La Corrida de Toros

Few topics lead to more heated discussion than bullfighting.  Before I went to a live bullfight, I wasn't really sure what I thought about it.  But you have to try something before you can pass judgement.

Madrid's beautiful Las Ventas is the capital of bullfighting, the most prestigious bullring in Spain.

We went twice: first to a traditional corrida de toros or toreo, where the bullfighters are on foot (toreros), and again to a rejoneo, where they're on horseback (rejoneadores).

  

Bullfighting is all about the ritual - the toreros and rejoneadores parade around the ring before the fight, and each stage is announced with bugle calls.

In a traditional corrida there are six bulls, with three matadores fighting two each.  The matadores each lead a cuadrilla (team) of three banderilleros, on foot, two picadores, lancers mounted on horseback, and a sword carrier.

I preferred the rejoneo, where the riders show incredible skill controlling the horse and the bull in a dance of amazing speeds.  The show is just as much about the amazing horsemanship as anything else, with the rojoneadores changing horses after every stage, and some horses being almost as famous as their riders.

We watched the celebrated Portuguese rejoneador Diego Ventura, one of the world's best, who drew enormous cheers from the crowd.  After each of his fights he walked a lap of honour around the ring, and his fans threw down hats, flowers, flasks of wine and even live chickens for him from the stands.

Diego Ventura

At the time, it's shocking but impressive, above all at the rejoneo, where the the skill of the riders is unbelievable.  The crowds aren't baying for blood, they're applauding bravery, and what they want to see are quick, clean kills, carried out with skill.  One rejoneador who struggled to deliver a final, clean blow was met with hostile silence by the crowd.

Although it's a shock and gruesome to watch, the atmosphere is intense.  A bit like a car crash; you know it's horrific, but it's hard not to look.

But looking back over my photos now, away from the atmosphere of the day, the blood and cruelty is much more real, and it's an inescapable fact that an animal is being killed for sport alone (although the meat is later eaten).

Away from the live action, when the ritual, symbolism, music and costumes are forgotten, it's hard not to feel some revulsion at the idea.  So I'm still undecided. 

A quick opinion poll of my Spanish colleagues in the office gives mixed results: most quietly like bullfighting, or can take it or leave it, but it's the atmosphere, the crowd, the ceremony and the tradition that they like, rather than the bullfight itself and the grizzly outcome.  One girl my age absolutely adores it; no one at all pipes up to say that they passionately hate it.  But the newspapers mourn the fact that numbers at bullfights are increasingly dwindling, and several regions (Catalonia being the most recent) have outlawed it, so it may be on the way out.

If your mind isn't already made up, then definitely go and see for yourself.

http://www.las-ventas.com/

Summer in the city

http://www.emperadorhotel.com

PHotoEspaña: Festival Off

Alongside PHotoEspaña runs Festival Off, fringe exhibitions in little galleries and public spaces all over the city, which are separate from the official festival's theme.

As part of Festival Off, my two favourite neighbourhood galleries, just a skip from my apartment, are each holding very different exhibitions of their own.

 

 

Galería Fernando Pradilla, which I wrote about here, is hosting Spain's first exhibition of the work of the Venezuelan Suwon Lee.

 

Her photographs in The Darkness of Light use huge exposure times to capture the stars and the Northern Lights in ways that are invisible to the human eye.

 

 

Her photographs don't look like photographs at all, they're like surreal paintings. The occasional presence of a tiny human shadow just emphasises the vastness of the sky.

 



A few doors down the street, Galería Patricia Acal, which I last wrote about here, is exhibiting David Leventi's beautiful photographs of the world's opera houses.

 

David Leventi, La Fenice, Venezia. Italy

From a family of architects, Leventi says in the exhibition's blurb that he has an almost religious feeling when entering magnificent buildings like these.

 

His photographs have such depth that they bring out every detail of the rich interiors, his aim being to create perfect symmetry. The scenes would be impossible for the naked eye to take in all at once, but the camera brings everything into focus in a single frame. The effect is like being surrounded by space and potential energy.

 

David Leventi, Palais Garnier, Paris. France



David Leventi, Curtain, Royal Swedish Opera, Stockholm. Sweden

PHotoEspaña and Festival Off are running throughout the summer at venues all over the city.  Look out for the yellow PHE13 signs on gallery windows and pubic buildings and you'll know you're in the right place.

 

The Darkness of Light until 13 July 2013

Opera until 4 July 2013

http://www.phe.es/

http://galeriafernandopradilla.com/galeria/

http://www.galeriapatriciaacal.com/GALERIA_PATRICIA_ACAL.html

 

PHotoEspaña 2013

PHotoEspaña, Madrid's International Festival of Photography and Visual Arts, is one of the world's most important arts festivals.  The city's museums, galleries and public buildings play host to exhibitions by photographers and artists from all over the world, with each year centred around a different theme.

2013's theme is Cuerpo. Eros y Políticas ('The Body. Eros and Politics').

There are 74 exhibitions involving 328 artists from 42 countries.  One of the festival's main exhibition sites is the beautiful 1920s Círculo de Bellas Artes.  I dropped in after work one evening to see one of the headline exhibitions, Mujer ('Woman').

Subtitled The Feminist Avant-Garde from the 1970s, the exhibition showcased 21 artists from the Sammlung Verbund collection in Vienna, which focusses on the feminist art movement in the 1970s.

The works are predominately centred around ideas of identity: women depicting their own bodies through their own eyes, rather than as a man's idealised image of a woman.

Ana Mendieta. Untitled (Glass on Body Imprints), 1972/1997

Also in the CBA was He, She, It. Dialogues between Edward Weston and Harry Callahan, which took the two great American photographers' works and placed them side by side.

Both Weston and Callahan famously depicted nudes and eroticism.  The aim of the exhibition was to show that in many cases it was not their nudes that were erotic, often being very soft and affectionate, but their photographs of other subjects, which became erotic by suggestion and association.

Edward Weston, Floating Nude, 1939

Edward Weston, Nude, 1934

Another major location for the festival is Madrid's luscious botanical garden (a little photo essay of which I made here).

Hidden away at the back of the gardens, through a vine-covered walkway, are two exhibitions.  The first, Savoir c'est pouvoir ('Knowledge is Power'), focusses on the body as an ideological tool or political object.

These images are less about photography itself as an art, but more about delivering an unambiguous political message.

Manuela Marques, Sin título (Puños) / Untitled (Fists), 1999

The second exhibition was my far-out favourite.  El cuerpo revelado ('The Body Revealed') is a series of different photographers' work from the Alcobendas Collection of Spanish art.

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto, 1993

The hugely varied images all touched upon the body as an individual, personal creation: the product of culture and society.  Not all were explicitly about the nude human form; my favourite series were Luis Baylón's affectionate and witty black and white portraits of ordinary people in Madrid, which are worth the trip alone.

Luis Baylón, Freud, 1990

Woman until 1 September 2013, all other exhibitions until 28 July 2013.

http://www.phe.es/

http://www.circulobellasartes.com/index2.php

http://www.rjb.csic.es/jardinbotanico/jardin/

Buongiorno Venezia

The next instalment of The Year of the City Break was a long late-May weekend in Venice.

We flew in from our separate directions without a cloud in the sky, with the city laid out like a painting below.

Knowing that the weather wasn't going to be on our side for much longer, we made the most of the evening sun and hopped in an open-top water taxi from the airport to the city.

We meandered our way through the little canals, past crumbling buildings, before bursting out into the mayhem of the grand canal, where we hopped out opposite Santa Maria della Salute.

Recommended to us by a friend, the Hotel Flora is tucked away down a tiny alley, hidden from passers-by.  It's a stunning 17th-century palazzo, with a courtyard garden draped in ivy and climbing roses, perfect for an afternoon Bellini.

That evening we explored the streets in search of Aperol spritzes and arancini, and stumbled across Piazza San Marco, rather beautifully and surreally submerged under a foot of water.

The next day the heavens broke, the rain came down and the water level rose, so we cancelled our lunch reservation in the garden of the famous Locanda Cipriani (it'll still be there next time), and curled up in the warmth of tiny La Cantina in Cannaregio, one of Venice's best bácari (cicheti bars).

It's famous for its fish, cooked and raw, with a tray of oysters ready on the bar to be shucked to order.  Looking at our hungry and indecisive faces, the barmaid brought us an obscene plateful of everything they had, a fishy feast.

Just as we felt we were able to move again, the sun came out.  We strolled along the backwaters of Cannaregio, away from the main tourist drag, and installed ourselves in a tiny wine bar on Fondamenta Ormesini for the afternoon, to watch the boats and people go past. 

The next day, the sun was back for good.

The terrace of the Hotel Monaco has one of the best views for lunch in the city, and the best seafood tagliolini to go with it.

On another tip from a friend, that evening we tiptoed through the floodwaters to see Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia at Musica a Palazzo, opera's equivalent of a secret supper club.

With around 80 people in the audience and just four singers accompanied by a piano and three strings, it's beautifully intimate.  The opera takes place in the rooms of a fading, once-opulent palazzo, with the audience following the performers from room to room with each act, champagne glasses in hand.

Grazie Venezia, we'll be back soon.

http://www.hotelflora.it/en/

http://www.hotelmonacovenice.com/grand-canal-restaurant-venice/

http://www.musicapalazzo.com/it/programma/