The world turns with the seasons at the opening of the Grec

The new director of the Grec Festival in Barcelona, ​​Leticia Martín, promised a popular opening for all audiences, and that's exactly what happened with Le Petit Cirque, featuring dance and circus by Yoann and Marie Bourgeois, to the rhythm of songs from Saisons, the album by singer-songwriter Pomme. With a French label and a co-production between the Grec Festival and the Lyon festival, Les Nuits de Fourvière, the Montjuïc Amphitheater premiered this show for all audiences this Thursday.

The stage of the old quarry presented the synthesis of a circus tent: the curtains through which the artists enter and exit, the upper stage where the string quartet performed the movements of the seasons, the wires that held flying elements like a kind of trapeze, and the circular track.

A mobile with human weights offers one of the most attractive plastic moments of the show

The ring of this small circus has been another character in a poetic show filled with evocative imagery. Slightly elevated from the ground and visually made of wood, the ring follows a score as rhythmic as that played by the four members of the string quartet: now stationary, now in slow motion, now in accelerated motion, now in crescendo, now in decrescendo—its mechanism is fundamental to this simple yet moving journey through the four seasons.

This mechanical character makes the dancers Marie Bourgeois, Kim Amankwaa, Yurié Tsugawa and Kiley Dolaway evolve, while Pomme sings the songs moving everywhere, even up the stairs of the stands, accompanied by the quartet formed by Camille Garin, Eva Sinclair, Maïa Collette and Pauline Denize, who is also responsible for the musical arrangement.

The show begins in spring, because in many civilizations, it's where the year's cycle begins, as the singer-songwriter recalled in Monday's media presentation. The first surprise comes when one of the dancers descends, suspended laterally from the top of the imaginary tent, and begins to dance with another dancer who moves with her feet on the ground. The combination of earthly and aerial dance forms an initial image, foreshadowing all that is to come.

The slow or fast movement of the dance floor makes the dancers walk or run without moving forward, sometimes playing with images projected onto the artists' entrance, which is too small for the effect to be enjoyed equally from all angles of the amphitheater.

As the four seasons move, new visual effects appear, such as the centrifuge. The acceleration of the dance floor's rotation forces the dancers to lean toward the center to avoid being thrown by the centrifugal force, producing a beautiful aesthetic effect in the succession of moving images that constitutes Le Petit Cirque.

But there's more. From an aesthetic point of view, the culminating moment comes when the dancers and tightrope walkers construct a mobile with their bodies. It's not a telephone, nor is it the motive for a crime; it's a sculpture that performs a balancing act, a feat of which Alexander Calder was a great master and which the company directed by Yoann and Marie Bourgeois elevates to the level of an acrobatic dance number.

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As with major premieres, the opening of the Grec Festival was attended by the President of the Generalitat (Catalan Government), Salvador Illa; the Speaker of the Parliament (Parlament), Josep Rull; the Mayor of Barcelona, ​​Jaume Collboni; the Regional Minister of Culture, Sònia Hernández Almodóvar; and the Councilor for Culture of Barcelona City Council, Xavier Marcé, accompanied by the Director of the Grec Festival, Leticia Martín, along with a large representation of the country's cultural life. Now, the Barcelona summer season has truly begun.