"VALIENTE" MUSICAL SHOW AT THE CHÂTEAU ROYAL

Date and time: Thursday 12 September at 9pm

Place: Château Royal de Collioure

Free admission

"VALIENTE" musical show at the Château Royal in Collioure. Poems by Manolo Valiente and music by Vicente Pradal with Vicente Pradal, Alberto García, Emmanuel Joussemet and Adrian Iordan.

The musical creation ‘Valiente’, produced by the Rivesaltes Camp Memorial, was devised by Vicente Pradal, Spanish singer-guitarist, composer and performer, as part of an artist residency based on an original edition of poems by Manolo Valiente, deposited at the Memorial.

Manolo Valiente was a multi-talented poet and sculptor born in Seville in 1908. After being interned in the Argelès and Barcarès camps, he lived in France and died in Banyuls-sur-Mer in 1991.

Valiente's poetry recounts daily life in captivity, exile and nostalgia for lost Spain, with only his fellow prisoners present in this barbed-wire-enclosed world. The sea, wind and sand are recurring elements in his prison poetry. Although sadness, misery and pain are part of everyday life, Valiente never complains, never feels sorry for himself, never capitulates: he tells, he bears witness.

His writing is simple, visual, and mostly in octosyllables, like popular Spanish poetry. We can decipher his admiration for Lorca, Machado, Hernández and Bécquer, but his terrible destiny also feeds his poetry.