NOTHING LIKE THE SUN on RadiUS

'Nothing like the sun' es un espacio de divulgación cultural en RadiUS centrado en la producción literaria y artística en lengua inglesa que coordinan los profesores Ricardo Navarrete, Michael Gronow y Juan Ignacio Guijarro, a quienes se suman otros docentes entusiastas en la materia como Esther de la Peña y José de María Romero Barea, así como estudiantes de la Facultad de Filología Inglesa de la Universidad de Sevilla.

De periodicidad quincenal, 'Nothing like the sun' es un espacio sonoro que se articula a partir de una tertulia sobre el autor que protagoniza el programa, un diálogo en el que, además de los coordinadores del programa, toman parte diversos expertos y estudiosos en la materia.

Desde el ámbito académico, para todos los públicos y a favor del pensamiento crítico, 'Nothing like the sun' pretende ser una iniciativa radiofónica contra el pragmatismo de los resultados, a favor del placer de las humanidades en tiempos de crisis.

Según sus coordinadores, se trata de un programa, en definitiva, dirigido a "quienes amamos las palabras, en cualquier idioma, los y las que nos dejamos guiar por la forma en que las historias logran expresar la amplitud y profundidad de nuestras experiencias”.

OBJETIVOS

“La literatura en otros idiomas nos permite conectarnos con los demás para darnos sentido a nosotros mismos. Cobramos vida a través de la exposición a otras lenguas, otras narrativas, a menudo diferentes a las nuestras, pero que resuenan en nuestra personalidad", comenta Ricardo Navarrete.

A su juicio, un programa de radio sobre literatura en inglés "debería ser una invitación a entrar en otros mundos". 'Nothing like the sun' nace con ese empeño. Pretende ser un portal a la producción literaria en esa lengua, una forma de explorar nuevos pensamientos, un sitio donde desmontar y examinar, contextualizar y empatizar con el idioma de Shakespeare, para asomarse a los puntos ciegos del propio.

CONTENIDOS

Además de la tertulia, este programa cuenta con varias minisecciones fijas, como la que lidera Juan Ignacio Guijarro comentando la canción del día, así como aquellas adaptaciones al cine de obras inmortales de la literatura inglesa y norteamericana.

Asimismo, Esther de la Peña, en su sección ‘Esther y sus amigos’, entrevista a personalidades relacionadas con el mundo literario. Michael Gronow y un grupo de estudiantes de la Facultad de Filología leen en inglés y castellano un poema alusivo al tema en cuestión. Por último, José de María Romero Barea, en su apartado ‘Words, words, words’, se ocupa de aquellas novedades editoriales del ámbito anglosajón dignas de ser reseñadas.

En las dos primeras entregas este espacio de RadiUS se ocupará de dos autores clave, como son James Joyce, con motivo del centenario de la publicación de su novela Ulises; y Charles Dickens, "cuya producción literaria sigue redundando en las sucesivas crisis que nos asolan", explica Navarrete.

Discover Europe on InterRail

Interrailers from Algeciras en route from Bruges to Antwerpen.

The time has come to make that InterRail trip! Take to the rails for a whistle-stop tour of Europe. Meet other travellers, improve your English, experience everything Europe has to offer and collect lifelong memories along the way.

Europe's modern rail network makes train travel easy, comfortable, efficient and environmentally-friendly. With an InterRail Pass you have the freedom to travel wherever you want in and between all of 30 participating European countries for a certain period of time. The main exception is that high-speed trains and night trains often require a paid seat reservation. Step on board the train with your buddies and discover Europe's secrets.

Here are 7 Interrail tips to fall in love with train travel in Europe, plus 10 cheap backpacking tips. You can easily book accommodation at Youth Hostels around the continent. Bon voyage!

Related articles: 
Cómo viajar de Lisboa a Atenas en tren de la forma más barata
Los primeros del Interrail gratis vuelven a casa
Abierto el plazo para solicitar Interrail gratis

The Prado Museum: A Collection of Wonders_documentary

We are in one of the temples of world art, a site of memory and a mirror to the present with 1700 works exhibited and a further 7000 art treasures preserved there. Its collection tells the story of kings, queens, dynasties, wars, defeats and victories, as well as the story of the feelings and emotions of the men and women of yesteryear and of today, whose lives are intertwined with the museum’s: rulers, painters, artists, architects, collectors, curators, intellectuals, visitors.

In 2019, the year of its 200^th Anniversary celebrations, telling the story of the Prado in Madrid from the day it was “founded” – that 19^th November 1819 when mention was first made of the Museo Real de Pinturas – means covering not only the last 200 years, but at least six centuries of history. The life of the Prado collection began with the birth of Spain as a nation and the marriage between Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile, a union that marked the start of the great Spanish Empire. Yet, for a long time over the centuries, painting had been a universal language that knew no boundaries. If there is one museum where it is clear that painting was not affected by nationalism, then that museum must surely be the Prado, with its eclectic and multifaceted collections demonstrating that art has no passports limiting its circulation, that rather it is a universal means to understand and convey the thoughts and feelings of human beings.

For this reason, taking the leading role in THE PRADO MUSEUM. A COLLECTION OF WONDERS are its art masterpieces and the great artists who made them, the crowned heads who collected them, but also the European and libertarian inspiration behind a museum and its wealth of art treasures and stories. Furthermore, there is an extra-special feature: Oscar® winning actor Jeremy Irons will be guiding spectators on a discovery of a heritage of beauty and art. Starting from the Salón de Reinos, in a deliberately bare architectural style that comes alive with people, lights and projections, taking the visitor back to the glorious past of the Spanish monarchy and the Siglo de Oro, when hanging from the walls then were many of the masterpieces exhibited today at the Prado. At that time, the space was used for dancing, holding parties and giving theatrical performances. This was a vibrant core of Madrid and of Spain as a whole, as was the Barrio de las Letras, where writers and artists from the Siglo de Oro lived, and, in the 20th century, the Residencia de Estudiantes, where intellectuals from the Generation of 1927 would meet, including Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí.

The paintings in the Prado reflect a unique epic era, that gave rise to one of the most important museums in the world. This is a collection put together “more with the heart than the head” because kings and queens chose only what they loved. It is an inventory of tastes and pleasures that tells the story of public events, dynasties, cardinals, wars and coalitions. It is also an inventory of private matters: a wedding, a lavishly laid table, the madness of a queen. It is a close network of crowned heads, hidalgos, majas y caballeros, each with their lives, truths and messages. It is the story of an era of great patronage, of the Spanish monarchs’ love for the great masters, like Goya, whose strong presence at the Prado is a body of work totalling over nine hundred items, including most of his drawings and letters. Goya’s art has influenced many modern artists, as is the case with 3^rd May 1808, a painting that depicts the effects of the Spanish revolt against the French army. This work would become a symbol of all wars and would give Picasso the inspiration for his Guernica. Like Picasso, Dalí and García Lorca were also captivated by the museum, while writer and painter Antonio Saura, who would continuously go there to bask in its magical atmosphere, called the Prado “a wealth of intensity”. So, this is art that illuminates the present and asks us: what has the Prado Museum been in these two hundred years, what is it today and what will it continue to represent for future generations – this living museum, a beacon for all Spaniards during the dark moments of the dictatorship, and a home to return to for exiled artists and intellectuals?

The aim of the authors, consequently, was to tell the story not only of the formal beauty and enchanting appeal of the Prado collection but also about how much the themes of the works exhibited are current today, and how through the history of art, they can also be a narrative of society, with its ideals, its prejudices, vices, new ideas, scientific discoveries, human psychology and fashions.

THE PRADO MUSEUM. A COLLECTION OF WONDERS is not only about these extraordinary works of art, which are the heart and soul of the documentary, but also about the landscape, the Royal palaces and buildings that set the scene and saw the birth and development of these art collections. This heritage is universal and includes not only the works of Velázquez, Rubens, Titian, Mantegna, Bosch, Goya, El Greco preserved in the Prado, but also the Escorial, the Pantheon of the Royal family, the Royal Palace of Madrid, the Convent of Las Descalzas Reales, the Salón de Reinos. It is a fresco contrasting interiors and exteriors, paintings and palaces, brushstrokes and gardens. 

The birth of the Prado Museum is an engaging story. In 1785 Charles III of Bourbon commissioned court architect Juan de Villanueva to design a building to house the Gabinete de Historia Natural. It would never serve that purpose. The building was transformed into the Museum we know today. Walking through this place of beauty means never ceasing to be amazed, removing prejudices and contradictions, discovering the myths and symbols of a wonderful, sometimes revolutionary, world. It means an interactive exchange through the history of art. It means being enraptured by masterpieces such as the Deposition by Flemish artist Van der Weyden, Adam and Eve by Titian, the Black Paintings of Goya’s later years, Las Meninas by Velázquez (“The air in Las Meninas is the best quality air that exists“, declared Dalí), El Greco’s twisted, elongated, unconventional figures, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch, which arouses curiosity, expectation, attention in visitors of any nationality and culture, or the work of the Flemish Clara Peeters, who had the courage to paint miniature self-portraits in her still-life paintings and stake a claim for the role of female artists, or even Ribera’s The Bearded Lady, where a woman, face covered by a thick beard, breastfeeds the new-born baby she holds in her arms.

Next showing at Avenida cinema: Thursday, January 23, 8pm

CHAMPS D'AMOURS: 100 Years of Rainbow Cinema

CHAMPS D'AMOURS 100 Ans de Cinéma Arc-en-ciel is a free exhibition at Paris' Hôtel de Ville. In collaboration with La Cinématèque Française. From June 25 to September 28, 2019 Chief curator: Alain Burosse

1919 ORIGINS. The first allusions to gay and lesbian characters and storylines to hit movie screens took the form of relatively ridiculous transvestite caricatures in playful burlesque comedies. At one time or another, every comic star of the 1910s (Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Fatty Arbuckle, Max Linder and Charles Chaplin) adorned themselves in the opposite gender’s finery to act out a storyline or a misunderstanding. The transvestite tradition is still very much alive today and comedy remains one of the genres that regularly welcomes LGBT characters. Other more serious work surfaced in the subsequent decades, including tragedies (The Wings, Mauritz Stiller, 1916; Michael, Cari T. Dreyer, 1923; and Pandora’s Box, Georg W. Pabst, 1928). These films created new hard-life stereotypes of gay love that was doomed by its very nature to calamity and death. These forays were quickly stifled and banned during the period that followed –a time marked by the rise of fascism in Europe and the strict censorship rules of the Hays Code, introduced in the United States in 1934. While French cinema remained an exception to the rule, gay people almost vanished from the movies. Rare portrayals were coded or hostile, and came from the fringes of an experimental, emerging form of cinema. At long last, in the 1960s in Great Britain, where homosexuality was still illegal, this situation was contested by the film Victim (Basil Dearden, 1961) and by Dirk Bogard, who played the lead role and had the original idea for the film.

1969 STONEWALL: THE TIPPING POINT

On June 28^th 1969, the same day as Judy Garland’s funeral (the singer of the gay anthem Over the Rainbow) the Stonewall riots broke out when a police raid sparked a rebellion from the regulars of a gay bar in New York City, marking the beginning of a worldwide militant gay movement. However, cinema had begun its transformation much earlier: in Hollywood, the Hays Code had slowly crumbled away, and in Germany angry young directors (Reiner Werner Fassbinder, Peter Fleishmann, and Rosa von Praunheim) had begun to use gay themes to shake up movies made by the overly-conventional middle-class Federal Republic from 1966 onwards.  This period –which coincided with the sexual liberation resulting from May 1968– led to the emergence of major works by great moviemakers who no longer feared tackling gay issuse in their films, as typified by the three masterful Italian directors: Pier Paolo Passolini (Teorema, 1968), Federico Fellini (Satyricon, 1969), Luchino Visconti (Death in Venice, 1971). The post-Stonewall period also saw the first films emerge from directors who mixed feminist and lesbian themes (eg. Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer and Ulrike Ottinger). In mainstream cinema, there was a rise in the number of gay and lesbian characters and they were often treated sympathetically. Famous directors also affirmed their own sexuality (eg. Patrice Chéreau with L’Homme blessé, 1983, or André Techiné, with Les roseaux sauvages, 1994) and new plots tackled hitherto unexplored themes (bisexuality, adolescence, romance and couples, etc.). New types of film-making opened up to portraying LGBT lives: in Spain with la Movida movement and Pedro Almodóvar in the 1980s, in Israel, South America, and several countries in Asia.

2019 THRIVING CONTEMPORARY SCENE

The burgeoning number of characters and LGBT themes in film has grown continually over the last twenty years. As a result, ground-breaking portrayals of gay and lesbian lives have flourished across all genres and in almost all areas thanks to new approaches, in particular those representing the queer viewpoint. The work and directors belonging to this movement have received unprecedented recognition from the general public and movie critics alike. This was clearly demonstrated in France and abroad by the popular acclaim of La vie d’Adèle (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2014), 120 battements par minute (Robin Campillo, 2017), and Una mujer fantástica, Sebastián Leili, 2017), and by the number of prestigious awards those films have collected (Palm d’Or, César awards, Oscar Award for best Foreign Film, etc.). Furthermore, a film with a gay theme –and since the young man at the heart of the story was black he had double minority status– was awarded with the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017: Moonlight, by Barry Jenkins. All this goes to show just how far we have come in terms of recognition and visibility since Different from the Others (Richard Oswald, Germany) made its own, very solitary, militant contribution a century ago.

CUT! Hollywood’s censors were not content with merely thrusting gay and lesbian characters into the closet. They also tried outright to eliminate any storylines deemed to portray same-sex desire too blatantly. Thus, an overtly lesbian dance scene was retrospectively removed from the epic The Sign of the Cross (Cecil B. DeMille, 1932), while a suggestive dialogue between a senator and his slave was cut out from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960). All around the world, censors have clamped down in more ruthless ways, imprisoning directors they deem scandalous in some places (Sergei Paradjanov in the Soviet Union) and banning films elsewhere (Rafiki, Wanuri Kahui, 2018, in Kenya). In India, the film Fire (Deepa Metha, 1966), which tells a lesbian love story was not suppressed by State censorship, instead nationalist Hindus ransacked cinemas and forced the government to order the film to be temporarily withdrawn from cinemas. In France itself, Zero for Conduct, by Jean Vigo (1933), was banned from cinemas for twelve years because of its anarchist leanings and the ambivalent relationship between the two students. Lionel Soukaz toyed with the limits of censorship in Ixe (1982), a collage film that brings together an erect penis and the pope in a whirlwind of images. But censorship often strikes in unexpected forms: through family pressure (Mishima, a Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader, 1984), through the rejection of topics producers consider “too gay” (Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh, 2010), and through fear of displeasing a political regime. A very recent example of this is the American film Boy Erased (Joël Edgerton, 2018), which tackles the subject of “conversion therapies” –its producers decided not to distribute the film in president Bolsonaro’s Brazil, where such practices are encouraged!

MASK! How can you show what you are banned from portraying? Hollywood directors who wanted to include gay and lesbian characters in their storylines faced this quandary from 1934 to the beginning of the 1960s because the Hays Code that had been adopted by the major production companies banned “sexual perversion” (amongst other things) from the big screen. In 1981, Vito Russo’s seminal book and eponymous documentary The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, 1995) revealed the multitude of ruses that had been employed to recycle codes and stereotypes entrenched in the collective subconscious: mannered, overly-elegant characters with no sentimental attachment, double-entendres, potent friendships, lingering glances, etc. It reveals traces of comedy (the Laurel and Hardy “couple”), film noir, Western and epics. It was about making the invisible visible, but often also involved using the images to imply that these different characters, always inhabiting a shady world and rubbing shoulders with criminals, posed a potential threat to the American family and society. Alfred Hitchcock was a master of the art of blurring the lines and managed to introduce intriguing, unsettling and seductive characters to many of his plots, including Rebecca (1940), North by Northwest (1958), Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

EVERY KIND OF LOVE IN THE WORLD To Western cinema’s portrayal of gay, lesbian and trans people we must add portrayals from other places, where long-silenced stories are now finally emerging in increasing numbers of countries year on year: Kenya, Iran, Guatemala, Nigeria, Chile, South Africa, South Korea, Guinea, India, China, Taiwan, Cuba, Israel, Brazil, Mexico, Senegal, Japan, Argentina, the Philippines, Egypt, etc. Even in the most hostile political contexts, LGBT characters are being created and storylines with gay content are being written in all languages, all around the globe. Ambitious films made by movie makers residing at the heart of the system, such as Chinese director Chan Kaige (Farewell, my Concubine) or Israeli Eytan Fox (The Bubble), are coexisting alongside films produced secretly by activists who want their minority voices to be heard. Far from contending themselves with simple on-screen portrayals and a quest for visibility, these film directors from all corners of the world are bringing us dissident representations, making no concessions, braving bans and refusing self-censure to expand our field of vision. Is it just a coincidence that one of the few films about intersex people came out of Argentina: XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007)? Movies from around the world take all forms and cover all angles: the denunciation of ambient homophobia, the comic re-use of stereotypes, tragedies and, above all, romance. These love stories, which may be light or dark, and do not always have an unhappy ending, tell audiences that LGBT love is possible, even if it is difficult under regimes that discriminate against or repress gay, lesbian and trans people. Cinema offers role models, and gay and transgender people’s need to see portrayals of themselves and of their love stories and sexual adventures are key in every part of the globe. In the same way, it is still essential that we fight prejudice by showing girls kissing girls and boys making out with boys (and vice versa) on the big screen and that we broadcast these images to the broadest possible audience as a way of asserting that minority love is part of every kind of love in the world.

IdI Students and Alumni Go to the Cinema in 2017

IdI Students and Alumni Go to the Cinema

Wednesday, November 29th, 2017 at 8.20pm

Cine Avenida, Marqués de Paradas 15, €3.90

Like in previous years since 2003, the Instituto de Idiomas is organizing a cultural activity at the cinema. On this 2017 edition, we are going to see a recent British drama film (with Spanish subtitles), which was highly acclaimed at the Seville European Film Festival, only a few weeks ago. God's Own Country is a story about love, dignity, immigration, and ultimately about male identity in our time. Hope you can join us that day.

Seville European Film Festival

A new edition of the Seville European Film Festival is coming up! Watch films in English and in other European languages, in the original version and with digital quality (mostly at the Nervión Plaza cinemas), at the SEFF. Don't miss a good opportunity to see and hear a selection of quality European films and improve your language skills either by listening to films in English (with Spanish subtitles) or by reading the English subtitles of films in other languages. It is good value for money (a student pass allows you access to 15 films for only 20€!). Come and enjoy the festival's international atmosphere. See you there :)

IdI students go to the cinema

Come and see a film in English with Spanish subtitles at the Avenida Cinema, (Marqués de Paradas, 15, opposite the Plaza de Armas Hotel), on Wednesday, October 28th, at 8pm. We'll meet 30 minutes earlier, around 7.30pm, outside the cinema. Feel free to bring a friend or a relative along. Tickets € 3.90 

In previous years, these are the films I took my students to see: The Emperor's Club (2003), Star Wars (2004), Love Actually (2005), Brokeback Mountain (2006), The History Boys (2007), Match Point (2008), Invictus (2009), Tamara Drew (2010), The Help (2011), The Angels' Share (2012), Coherence (2014) and Paterson (2016).

PS: Read V.O.:La voz humana beforehand if you want to find out why you want to watch films in the original version.

The 12th edition of "IdI Students go to the cinema".

Some of the 50 students and teachers who came to see the film at the Avenida Cinema.

Holy Week Celebration in Seville: Structure and Interpretation (A Traveller's Guide)

By CARLOS MARTÍN GAEBLER

Multimedia lecture given at the Alfonso XIII Hotel, Seville, on 28th March 1994. Photography by Carlos Ortega

A presentation of the celebration of Holy Week in Seville can be approached from many different angles because this celebration is in itself complex and multifaceted. It is my intention to divide my introduction to the Holy Week in Seville in two parts. I will start by mentioning the facts, that is, describing the people who take place in the event and the icons displayed in the streets, and, after that, we will consider various interpretations of this representation which is at the same time religious and theatrical.

PART I

SLIDE 1 For many centuries, the Christian festival of Easter has been celebrated in Seville with a series of processions in the streets which are meant to act out different stages of the Via Crucis. This is done by taking out of the churches a number of long-venerated sculptures or figures of Jesus Christ, of his mother the Virgin Mary, and of some of the people who were directly or indirectly involved in the Crucifixion. These icons, which are normally on display at churches all year long, are set temporarily on large, wooden structures or floats which we call pasos

and which are carried in procession following a carefully-planned itinerary: they are carried from almost every district church in Seville to the Cathedral and then back to their temple. These pasos have been set up by local Christian associations known as hermandades. These hermandades, which have no official link with the Catholic Church as such, are made up of citizens residents in a given neighbourhood who meet regularly throughout the year. When Easter time comes, most of its members go out in procession accompanying these pasos. Before going any further, let's have a brief look at the different types of pasos so that you are able to identify them when you see them this afternoon.

SLIDE 2 Every procession usually consists of two or three pasos (sometimes just one). In the case an hermandad takes out three pasos, the first one is the so-called Paso de Misterio, which depicts a specific moment of the Via Crucis or the period around the Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. Theses scenes consist of a set of several wooden sculptures which, when displayed on the streets, give viewers the impression of being alive thanks to the way they are carried by the men underneath them.

SLIDE 3 The second paso, and one which is common to almost all hermandades is the Paso de Cristo which, as you can see in these slides, may represent either Jesus carrying his cross on his way to the Golgotha or

SLIDE 4 Jesus crucified. These sculptures of Jesus are usually installed over a little mound of red carnations or pale purple irises and they portray him either on the brink of death or already dead. Bear in mind that some of these figures that you will see in the streets of Seville this week were carved in the 17th century by some of the masters of the Barroque period, such as Juan de Mesa (who is the author of this crucifix from 1620) or Martínez Montañes and are sacred icons for the inhabitants of Seville.

SLIDE 5A The last paso in every procession is always the Paso de la Virgen (also called Paso de Palio). This paso is the most elaborate one and is structured around a silver canopy which encloses the statue of a crying Virgin, the mother of the dying son, who is richly dressed in velvet and silk, adorned with jewelery and embroidery and surrounded by candles and flowers: white or pink carnations, orange blossoms, gladiolus, etc. She is portrayed as showing deep grief for the death of her beloved son who has been unjustly assassinated or is about to be killed by his captors. In this context of pain and sorrow she is paradoxically depicted with luxurious splendour

SLIDE 5B because she is also imbued with the ultimate triumph of life over death. She is symbolically surrounded by an atmosphere of joyfulness and pagan sensuality: flowers, jewels, fire, incense, music and songs (the famous saetas, which some people sing at her from balconies). This is the way death is depicted in this Baroque ritual where, like in flamenco, sorrow and distress are expressed with joyful passion. And so, unlike the depiction of more rigid, austere, mournful virgins (as is the case in Castilian processions), the virgins in the Andalusian Holy Week are highly ornamented and clearly associated with the joyous arrival of Spring in the South. Although a still sculpture, she is carried by the costaleros in such a way as if she were dancing to the music played to her by the band.

SLIDE 6 But this is not only a splendid ritual of statues but also of real people, the human actors that take part in it. These are the real characters in this dramatization of the passion of Jesus of Nazareth. First of all, there are the nazarenos. The nazarenos (who take their name after the place of birth of Jesus and who can be either men or women) always march in front of a paso in a procession. They carry a heavy candle and they are dressed in a uniform which completely covers them as a sign of the rejection of vanity. Once they get dressed at home (sometimes in rigorous black, sometimes in colurful garments) and leave for their church in the afternoon, some nazarenos are required not to speak to anyone until the procession is over. This is part of the ritual of penance observed by some of the most traditional hermandades, mainly those located in the old centre of town.

SLIDE 7 Secondly, and always marching behind the paso of Christ, we will see the penitentes who, instead of carrying a large candle, carry one or several wooden crosses, thus commemorating Jesus' painful ascent to the Calvary. Both the nazarenos and the penitentes are meditating and doing penance. Some also go in procession to show their gratitude to their god or because they want to plead for God's mercy. As a further sign of sacrifice some nazarenos and most penitentes march barefoot.

SLIDE 8A The costaleros make up the third social group involved in the procession; they are groups of between 36 to 48 men who carry the weight of the paso on their shoulders. Some pasos may weigh up to 2,000 kilograms, so each costalero might have to hold an average of 50 kilograms for several hours.

SLIDE 8B While in the past the costaleros used to be appointed professionals, in modern times none of them do it for money any more, but out of devotion and social pride. They are so keen on it that they usually meet a few months in advance to rehearse late at night with heavy sacks of sand on top of bare pasos.

SLIDE 9 A band of musicians accompanies each paso. Placed behind them, they play music especially composed for the occasion. And here again a very important distinction has to be made, because bands play different music depending on whether they are marching together with  the Virgin or with the paso of Christ: they will play lively, joyful music to the Virgin, but music of mourning to the dead Christ. This way the symbolic opposition between life and death, which stems from the different disposition or arrangements of both pasos, is emphasized.

SLIDE 10 And last, but not least, the people in the streets. The celebration of Holy Week in Seville is, above all, a ritual of interaction between the people who attend the processions and those who directly participate in them, because both groups are equally relevant to the celebration. Large masses gather in the streets (locals have coined a term for this, la bulla, a huge crowd) and, if you are to enjoy the celebration to the full, you are advised to make a little effort and put up with some minor inconveniencies. And I can promise you that you will find it is worth it!  

PART II

SLIDE 11 As I pointed out at the beginning of my presentation, the celebration of Holy Week in Seville may be interpreted in many different ways (all of them equally valid), apart from the obvious commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus, which lies at the heart of the whole ritual.

But this ultimately romantic ritual also brings about a social phenomenon which is worth mentioning here:  an identification of the inhabitants of the city with their own town and their long-venerated icons which is renewed every year and which also gives them an opportunity to show their sense of community and tolerance. Furthermore, these seven days represent the best of occasions for sharing the artistic treasures of the city with visitors from all over the world (and here's where all of you come into the picture!).

This leads us directly into the universal quality of the Semana Santa in Seville, because, rather than being restricted to a portion of the population, it is open to all who are in Seville this week: that is, believers and non-believers, Catholics and non-Catholics, Sevillians and those from other parts of Spain, Spaniards and foreigners, conservatives and socialists, rich and poor. This truly democratic feature is what really accounts for the long-aclaimed universal nature of our Holy Week.

SLIDE 12 From looking at these slides that you have seen so far, you will easily understand that the city becomes at the same time an enormous temple and a stage for this Baroque dramatization, laying the ground for the magical coincidence of the contemplation of a paso passing by a beautiful spot in the city, a city which is, at this very same time, celebrating the sensual arrival of Spring in this southern latitude with the blooming of orange trees, the smell of incense, warm afternoons, the high moon up in the sky, and, above all, with a general feeling of joyous solemnity and well-being which pervades everyone. (This may sound like a contradiction in terms but it is not, for remember what I said before about how in this ritual death is commemorated through a celebration of life.)

SLIDE 13 To conclude this presentation, or any other about Holy Week in Seville, one has to allude necessarily to its intensely emotional nature, for what we can witness these days in the streets of Seville may also be interpreted as a modern metaphor of human suffering: the image of this archetypal mother crying for her dead son may also stand as a symbol for human loss, be it the loss of a son in the Bosnian battlefield, be it the loss of a son, a lover or a best friend at the hands of the Aids epidemic.

You must remember that no one is considered an outsider in this ritual because every single one of us may see his or her own grief reflected in these icons, as if we were looking in a mirror. By doing so, we may well think of those who suffer (as He suffered). In the same way as those who are tiredly marching in the procession or carrying the heavy pasos experience a catharsis of sorts which redeems them from a whole year of weaknesses, we, as indirect participants may also examine our own thoughts and feelings and share in this purifying catharsis, because in the end we are all fragile human beings in search of ourselves, and that's what this magnificent urban opera is all about. THANK YOU.