NAU NUA: CLARA PEYA

03.07.2025

Time

Clara Peya . Cortesía de Festival Grec BCN

"Time goes on over the dream sunk to the hair, yesterday and tomorrow eat dark flowers of mourning." These verses by Federico García Lorca appear in his play Así que pasen cinco años (So Five Years Pass) from 1933, part of his so-called Teatro imposible (Impossible Theater), due to its surrealism, and the source of one of the pinnacles of modern Spanish music, La leyenda del tiempo (The Legend of Time), which Camarón de la Isla published in 1979. All this, and much more, came to mind when Clara Peya, with talent, shared with us her poor relationship with time and its silent, inevitable, and definitive passage. Surely the term "impossible theater" takes shape in the need to capture time, with an individual awareness of existence trapped in an unwanted future. Like a character in Pere Calders's Cròniques de la veritat oculta (Chronicles of Hidden Truth), with life locked in a fist for fear of it slipping away.

Clara Peya, as I say, through talent, presented her album Corsé (2024) on the magical stage of the Teatre Grec, giving it a unique dress under the artistic direction of her sister Ariadna Peya, opening corsets and breathing the good and bad airs that this life that escapes in the river of time brings us right and left. She was accompanied by spirits of talent such as her usual musicians as well as dancers and special collaborators, from Albert Pla with a red cape and whispering that the song would never end, to Salvador Sobral and Sílvia Pérez Cruz, separately, after their joint performance at the Noches del Botánico in Madrid, suspended due to rain the day before. Also at the Grec the rain appeared, timidly, although it seemed to caress Peya's introduction on the piano of her "Cerebralmente" or more notably in the wonderful "Hija del silencio". Of particular note is Kathy Pey's powerful version of "Alta traïció," with the nerve of a drifting ship and dancers in red vests.

And time passes, and passed, and the echo of Léo Ferré reminding us that everything fades with time leads us to want to capture the moments Clara Pey created, and not let them escape us, but... Her recent Solilòquia (2025) is already creating new moments for us.

Text by Juan Carlos Romero

Photograph courtesy of Festival Grec BCN

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