Street theatre and an urban market

FiraTàrrega is known as an in­ter­na­tional “mar­ket” for the per­form­ing arts that takes place every year in Tàrrega in Lleida dur­ing the sec­ond week­end in Sep­tem­ber. Founded in 1981, it is a great shop win­dow of what is going on in the per­form­ing arts, with spe­cial em­pha­sis on street arts and un­con­ven­tional vi­sual shows. It is also a meet­ing place and an in­ter­na­tional point of ref­er­ence for de­bate, the main ob­jec­tive of FiraTàrrega is to boost the per­form­ing arts mar­ket, open­ing the door to in­ter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion for par­tic­i­pat­ing com­pa­nies.

Other more spe­cific ob­jec­tives are the ac­com­pa­ni­ment and pro­mo­tion of cre­ations by emerg­ing artists, en­cour­ag­ing train­ing, fo­cused on artis­tic cre­ation and cul­ture man­age­ment, and on gen­er­at­ing strate­gic al­liances to de­velop transna­tional street art cir­cuits or pro­duc­tions.

Fira Tàrrega is the only strate­gic street the­atre fes­ti­val of this type in Cat­alo­nia. It is a point of ref­er­ence for street arts in south­ern Eu­rope, al­though hy­brid cre­ations are also pro­moted with spe­cific pieces of in­ter­est to fam­ily au­di­ences, in­clud­ing dance and cir­cus: Big Bounc­ers (Plata) Pa­gans (El valor de res), Atzu­cac (Noves es­pir­i­tu­al­i­tats per a per­sones atees), Roberto G Alonso (Jo, trav­esti) and Circ eia (La pedra de fusta) are some of the names that have made their name at the fes­ti­val.

La Fassina is an urban mar­ket held in par­al­lel to the fes­ti­val lo­cated in an open, cen­tral space, with a con­tin­u­ous flow of pub­lic, next to the city bus sta­tion and Plaça de les Na­ciones. The de­mo­graphic of vis­i­tors is var­ied, but they are mainly young peo­ple with fam­i­lies (av­er­age age 33) and mostly from the provinces of Barcelona and Lleida.

Fira Tàrrega will host over 200 per­for­mances dis­trib­uted among 25 street and in­door per­for­mance spaces and vis­i­tors num­ber­ing more than 140,000 over the four days of the event.