What the foc?! Brussel en Barcelona slaan de handen ineen
From July 4 to 14, Gerardo Salinas and Junior Mthombeni, along with a group of urban artists, will present the creation What the foc?! at the GREC festival in Barcelona. The collaboration between Teatro Nacional de Catalunya (TNC) and KVS has a long history. City dramaturge Gerardo Salinas is currently working hard with Junior and the entire group on the production and gives us an insight into how What the foc?! came to be.
On May 28, Junior Mthombeni and I left for Barcelona. The purpose of our trip? Rehearsals for What the foc?!, a co-production between TNC and KVS. For this, we gathered an enthusiastic group of artists, 17 in total, from Barcelona. It's a fascinating mix of ages, disciplines, backgrounds, ...
We are currently preparing for the premiere of What the foc?! in early July, but our collaboration with TNC goes back quite a while, to 2019 to be precise. We traveled to Barcelona then to present Dear Winnie, the Jr.cE.sA.r creation inspired by the life of Winnie Madikizela Mandela. During our stay, we met Tinta Negra: a collective of Afro-Catalan artists. We were impressed by their organizational form and discovered that we had a lot in common. In consultation with Carme Portaceli, artistic director and our partner in crime at TNC, the idea was born to set up a series of workshops with artists from Barcelona, where we could share our working methods, experience, and vision.
The workshops were a hit: more than a hundred people signed up to participate. From these hundred applications, Junior and I carefully selected the twenty final participants. We started working with this group for the first time in March 2023. And it was fantastic: the chemistry was electric! We worked with them from the perspective of 'Urban Dramaturgy': we explored the city through exercises and reflections. This resulted in an impressive outcome during a second workshop week in June 2023.
So impressive that Carme Portaceli invited us to create a production based on this vision. It was obvious to us that we would involve some of the workshop participants. And in the end, we just brought everyone on board – even though it was a challenge on many levels (financially and logistically).
But the effort was more than worth it, because thanks to the collective, we learned so many different aspects of life in the city of Barcelona. It also ensured that we remained constantly connected. Since then, there have been several exchanges with the group. Shorlady Preciado replaced a performer in Mimi's Shebeen, a creation by Alesandra Seutin for KVS, Mauricio Sierra and Denise Duncan participated in the international segment of WIPCOOP and the Próximamente LAB in Brussels. And Moha Amazian is one of the artists in Hannibal, the season opener at KVS this coming September!
These exchanges are intrinsically linked to the dynamic we have built with TNC and create a great synergy between Brussels and Barcelona. The commonalities between our cities are numerous, such as multilingualism and cultural diversity. This meeting between the collective, TNC, and KVS allows us to deepen the bond between both the cities and the theaters.