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Fourteenth edition of the Olot Seismograph, a festival focused on movement and landscape

bonart olot - 04/03/22

The fourteenth edition of the Olot Seismograph will be held this April and will mark the path of transformation towards a new model of festival focused on movement and landscape. From the 7th to the 10th of April, the Seismograph will live its strong days with proposals that will flood the city with different disciplines of the movement.

In total, you will be able to see some thirty living arts proposals that will expose the body in dialogue with the city and its unique environment. Under the motto “the festival that detects the movement of the body and the planet”, the Seismograph is from now on a situated and conscious festival, with a more global, more sustainable look and made for the city.

The 2022 Seismograph aims to address three objectives from which the festival's programming is constructed and designed: social challenges, the environmental challenge and the relational challenge. The program will invite the public to discover and be carried away, with more international proposals and more sites than ever in environments such as the Montsacopa volcano, the Tossols, the Plaça de Braus, the Athletics Stadium or the Fonts de Sant Roc, others.

Fourteenth edition of the Olot Seismograph, a festival focused on movement and landscape

With these three challenges as its horizon, the Seismograph presents a day on Saturday 2 April where you can see the shows Migrare de la Cia. Strawberry, where four female performers will show us the rawness of exile through dance and circus; Ada Vilaró's solo performance, SOS, which will address the climate emergency; and Insecta Dance Music, by the electronic music and poetry duo Jansky, who will present an augmented sound reality concert based on the sound of insects.

This edition highlights the weight of international programming. For example, with City Horses, directed by Swedish artists Anna Källblad and Helena Byström, and co-produced with twelve European festivals through the Big Pulse Dance Alliance program. Twelve female performers have been chosen through a public call to simulate a herd of mares in the wild walking around the city. Or with Bark, from the company Acting for Climate, who will come from Norway to Olot by public transport and bicycle to present an aerial and circus dance show where the trees will be part of the piece. A collaboration of the festival with the European project Perform Europe.

This presence of the natural environment is very relevant in the new Seismograph. Like the new corporate green of the festival, this color is transferred to the program with proposals that integrate the representative environment of Olot. Like Nebula, by the Brazilian of Brazilian origin Vania Vaneau, who will address the human-nature relationship in a post-apocalyptic context from the crater of the Montsacopa volcano, or Gratte Ciel, by the French company Rozéo who will present a show of contemplation on delicate metal poles from the Athletics Stadium.

Sustainability and, by extension, nature and the living things that inhabit it, are the protagonists of different proposals, such as worms in Mass-Bloom explorations, the Danish Recoil Performance Group, or bacteria and fungi in Paramecis and Meteorites, by Xesca Salvà & Marc Villanueva.

Fourteenth edition of the Olot Seismograph, a festival focused on movement and landscape

The Seismograph 2022 invites us to question and reflect on our identity and society. Along these lines, Raquel Gualtero's intimate dance solo Panorama and Amer Kabbani's Runa will be premiered, a contemporary circus self-fiction piece that questions the absurdity of territorial boundaries and human conflict. in a dialogue with objects (rune), body and sound. They also play with objects Angel Duran in Papillon (a powerful light cocoon) and the Franco-Canadian company Un loup pour l'homme a Cuir (leather equestrian harnesses). Among the other proposals with strong social content, we find Nest, by Marie Gyselbrecht, a member of the company Peeping Tom who will present a performance on homeless people.

Keeping its essence, the Seismograph once again recovers the appointment on Sunday morning at the Parc Nou, one of the most emblematic and popular activities of the festival, which this year adopts the name of Parc Nou en Moviment. Six companies will perform: Cia. Silvia Batet, Colectivo Lamajara, Ivona, Fran Sieira, Elvi Balboa, as well as the mares of City Horses.

Beyond this first fortnight of April, the Seismograph will schedule different shows throughout the month and will present Rojos by the Miquel Barcelona Company on April 14; Shalott of the Shalott Company, on the occasion of St. George's Day; and the familiar Imperfect by La Baldufa & Sol Picó at the Teatre Principal in Olot, on 24 April. As a final colophon, and also at the Teatre Principal, the Seismograph will close its fourteenth edition with Very very slightly by the Mallorcan Eulàlia Bergadà on April 29, coinciding with Dance Day.

Seismograph