The Mercat will go around the world in 50 shows next season, looking more towards Asia and discovering transmissions of languages that are reinvented in each context. All this crossed by themes such as the new identities that globality gives. Thus, the room is committed to international companies such as the Taiwanese Cloud Gate, which returns to Barcelona with 13 languages (Thirteen languages), alluding to the street gibberish that the choreographer Cheng Tsung-lung remembers from his childhood in Taipei. And invites with two shows the Sidney Dance Company directed by the Catalan Rafael Bonachela, as well as the most international of the Norwegian companies, Carte Blanche, with a piece by Frédérik Gravel.
Olivier Dubois recovers the vertiginous Tragédie with which he burst into Avignon as a choreographer 30 years ago, with 18 dancers. And the also French Rachid Ouramdane, who opens this Grec, will return with the Chaillot-Théâtre National de la Danse that he directs and a piece of aerial choreography, halfway between a documentary and circus dreams. The presence of the circus will be strong this 2023-24. And Alexander Vantournhout will work on it from the dance with Foreshadow.
As part of Temporada Alta in Barcelona and in collaboration with the Mercat, the leading Belgian, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, will dance her solo on the Goldberg Variations, with Alain Franco on piano. And so as not to neglect any latitude, she will open the course with the Lebanese Omar Rajeh, with that celebration that he calls Beytna and in which he invites choreographers and musicians to dance while his mother cooks for everyone.
“Now that we are working more and more and it seems that this intense work is getting us nowhere, we want to open the season remembering that what matters is the moment of celebration with others”, affirms Àngels Margarit, director of the Mercat, whose mandate The eight-year term ends in February 2025. "If I continue, it will be under certain conditions, but that will have to be discussed in the fall," he says.
As for local artists, there will be work by choreographers associated with the room: Núria Guiu, Joaquín Collado and Aina Alegre, who is now artistic director in Grenoble. There will be a piece by Olga Pericet and La Veronal will repeat Firmamento, for those who miss it at the Grec.
The presence of the aforementioned Cloud Gate with a pre-pandemic piece – "which is the one I like the most, and also fit better into our scenic box than the most recent one", indicates Magarit – allows the Mercat to open a Taiwan Panorama and show the creation country, with three more companies, including Wang Yeu Kwn, with the intimate Beings. This is the result of the relationship of crossed artistic residences that the Mercat began in 2019 with a Taiwanese theater. After the covid, the exchange of artists resumed last year, with Roser López traveling to the Asian country and Lin I-Chin attending the Fira de la Mediterrània. “We want to get closer to this powerful and variable territory, very technological and modern, but at the same time of great ethnicity and cultural richness”, says the director of the Mercat.
On the other hand, the room proposes to discover two choreographers with two pieces each: the Canadian Catherine Gaudet and the French Lara Barsacq, who was part of the Batsheva in the nineties, and then of C de la B or Jérôme Bel, and that builds a feminine and feminist review of the Russian Ballets of the early twentieth century.
And Maud Le Pladec will take care of the cultural transmission of dance with Silence Legacy, in which an 8-year-old Canadian girl dances krump embodying a universe that still does not belong to her.
The current season closes with 68% occupancy, 31,000 tickets sold and 48% new audience. And if the motto of the current one was “Qui balla muta”, that of the next one is “Qui balla muta... persisteix” “because only those who are capable of mutating can last”, concludes the director.
