Fine Arts Programming executive director observes Spanish festival up close

Brian Jose celebrated New Year's Eve in September in Spain — or so it seemed.

Every year, the small Spanish town of Tàrrega becomes a mini Times Square on Dec. 31 with the annual FiraTàrrega, an international market for performing arts held during the second weekend in September.

Jose, executive director of Fine Arts Programming for the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University, attended the festival for the first time as an invitee of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters (he is on the organization's board of directors) while also representing CSB and SJU.

"I was not quite sure what I was expecting," Jose said, smiling. "I pulled into town and there were proletariat-looking 1960s, 1970s, 1980s-style block buildings. And I thought, 'What a weird place for a giant theater festival.'

"After I got set up at my hotel, I walked in toward town, and went through the centuries-old gates, and all the sudden I was in a medieval setting with narrow streets. It was a really magical place for the performances. Once the festival started, there were performances in every plaza, and on many of the corners.

"It was sort of like Times Square in New York on New Year's Eve. This town, which usually had 16,000 people, now had 90,000 visitors in those tiny streets," Jose said.

There were two types of performers at the festival — individuals presenting street theater, and groups performing on stages. "Street theater I might loosely define as clowning — a lot of juggling, a lot of one-person performance art. Those were the corner performances," Jose said. "There were also stages set up all over this medieval city, and you saw all stripes (of entertainment) — some were music, some were dance, some were theater, some were comedy. I even got on a shuttle and went out of town one day and saw a performance in a horse corral."

While there, Jose wasn't doing his best Simon Cowell impersonation, saying yes or no to the acts.

"There were very formal aspects of this festival that I participated in on Friday and Saturday, but I wasn't a judge or anything," Jose said. "I was mostly there to represent the presenting environment in the United States. No small surprise, artists from around the world would love to get into the U.S. market, so that's what I was asked to talk about."

The professional performers hailed from all over the world, including Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Holland, England, Italy, Russia, Colombia, Brazil and the Czech Republic. Many of those groups operate with support from ministries of culture in their respective countries.

"They have government support in subsidy of the arts in a rather substantial way. They kind of needed a primer on how it works in U.S. One of the things government support allows is some risk taking. Without that kind of (government) support, it's harder for U.S. presenters and artists to take risks to do something new. They're so dependent on ticket sales and fundraising," Jose said.

One example of that was a theater performance of a Catalonian group that presented a 100-minute play without a spoken word. Jose said it was one of the best theater performances he had ever seen.

"I'm not sure, though, how that would play in the U.S. Would a theater company take a chance to present a massive production without a word spoken?" Jose asked. "The government support allows for risks to be taken, and of course you'll have some winners and losers in that. So, that was one of the nice things I got to see, some work that really pushed the edge. The down side was I got to see some work that really pushed the edge (in the other direction)."

Jose said he was interested in possibly bringing two groups to the U.S. and CSB and SJU - the Catalonian group Kamchàtka which produced the wordless play, and a circus company from Belgium called 15ft6.

"I emailed (Kamchàtka) and said, 'How can we make this happen in the next two years? Your performance was so good, the whole time I sat there telling myself, it's just a play.' I couldn't help myself being totally caught up in it. I don't know how we would do it here, but I want to do it here," Jose said.

"15ft6 were very funny, and had a good command of English, which will be beneficial in our residency activities working with our students. I thought they could be a really entertaining group for us," Jose added.