Christmas Carols

Do you like traditional Christmas Carols? Well, a lot of people don't. Some of us actually hate walking in the Mall and hearing tha tacky melodies all along, once and again, endlessly repeated till one is sick.

Luckily, inferior quality divas aren't the only ones to sing them. Rock stars are also conquered by the Christmas Spirit. Some of them have their own version whether from their own creation or adapted from the classics.
Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Christmas Time Again", Flaming Lips, "Christmas at the Zoo", Beck's "Little Drum Machine Boy", Subjam Stevens' "Songs for Christmas", Bright Eyes, "A Christmas Album", Barenaked Ladies, "Green Christmas", AC/DC, "Mistress for Christmas" and Darness, "Christmas Time" are some of them.

So, if you want to get out of the trodden path, try one of these to create an original atmosphere at home. What do you think?

Theatre as event

According to Aristotle's seminal theatrical critique Poetics, there are six elements necessary for theatre: Plot, Character, Idea, Language, Music, and Spectacle, Moving On Theatre Company used mainly Interaction, which is an element Aristotle didn't take into account. Interaction is something which has become essential nowadays, both in communication and in education. Not that interaction wasn't present in Shakespeare's days, interaction has always been present in performance arts, and of course in Shakespeare and Lope de Vega's days, when audiences ate and drank and shouted at the actors without any restraint.
Lope de Vega wrote that for theatre one needs "three boards, two actors, and one passion". That is exactly what Moving On Theatre Comapany offered us at the Language School. Music and Spectacle together with an ability to involve audiences and make people participate. Everybody enjoyed seeing our students go on stage and take part as the professional actors asked volunteers to act when they realised that the audience was there waiting for them to put on a play.
Did you see the show? Give us your opinion.

The magic city

If you would like to dicover this magnificent city, if you have never walked along the streets of this magic city, you can still try to find a place in the trip the English Department is organizing. Contact us at eventeoivalencia@gmail.com or call Rosa at 963823433 as soon as possible. We are going to close the passengers' list before the Christmas Holidays

Quiz

Cecilia invites us to a Quiz in Valencia's Pubs.

Juan Marsé, Premio Cervantes 2008

Spanish novelist, Juan Marsé (Barcelona 1933) belongs to the group of realists from the 50s rooted in Barcelona, together with Jaime Gil de Biedma, Carlos Barral, José Agustín Goytisolo, Juan García Hortelano, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan Goytisolo, Terenci Moix and Eduardo Mendoza.
La oscura historia de la prima Montse, is a key novel in his career as a writer as this is the novel where we can find the events and characters that have obsessed him throughout his life as a writer. In this book he expresses strong feelings and opinions about Catalan society under Franco's regime.
Some of his novels, such as Últimas tardes con Teresa, Si te dicen que caí, La muchacha de las bragas de oro and El amante bilingüe, have been adapted for the cinema or the theatre with little success.
Marsé analyzes the moral and social downfall of postwar Spain, class differences in his native Barcelona, the memories of those who lost the Civil War, the fight between workers and burgeois students and lost childhood. He analyzes Spanish society with the techniques of social realism, although, sometimes, he also experiments with other more avant-guard mechanisms, always with irony and satire and humour. His books have often been censored in the past.
Have you read any of his books. Well, if you haven't, this is an opportunity to see if his writing is still alive. Did he deserve this prize? Tell us your opinion.