Six major cultural facilities in Barcelona – the Auditorium, the Liceu, the Mercat de les Flors, the Palau de la Música, the Lliure and the TNC – have promoted a project that connects the performing and musical arts with the educational world. They call it LaCultivadora and it has funding from the Government, especially from the Department of Culture, which has made some 450,000 euros available for this 2023.
Coming from European funds, this capital has been decided to allocate -unanimously by the different directors of the halls and theaters- to this tool that brings together all the activity of its educational services, not only the offer of shows, but workshops, training, thematic materials, etc., which from now on is available to any teacher, who can filter them by theme, people, etc.
The tool has a vocation for the future and a double objective: "to guarantee and foster the transformative power of art in education, and to promote and promote artistic proposals with an educational perspective".
Minister Natàlia Garriga, who had attended the debut of the Liceu Symphony Orchestra at the Paris Opéra over the weekend, led the presentation of this program and its online platform, lacultivadora.cat, which centralizes the offer of educational services on Monday and facilitates the reservation. The latter is not trivial, since the payment process for activity reservations by a school was complex and laCultivadora greatly facilitates the process.
Garriga expressed the need to "encourage curiosity about culture and promote habits, if possible, visiting the cultural spaces themselves, as is the case." For the minister, "it is key that students visit cultural facilities, participate in their projects, learn and grow with their arts", something, she has said, that "helps awaken new vocations, new creators and new audiences".
It so happens that the six people in charge of the rooms are not only convinced of the transformative power of culture but also committed to the idea of bringing culture closer to education and thus guaranteeing that the performing arts are within the reach of the public of the future and, therefore, that in the future they have their public. “In the future, cultural centers will either be educational or they won't be,” said Joan Oller, general director of the Palau de la Música.
In this first testing phase, the platform will be available to schools. Esplais, casals, etc. will be added in the future. But it remains for later that the aggregator is also a tool for anyone in the family public, since the facilities have to combine their different ways of making reservations.
During the 2022-2023 season, the six facilities have offered up to 329 educational activities, including shows, workshops or visits, in which more than 212,000 people have participated.
