For lifelong residents of Olot, Sismògraf remains, 16 years later, that festival of “people who do unusual things.” And the most divergent of those things would not be, for example, watching flamenco dancing on the grass, as Álvaro Murillo did surrounded by a large audience this Sunday under the sun of Parc Nou. Not even that intimate and poetic night walk that Albert Coma proposes in that same corner of the park, in which he arranges a series of mini objects that light up and ring in the dark to evoke a love story.
Vacuuming yourself, as Lawrence Malstaf proposed in the Carme cloister, already borders on radicalism, and the fact that Irene Vicente Salas occupies the Museu de la Garrotxa with Corpus is a good shake-up of the perception of history from an attitude of the present: you just have to delve into it. in the room where La càrrega by Ramon Casas is on display, about the civil guard’s repression of strikers in Barcelona at the turn of the century, and seeing in front of it a young woman dressed in her kigurimi and chatting while curled up in an armchair. “What sheltered, warm, hunched and sleepy body will want to take to the streets, the cities, the world, if I already have my window in my hands?”
But it is in the volcano that rises in the middle of the city where the festival that detects the movement “of the body and the planet” lives up to its nickname. There, in the Gredera del Montsacopa, five English performers with a retro-futuristic look await the participants of their Geophonic to show them ancestral sounds. The runners and dog walkers who pass through the place daily will be aware for the first time of its geological importance. Lorna Rees
“It is the fifth time we have done Geophonic: we presented it on a beach, in the financial district of London… but nothing compared to that volcano,” Rees confesses to La Vanguardia once the entourage has reached the crater, the one that is from the few natural parks in the Garrotxa volcanic area that have not been deformed by any lava flow. Dancing while pretending to be each of them a mineral/victim of the extractive industry is not the forte of these young performers, but when they sing an English folk song in different voices, with the captivating landscape of La Garrotxa in the background, their environmentalist message is moving.
“This is a song from 1844 in which a woman with a sick miner husband cries out to the owner of the mine in Durham to stop exploiting the land and its people. For us it is an anti-capitalist anthem,” explains the artist-activist, panting and with a sparkle in her eyes. The proposal ended with joie de vivre and dancing to disco music on the crater grass.
Diverging often means hitting the nail on the head. And Tena Busquets, ideologist of Sismògraf and those 30 shows that she had in 4 days in Olot, is not afraid to look at the climate emergency head on. Even less so from a city that is the fruit of nature: “Olot was born from the earthquakes of 1400. It is a natural fact that makes it what it is. We are in a natural park, the landscape is important to us, it has been culturally, you just have to see the paintings in the Museu de la Garrotxa, and also industrially… This is the issue and it is what we had to work on, in being an updated, sustainable festival made for the city and its natural environment. A conscious festival.”
There are now three editions that this greener Sismògraf has had. And the balance that the organization makes is more than positive: all the shows that required admission have been sold out and the free outdoor shows have registered a high level of occupancy. In fact, the equivalent of the capacity of a Liceu surrounded the Mozambican dancers of the Ertza project in the Parc Nou on Sunday morning. It was the culmination of a morning itinerary that ended with people joining in to dance. Now the focus is on April 26, 27 and 30, when the festival premieres Sismodansa, with a program linked to International Dance Day. They will occupy public space, the library and the theater.
