often based on artists who dealt with it, such as Joan Baixas and his recent Una pedra a la sabata. “But the projection of the stage Brossa was already diffuse when he was alive, and he was never happy with the adaptations that had been made to him, and this could sometimes seem like an artist’s pose, but there was a real background”, he explains . “I don’t want to make a hagiography of him, because he was not a misunderstood genius and the mask of his character you can never take off, but many of his pioneering solutions resonated, sometimes others arrived at the same time from different places”, he says, to explain how he was at the side of “the explosion of the Catalan scene in the seventies and eighties, when many of the resources of the alternative performing arts began to be popularized”. At the same time, however, Minguet emphasizes that there is still much to do, as he recalls that “normally puppet and circus shows are not intended only for the rascal, and, moreover, they are often performed in precarious conditions”, and quotes the fakir Kirman or Tortell Poltrona as artists who had worked with Brossa.
The poet Eduard Escoffet claims that Brossa’s work “broke all the borders, it made many people see that there is not a single poetry, that the book is just another format”. He himself has performed it in recitals all over the world, on the one hand, and also as a programmer for decades. The Poesia i Festival, which he directs, is an example of the expansion of poetry beyond the word, and this year, for example, in addition to recitals or concerts, there have also been several performances and, up to and everything, a walking magazine that Escoffet sees as indebted both to Brossa and to those made by Carles Hac Mor and Ester Xargay, and which in the late nineties were part of the breeding ground in which poetry recitals began to gain momentum and to reformulate. Ultimately, says Escoffet, Brossa and Hac Mor agreed to “understand poetry not as aesthetics, but above all as ethics and as a machine for creating new discourses, daring to play and experiment”.
