"I'm glad to be a Ferrater!" (Dare to be a Ferrater!), Says actress Estel Solé, projected on the screen. The Teatre-Auditori de Sant Cugat experienced the closing of the Barnasants festival with a show dedicated to Gabriel Ferrater in the year of his centenary.
Earlier, the Barnasants honorary awards were presented. Rosa Zaragoza gave the career award to singer and activist Julia León, and the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, gave the cultural activism award to Fina Sala and Pietat Hernández, co-founders of the Altaveu Festival. The director of Barnasants, Pere Camps, recalled at the closing the 160 recitals that have been scheduled this year, which has been dedicated to Joan Fuster, also a centenarian.
Solé, wearing a green turtleneck sweater, becomes the poet of Reus, with a glass of Giró gin and a cigarette in his hand. And dark glasses.
The show, Gabriel. G, it works on several levels. In addition to the screen, the live body is the songs that Meritxell Gené has composed based on Ferraterian poems. With herself on vocals and acoustic guitar, Santi Careta on electric guitar and Guillamino on machines.
The scene is completed with Margherita Bergamo Meneghini and Ricardo Salas, who dance in movement or still, while they read, they build columns of closed books with, on top of them, open books that make light. And they smoke, drink, and distribute carnations. And it is from the metaphorical dance that ends up implicitly reflecting the death of the poet.
Between song and song, Solé appears projected, responding to an interview in a bar. From a scattered collection of texts, he draws and contextualizes a Ferrater for laymen who reviews what he thinks of Reus, life in France, mathematics, his aphorisms, the reading of Shakespeare –which reveals to him that “in poetry one can say everything”–, the role of the intellectual or his relationship with “people who have primary reactions”. Also about her relationship with alcohol.
The songs refer to the poems, without a rigid fidelity but taking them as pretexts. They start with If I can. "Something has entered / into some verse that I know / that I can write, and I don't / know when, or how, or what / will agree to say." We went into the verses, and we continued with classics with Fingers: "Light, they trusted / your fingers between my fingers." The notes resonate from the musicians' fingers.
Thus, now a projection, now a poem made song, like Game, Idols, The excessive speaker, The lesson, The other way around, Number, Metronome, The beach, Possessed (“When the worms / will have a cold dinner with my body / they will find a taste of you ”).
Then everything goes back to black and, now, the voice of Gabriel Ferrater sounds at the famous Price Festival on April 25, 1970, when he recited his Cançó del gosar poder.
And it ends with Cambra de la tardor and Paisatge with figures: “(...) Let’s leave / the days that will come for all of us, / like the shackles of an orange. Has". We have them.
Catalan version, here
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