The Troupe, or the Family, the Militia...
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A day at the office, or the scene of a play
At the Christmas dinner, Berta read us this portrait…
Albert types relentlessly, never stopping for a moment. Between ideas, he mutters the end of a sentence aloud, incomprehensible to anyone else. Anna walks in from the kitchen with a coffee she’ll never drink, laughing loudly as she announces for the tenth time that the Wi-Fi isn’t working. Vero replies, “It’s easy!” while simultaneously calling every IT technician in the city. Gina pokes her head through the door, shouting that she still hasn’t found accommodation for Martyn in this gentrified Barcelona swallowed by the harshest capitalism. Ari agrees with her while internally debating whether or not to cut her hair. Bet is on the phone with The Little Prince, while spontaneously organising a snack in the dining room, taking her daughter to the doctor, explaining an international project to Clara, and drafting twenty-nine proposals. All at once. Silvia usually appears around noon, hands in her pockets, showing off the new trousers Ari gifted her. She tells Anna she’ll be the last one paid because she’s forgotten the office keys. She also takes the opportunity to show everyone her new 2025 planner. A corralito forms around Silvia. Eva arrives, exclaiming, “Lift your spirits!” and immediately begins writing feverishly to all the programmers in Catalonia. Ari receives a call from Paris, and silence falls so everyone can hear her speak French. The chatter resumes but is interrupted again when Brito calls a hotel in Alicante, and everyone listens to her speak in a Canary Island accent. Gina pops her head through the door once more, shouting, “Seriously, they’ve closed the bakery downstairs?” Laura Vinyals, who’s only recently joined the office, observes everything from the corner of her eye, silently. She smiles, thinking, “Theatre people are intense...” Alicia and Brito reassure her, saying, “You’ll get used to it.” The doorbell rings several times, and Ari and Anna both say at once, “It’s Oriol.” Oriol walks in, saying, “I’ll handle everything, don’t worry.” Albert, who still hasn’t stopped drafting news articles, steps outside to read aloud and make a call to the Assoc. Silvia is still lingering in the hallway, gossiping with Alicia about the latest office drama. Berta captures this entire scene in Softcatalà. Someone, we don’t know who, shouts, “I’m heading to La Biblio!”
Berta Cascante
Christmas 2024
Il racconto di Vinicio Capossela al Teatro La Biblioteca
Some reflections to keep you company these days...
This December, we had the immense pleasure of welcoming Vinicio Capossela for an evening at Teatre La Biblioteca, in an event organised by the Italian Cultural Institute of Barcelona. He is one of La Perla’s favourite musicians, a beautiful blend of excitement and melancholy. He spoke of eclipses, festivities, stopping the rushing time with stories, and the Twelfth Night... We are sharing the notes we took, as another way of reflecting on these festive days, in case you’d like these ideas to keep you company.
Il fuoco e il racconto. This is the title of the essay by Giorgio Agamben that Capossela cites to introduce one of the central themes of his work as a musician: telling stories through songs. And beyond that, creating an art that brings us together to share stories and create new ones, as oral tradition has always done.
The time of stories interrupts the time of death. Stories manage to halt it for a moment, to suspend us. “Telling a story is always an interruption of mortal time.” It responds to an ancestral desire. Capossela declares himself a great lover of literature for this reason. Like in the belly of Pinocchio’s whale: outside lies the sea, the world, reality made of past and memories. Inside the whale’s belly, however, there is the possibility of something new. Because every story, even one we’ve heard countless times, always brings a discovery.
His book Ecclistica is a logbook, a lunar book, a calendar, an alphabet of the visible and the invisible. It speaks of eclipses and how humanity’s history has always been tied to these astronomical phenomena laden with meaning and myths. Eclipses have accompanied humanity’s destiny since time immemorial: we’ve recorded them, observed them, awaited them. And we continue to do so. They reflect our need for rituals, for dignifying life through what we see and what remains hidden. Rituals, like eclipses—and like the rituals surrounding eclipses—occur at intervals and affect an entire community. They also interrupt time: through the hours, they transcend schedules, much like a concert.
Capossela is fascinated by these phenomena and by what happens in those intervals. They are like festivities, which always carry a strong element of illusion. He says he sees it in the eyes of people at concerts, like the mesmerising effect of a bonfire. The cultural extension of this phenomenon is festivities—those special times, marked dates, where the linearity of time and the chains of cause and effect fold in on themselves to give way to a different kind of experience.
His latest album, Sciusten Feste n.1965, is entirely dedicated to Christmas celebrations. For him, these are like a great masquerade, where we abandon our everyday faces to seek the spark of wonder in the eyes. Like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which is also a grand masquerade tied to the Christmas celebrations of its time, where the natural disruption linked to death and resurrection marked a radical change in the order of things.
We are right in the middle of these festive days, and we can only recommend that you let yourself be accompanied by the songs from Capossela’s new album and allow yourself to be carried away by the special magic of taking part in rituals that we create together, and that therefore transcend each of us individually. Gathered around a table, with dishes that remind us of childhood—and of our grandparents’ childhood. These cold nights that tie us to the ancient past of lunar eclipses, that return us to a less chronological and rushed present, and that open us up to the novelty promised by every good story.
Capossela picks up the little red piano we had set up for him on stage, plays a song in Italian that says, “don’t be sad if we’re not together this Christmas”, and afterwards remarks, “With this little piano, we’re paying a good homage to Pascal Comelade.” Then he moves to the grand piano, begins a few chords, and as Marc briefly steps up to adjust a sheet of music, he starts the tune of Non c'è disaccordo nel cielo, a song we all adore. Finally, he invites his guitarist to join him on stage, and together they sing, as the Argentine Mercedes Sosa did, about the change in the simplest, most fragile things that shift along with us: Le semplici cose.
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