More than two hundred people chanted and danced to the songs of the Barcelona group Bravo in their debut at the Mercè festivities on September 20. Not only were his lyrics catchy and the rhythms of his pop music invited you to move your hips, so that your body moved completely naturally: the neurons of the assembled audience also danced.
Because on stage you saw three people with functional diversity giving their all, despite having to be seated. Paula González was the lead singer, wearing sunglasses and not stopping for a moment from smiling from a folding chair. Singing alongside him was Guillem Mata – who had a past in a heavy metal band. Also in a wheelchair, DJ Dani Moreno handled the electronic music by sliding his gaze over the screen of his computer. The only thing missing from the event was the absolute ear of Jordi Doñate, the third voice of the group, who had to stay home due to health problems.
Perhaps it is the first time that a musical group fronts four people with a 75% or greater degree of disability. According to ASPACE (Spanish Confederation of Associations for the Care of People with Cerebral Palsy), in our country there are about 120,000 people with this condition in the motor cortex of the brain, which is responsible for muscle movement. One in every 500 children born in Spain. In recent times, many of them have been able to access tools for expression and personal and artistic development, for example thanks to the Vodafone Foundation and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, which have created electronic instruments and sensors that help interpret songs with biometric data. .
Los Bravo, during a rehearsal (Àlex Garcia)
‘Veure’te riure’, a song from Bravo
Lyrics: Manel Tijeras
Music: Bravo
little prince
The king of the house
you make me laugh
Plasticine and contradictory sea
Shovels and buckets
Memories on the skin
Chili, fantasy
Like a big lie
To spend the rest of your life
[Coro:] It will be marked
L’amor pur
We will not bleed
Clay dolls
little prince
The king of the house
you make me laugh
tell you i love you
Let’s go down the road
For when you make me happy
i will be fine
i will help you
If things don’t go well
don’t forget about me
I will always be there.
Music therapist Dani Royo, who acts in the background alongside sound technician and drummer Marc Caballero and editor and bassist Jon Botas de Lorenzo, set out to demonstrate that some of those people with a musical vocation can seriously dedicate themselves to their passion. Royo worked for about ten years with ASPACE Catalunya on a musical therapy project that put songwriting at the center: “We did about 150 songs and organized four concerts,” he tells me at the Center Moral del Poblenou, very close to the venue. where Bravo rehearses. “They were lyrics in which they talked above all about mourning, for everything they have lost due to their condition, and gratitude, for example to their parents, for taking care of them throughout their lives,” he adds, “but without great musical quality, because the important thing was that they shared problems and experiences, that they talked about topics such as their sexuality, which are quite taboo in the group.”
But, unexpectedly, the magic arrived. In a concert at the Poble Espanyol in Montjuic, on June 2, 2017, Mabel Clavell sang her song about the birth in which she came into the world, which was traumatic and confined her to a wheelchair, and, above all, she did something what he had always wanted to do: dance. And he danced. With the help of two friends, who put her on the floor, she danced before hundreds of spectators. As she later wrote in her first-person chronicle of the experience in the magazine connection: “I think many people connected with the song and with me.” Jon Botas attests to this: “I remember well my first concert at Poble Espanyol, no one was prepared, not even me, for what was going to happen: that went through me.”
“There I saw that there was magic, that it could become a show,” says Royo, “we decided to emancipate ourselves and take the step from therapy to culture, which happened six years and a pandemic later.” The slow and difficult transition from activism to art. They began to rehearse every Tuesday and Thursday thanks to the involvement of the families, since the logistics are not easy at all. They created a website, looked for a manager, and were selected by the Cultural District, with a concert and talk. On March 6, they performed for the first time in an emblematic venue: the Sala Apolo. And last month they did it at La Mercè: “Bravo has changed my life, because thanks to this group I have achieved personal goals that I thought were impossible,” the charismatic Paula González tells me via WhatsApp message. And he adds: “Music makes me feel super good. When singing I put myself in the shoes of my colleagues and the audience. “It is a great work of empathy.”
At the concert on the stage in front of the Fabra i Coats there were no more explanations. The songs were alone, in front of the public, without pedagogical discourse: naked, direct. And they worked. Those of us in the front were together with people in wheelchairs and caregivers, who were also applauding excitedly, and we saw the particularities of the artists, but those in the back arrived by chance and simply stopped, asked for a beer and started dancing.
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