-
RoboCup is an annual robotics and AI championship in which autonomous machines, of all shapes and sizes, compete to complete real-world tasks. The 2026 event (June 30 to July 6) took place in Songdo, South Korea. This report reflects a general interest in RoboCup in this specific Incheon setting. It is also a way to…
-
It’s only in the last decade that tourism and the housing crisis have become bedfellows in Barcelona. But how and why did that happen? I tried to answer this question in master’s coursework last year, drawing on local academic sources and expert opinions (such as people who had been working in the city council at…
-
This quietly confident, if slightly sad play by American playwright Annie Baker is brought to the stage in this excellent Catalan adaptation directed by Marilia Samper. At over three hours long (with a short interval), El cine (The Flick) weaves slow magic from the mundane setting of a battered Massachusetts cinema in the early 2010s.…
-
Constant shifts in perspective and playful music and visuals dynamise this Catalan production of English playwright, Mike Bartlett’s Love, Love, Love (2010), translated by Cristina Genebat and directed by Julio Manrique. The title is taken from the famous Beatles’ track. The time-leaping production begins in 1967. Kenneth (a self-consciously suave David Selvas) is a 19-year-old Oxford…
-
Jeanette Winterson is the Lancashire-raised author of some three-dozen books, from the 1980’s classic Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit to the timely 12 Bytes (2021). Her latest Night Side of the River (October 2023) is a book of 13 original ghost stories told with a signature autobiographical twist. Technical innovation haunts the pieces, as…
-
One of Spain’s very first road deaths took place on a hairpin bend in 1927 Ourense, a province of the northwestern region of Galicia. The deceased, one José Fernández España y Vigil, was a civil engineer employed to study the layout of the southern bypass of the railroad – a proposed new section of the…
-
There is a story that the renowned fado singer Amália Rodrigues was in a hotel room in New York contemplating suicide; to stave off the depression she watched videos of Hollywood legend Fred Astaire tap dancing. Tap, or at least a style of footwork known as ‘zapateado’ is central to flamenco, but also to the lost…
-
Antoni Benaiges was born in 1903 into a Catalan family of rural republicans living in Montroig, Tarragona. He trained as a ‘mestre’, a teacher, and on graduating found work in a mixed school in a tiny village in Bañuelos de Bureba, Burgos. There, in a brief two years, Benaiges quietly revolutionised the lives of the…
-
Heavy themes of war, poverty, racial and gender violence are lightly thrown in A Man of Good Hope, a slick musical theatre production in English set in Africa and performed by Cape Town company Isango Ensemble. Based on 2014 book by white academic Jonny Steinberg, it tells the story in song, dance and narration of…
-
“In Cádiz where I was born there was a place I loved called Palacio de la Moda. You’d go in and there were mirrors everywhere: on the walls, on the ceiling. You drowned in the spectacle of yourself.” José Troncoso is director of La Estampida, a Spanish theatre collective that burst onto the scene eight…