IT'S NOT as though you'd ever need an excuse to head to Mérida, but as most of us find our travel wish lists grow at a much faster rate than we can either save up or find the time to check off entries, this western-Spanish city may well remain under the heading of 'oh-my-goodness-I-really-have-to-see-this' indefinitely, especially if it's an entry that you're keeping for dessert.
But now really is the right time, because its International Classical Theatre Festival has kicked off again for the first time since before the pandemic.
If you've already missed the tempting-sounding From Bach to Radiohead concert, which took spellbound viewers on a journey through as many different musical styles and geographical locations of these from the 17th to the 21st century as it could cram into one night – covering Rossini, Iron Maiden and Paco de Lucía – and if you don't think you're going to make it there in time for today's refugee documentary film Welcome to Spain, which was premièred at the Hot Docs International Festival in Toronto, Canada, then at least this is a taster of the imaginative variety of events you can catch in Mérida over the opening weekend from next year onwards.
Plenty of other events are on the cards for the next few weeks and, even though the plays performed are in Spanish, they are typically very well-known ones that you would be able to follow even if your language skills are not yet up to catching live, moving dialogue.
If you're keen to make sure this is, indeed, the case in time for next year's festival, a good way to practice is to find a film on DVD you know backwards and inside out, switch the language into Spanish and, if necessary, put the subtitles into Spanish, too, and make heavy use of the 'pause' and 'rewind' functions. Even just five or 10 minutes a day of this will help – in fact, it's better to stop when brain-fog sets in, to ensure you spend the whole exercise concentrating and absorbing rather than letting it drift over your head.
What's on
For those who are not familiar with the Roman and Greek dramas, you could be missing out on a treat – the most famous comedy playwrights, like Plautus in the case of the first and Aristophanes for the second, are behind prolific and downright hilarious works that will have you spluttering on your coffee; very easy to read in English translation, you'll be shocked at the ideas and themes they came up with 500 years before the birth of Christ (risqué humour wasn't invented by the current living generations, after all).
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com