The Catalan Center

A Road Map for Catalan Culture in New York

2011-04-07T21:19:00.000-07:00

The first important sign may have been the proliferation of non-stop flights between New York and Barcelona—first Delta, then Continental, and, finally, American. The next was the manifest interest of the great cultural institutions of New York in programming Catalan cultural events: the Lincoln Center Film Society programmed a Catalan film retrospective (2006); the Metropolitan Museum showed “Barcelona and Modernity: From Gaudí to Dalí,” (2007); the BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) wanted to program a festival of Catalan performing arts (this, unfortunately, did not come about).

A generation of museum directors and arts curators with an interest in and sensibility for the underexplored treasures of world culture—and hence in Catalan culture—was taking a leadership role at major American arts institutions. Richard Peña, at the Lincoln Center Film Society; Curator Bill Robinson of the Cleveland Museum of Art, who traveled in 1999 to Barcelona to study one Picasso painting, discovered Catalan art, and devoted the next seven years to laying the foundations for the great “Barcelona and Modernity” exhibition, which opened in 2006 at his museum. Robinson found like spirits in Jared Goss and Magdalena Dabrowski of the Metropolitan, who co-curated and hosted it in 2007.

In 2006 all these things were blossoming. But the New York Times, for example, still tied itself into a knot when it had to explain that something was Catalan, or that someone was from Catalonia. The “newspaper of note” feared that its readers would not know what it was talking about.

Over the next five years, this, too, would change. Ferran Adrià appeared day after day in the food pages of American dailies, and on his coattails an interest not only in his theories and methods, but in the flavors and traditions that underlay them. Now when food writers want to spice up an article, they will often add something like romesco to a recipe to give it an interesting “Catalan” touch.

Barcelona is in fashion, and will continue to be. Some feared that the interest in Barcelona would not translate into an interest in Catalonia, but this fear was groundless. Those non-stop flights, in part a response to the happy situation of the Barcelona port at the start or finish of Mediterranean cruises, have spawned guide books, airline magazines, travel articles in newspapers, which all reflect the specificities of Catalan culture.

New markers of the Catalan image continue to emerge. One of them is the Barça. For years Americans ignored soccer. Miraculously, the last World Cup changed all that. And U.S. sports reporters made the point that 8 of the players on the winning Spanish team were the product of La Masia. One reporter at theChicago Tribune, Kevin Williams, is such a culé that he has set up a blog about the Barça [http://www.barcelonafootballblog.com/].

Yet not everything is gastronomy and sport. When Jordi Savall brought Hespérion XXI to the Metropolitan Museum, The New Yorker declared the concert to be the best musical experience of 2005 (“Savall is not only a performer of genius but also a conductor, a scholar…”). The Gotham Chamber Opera staged Montsalvatge’s “Gato con botas” last season to weeks of sold-out audiences. If the Institut Ramon Llull programs dance at the BAC, or The Catalan Center brings talks on Guastavino or Enric Ruiz-Geli to the American Institute of Architects, audiences flock to the events.

Promoting Catalan culture in New York is a highly gratifying experience. The American history of minority cultures has generated a positive predisposition toward lesser-known cultures. If a Catalan institution approaches a New York counterpart with a good idea and a modicum of funding, it finds a warm reception. While food, sport, travel, and fashion build excitement and interest, cultural, academic, and scientific events bestow knowledge and prestige. Everybody wins.

The next stage in assuring the place of Catalan culture in New York can be very exciting: committees of local experts advising Catalan institutions (as the Col.lectiu Emma does with journalists); networks of U.S. and Catalan institutions working together; bilateral exchanges of artists and creators; networks of businesses supporting the arts… This is an important time to keep building on an already fertile field; let us not let austerity nip this process in the bud.

Mary Ann Newman

Former Director of the Catalan Center at New York University. Member of the Editorial Board of In-Transit.

Reprinted from "Catalan Views" a monthly blog of the Catalan News Agency.

Creative Documentaries from Barcelona

2010-10-01T10:50:00.000-07:00

As Director of The Catalan Center, I am pleased to welcome Mr. Gerwin Tamsma as guest blogger to open the semester by offering his view of the Master's in Creative Documentaries of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

This semester we are delighted to be offering a series of films produced in the framework of this M.A. program. We are honored to welcome the founder and director of the program, Professor Jordi Balló, for the opening and closing of the series, to frame the mission of the program and discuss the films. In the following article, Mr. Tamsma, who focused on the UPF Masters in a "Signals" section of this year’s IFFR, tells us why these films are important.

Mary Ann Newman

The Master’s in Creative Documentary of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra at the Intersection of Genre and Technology

The films produced in the context of the Creative Documentary MA of Barcelona’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra are more than ‘just’ the impressive result of years of dedication of some of Spain and Catalonia’s most talented filmmakers. They represent the cutting edge of arguably the most important trends in cinema. This film series offers an overview of this program and its role in these developments.

Much, if not all, of the vitality in contemporary modern cinema in the last twenty years is related to two developments: the rise of digital technology, and the disappearance of fixed borders between fiction and documentary.

Modern recording technologies opened up affordable possibilities for filmmakers to shoot anytime and anywhere, uncovering a wide array of new subjects and aesthetics. This helped to establish a certain type of personal and hybrid filmmaking, one that allows creators to combine documentary research not only with the joy of experiment, the reason of essay, the emotions of social commitment and self-examination, but also with the fantasy of fiction, poetry, and re- enactment.

It is this type of cinema that is proposed, thought, and produced by the Master’s in Creative Documentaries of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Characteristically, the films are full of people and places familiar to the filmmakers: rarely is there a film without mothers, fathers, uncles, neighbors or friends. Though the settings are distinctly Catalan and certainly Spanish, the films are very cosmopolitan – like the city of Barcelona itself, one could say.

These films are almost the exact opposite of the fare we are offered in the multiplexes: they are too caringly and patiently made to become mainstream: too contemplative, too intimate, too obsessed with the passage of time, with finding the right form. And this is why I care for them.

Gerwin Tamsma

International Film Festival Rotterdam

Gerwin Tamsma is responsible for programming the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s feature films from China and Korea, Latin America and - in Europe - Belgium, Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal, and he also coordinates the ‘Bright Future’ section. Mr. Tamsma is part of the selection committee for the Tiger Awards competition, as well as the committee of the Hubert Bals Fund. He has curated retrospectives as well as special programs for the festival.

Catalonia, Land of Missegetes

2010-09-30T17:29:00.000-07:00

In the 5th century, Hecataeus of Miletus described the part of Iberia now known as Catalonia as a land of missegetes: mixed peoples. Catalonia has always been a crossroads and the Catalans have always been travelers.

The Fall program of the Catalan Center highlights and celebrates these to-and-fros of Catalan culture through a focus on scholarly literature and documentary cinema.

American scholarship: Americans here and abroad and Catalans at U.S. universities are producing original works of scholarship in English about Catalan culture. Stephen Jacobson’s Catalonia’s Advocates: Lawyers,Society, and Politics in Barcelona—1759-1900 reads European social history through the resurgence of Catalan law in the 19th century. Hot off the presses, John Ochsendorf’s Guastavino Vaulting traces the development of this remarkable construction technology from its Mediterranean roots to to the Oyster Bar at Rockefeller Center or the 59th Street Bridge. Finally,Professor Sara Nadal will return to NYU to speak on The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema Under Late Francoism, the first issue of the venerable Hispanic Review to be devoted to Catalan culture, and a new approach to Pere Portabella, Joaquim Jordà,Jacint Esteva, et al.

Film, form, and genre: Professor Jordi Balló, the founder of the M.A. in Creative Documentaries at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, will join us to explain the origins and influence of the program and kick off the semester-long film series. To quote Gerwin Tamsma of the International Film Festival Rotterdam: “The[se films] represent the cutting edge of arguably the most important trends in cinema: […] the rise of digital technology, and the disappearance of fixed borders between fiction and documentary.” The seven films on view in this series do their part to blur these borders; it is a rare opportunity to see them in the U.S.

Catalan Artists See the World: Under this rubric The Catalan Center presents work by Catalan artists on countries other than Catalonia. This fall we are proud to collaborate with the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Educational Center on an exhibition of Catalan artist Mireia Sallarès’s work, Las Muertes Chiquitas/ Little Deaths. Her exhibition/film/documentary archive reflects three years of interviews with Mexican women who, invited to talk about orgasm, proceeded to discuss life, death, gender, sexuality, violence, politics, and family. This gripping portrayal of the contemporary life and thought of Mexican women, part of a long, ongoing conversation between Catalonia and Mexico, will be shown at the CSV Center from October 16-28.

Missegetes one and all, please join us on these fascinating journeys!

Jewish History of Catalonia: Forcano and Planas

2010-05-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

What happens when you cross two under-studied traditions? What happens when experts in Catalan medieval history and in Hebrew philology collaborate on a groundbreaking publication like A History of Jewish Catalonia? When assumptions about medieval Jewish Iberia are shaken up by the legacy of a Jewish population that speaks Catalan and not Ladino?

To judge by the reaction of the audience at the presentation of the book at the Center for Jewish History in NY—on Sunday at 4:00 p.m.—, the combination is rousing, eliciting an outpouring of curiosity, questions, and intellectual excitement.

Authors Sílvia Planas and Manuel Forcano spent about 20 minutes each explaining the organization of their sections of the book (published simultaneously in Catalan, English, and Spanish by the Ajuntament de Girona--the Girona City Government--and Editorial Àmbit). Sílvia Planas, expert in medieval history, and Director of the Nahmanides Institute for Jewish Studies and the Museum of Jewish History, both in Girona, dealt with Ço que hem perdut—“What has been lost”—and Manuel Forcano, Ph.D. in Semitic Philology and Vice-President of the National Council on the Arts of Catalonia, dealt with Ço que li és romast—“What remains.”

The point of view of this first comprehensive history of the medieval Jewish tradition is that “Our past is not ours alone. The geographical space that our culture has occupied over the centuries has been home to diverse peoples with different cultural and religious identities, including, at least during the Middle Ages, the Muslim and the Jewish communities.” The book looks at the daily lives of Jewish women and men, evoking their names, their feasts, their good, and their rituals. It also looks at their role as, cultural transmitters, translators from the Arabic, original thinkers and intellectual go betweens whose works “are the fruit of their lofty speculation and their genius for welding together the very best of Arabo-Muslim culture from Al-Andalus and the culture of the Christian kingdoms in the north of the Iberian Peninsula.”

According to Planas and Forcano, the Jews of Catalonia constructed a “soaring intellectual edifice…in spite of the difficulties of a daily life weighed down with religious persecution and social degradation.” The two eloquent authors conveyed this very well, awakening tremendous enthusiasm in the audience.

New Yorkers will have one more opportunity to hear Manuel Forcano speak: On Tuesday, May 4th, he will address the topic "Traces of Esther: The Jewish Presence in Contemporary Catalan Culture." Don't miss it: there are sure to be fascinating discoveries.

6:30 p.m., May 4th, King Juan Carlos Center

53 Washington Square South

For more information, call 212 998 8255

A Bit of Buzz: Bridges vs. Wi-Fi, and the BCN—CellFilmFestival—NYC “A big festival of the smallest films in the world”

2010-03-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

A little background for those who have not yet visited us: The Catalan Center at NYU is a sweet office with three big windows, kindly provided by the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU, and paid for by the Institut Ramon Llull, the Catalan government office that promotes Catalan culture (which includes, it can never be said too often, the culture of Valencia and the Balearic islands) abroad. It is shared by two people, Mary Ann Newman and Maria Litvan, and a slightly overwhelming collection of boxes and shelves full of Catalan-related books and pamphlets and CDs and DVDs and general stuff. And lots of coffee pods and herbal tea bags.

Next week, said Catalan Center is thrilled to be celebrating a special event that was the curatorial brainchild of Maria Litvan, a clear indication of the advantages of collaborations between 50-somethings and 30-somethings, and of the great potential in keeping the creative bridges between BCN and NYC active and buzzing. Maybe not the bridges; maybe the wires, or better yet, the wi-fi. What, you say? This is what:

The week of March 29 to April 2^nd, Alberto Tognazzi and Mar Cordobés will be offering a production workshop in Mobile Technology, Activism, and the Arts for the ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program) at NYU. Fresh from a similar event at the CCCB (Center for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona), their workshop at NYU will (I quote from the course description) “focus on how cellphones can contribute to art and activism. In doing so, they will explore how the internet has become an important platform for distribution and show how videoblogs, webtv, webshows, viralism, proam, DIY, flashmobs are redefining this whole sector of audiovisual communication.”

I (Mary Ann, the 50-something) intend to attend the workshop, if only for the vocabulary (proam? flashmob?). But the primary intended audience for Tognazzi and Cordobés’s work knows the lingo and is in a privileged position to take full advantage of their knowledge. In fact, few institutions and student bodies could be a better fit for their workshop than the ITP. This department of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts was founded in 1979, and (I quote from their website) grew “out of the work of the Alternate Media Center which was founded in 1971. ITP and AMC have developed an international reputation for pioneering work in demonstration and research in the field of interactive media. 2009 mark[ed] the 30th anniversary of the Interactive Telecommunications Program.”

Eighteen students have signed up. And you, friends and readers, are invited to see their work, plus a selection of greatest hits from the MóvilFilmFest—founded in Barcelona by Alberto Tognazzi in 2007, and celebrating its fourth festival later this year— on Friday, April 2^nd, at the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU, another of the kind hosts and invaluable friends of The Catalan Center at NYU.

Webs of interest:

Alberto Tognazzi: http://tognazzi.tv/

Institut Ramon Llull: http://www.llull.cat

The Catalan Center at NYU: http://www.thecatalancenter.org

CCCB: http://www.cccb.org/

Tognazzi at the CCCB: http://www.cccb.org/en/curs_o_conferencia-the_camera_on_your_mobile-34460

ITP at NYU: http://itp.nyu.edu/sigs/program/

Chance Meetings in New York City

2010-02-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

If beauty—according to Lautréamont—can be likened to “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” then the week of February 22, New York will be a privileged site of Catalan beauty, as two Catalan artists whose work routinely combines the erudite and the erotic, the mundane and the worldly, the humorous and the grave, the eerie and the ordinary come together on several different stages.

Acclaimed Catalan author, Jaume Cabré, will be in New York to celebrate the publication of Winter Journey (Swan Isle Press, 2009), a collection of short stories, and his first book to be translated into English.

Celebrated Catalan composer, Benet Casablancas, will be in New York for the U.S. premiere of two of his works, and for the world premiere of a new composition commissioned by the Miller Theatre, Four Darks in Red, an homage to Mark Rothko.

Two such significant premieres by established Catalan artists from two different fields, literature and music, would be noteworthy in any case, but the rencontre in New York of Jaume Cabré and Benet Casablancas is particularly fortuite, because their work exemplifies the richness of artistic juxtapositions, both fortuitous and deliberate.

Winter Journey, by Cabré, is a case in point. The very title is a reference not only to the Schubert song cycle, Winterreise, but also to a dense weave of references cited in an author’s epilogue, including poems by Wilhelm Müller (which provide the lyrics to the Schubert songs), Attilio Bertolucci and Antoni Marí, and the biography of Schubert by Gaston Laforgue. Through the stories run the threads of tapestries, paintings, and songs, in which Rembrandt, Sibelius, and King Crimson engage in an intersecular conversation (masterfully and colloquially captured by Patricia Lunn, the translator).

And one of the unwritten participants in this conversation could easily be Benet Casablancas. On Wednesday, February 24, The Catalan Center is presenting “’Little Night Music’: A Composer’s Salon with Benet Casablancas.” “Little Night Music,” a clear reference to Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” became a touchstone for American audiences thanks to Stephen Sondheim, and Casablancas carries on the play of words with his “Petita música nocturna,” threading the universal reference through the Catalan warp and weft.

Nevertheless, like Cabré, Casablancas does not limit himself to the references of his own medium. A simple glance at the titles of the works he will be playing on Thursday at the Miller Theatre pays witness to his passionate commitment to the interrelationship of the arts: Seven Scenes from Hamlet rethinks Shakespeare through music, and Four Darks in Red, his important commission by the Miller Theatre, paints Rothko’s gradations of dark and light in variations of sound and silence.

Taking a loan from a Brooklyn neighbor, and extending the thread of references once step farther, perhaps the only thing that could have brought these two together, back-to-back, in New York, is the music of chance.

Events:

2/22 Reading of Winter Journey by Jaume Cabré

6:30 p.m., King Juan Carlos Center at NYU (www.nyu.edu/kjc/)

53 Washington Square South (between Sullivan and Thompson)

Staged bilingual reading by the author and actress Hillary Spector, of “Ballad,” a story from Winter Journey.

http://www.swanislepress.com/intro.html

2/23 Meet the Author, Jaume Cabré

7:00 p.m.. Idlewild Books, 12 West 19^th Street (www.idlewildbooks.com)

A launch party for Jaume Cabré, the Catalan author of Winter Journey. With live Schubert and a discussion of the relationship between the music and the text.

2/24 Little Night Music: A Composer’s Salon with Benet Casablancas

7:00 p.m., Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimon, 24 West 12^th Street

Following a performance by The Perspectives Ensemble of Benet Casablancas’s Petita música nocturna, the composer will engage in a conversation with CUNY musicologist, Antoni Pizà; Artistic Director of The Perspectives Ensemble, Sato Moughalian; and Director of the Miller Theatre, Melissa Smey in which the composer’s musical oeuvre will be discussed in the context of the European and North American modernist traditions.

2/25 Composer Portrait: Benet Casablancas

8:00 p.m., Miller Theatre, Columbia University (www.millertheatre.com)

2960 Broadway at 116^th Street

One of today’s most exciting Catalan composers will be highlighted in this program of works never before heard in New York. Among the pieces to be played are Seven Scenes from Hamlet, for narrator and chamber ensemble, New Epigrams, and Four Darks in Red, inspired by the Rothko painting and commissioned by the Miller Theatre.

Welcome to the Catalan Center Blog

2009-07-25T13:25:00.001-07:00