PROJECT

The romantic music of various Spanish-speaking artists between 1960 and 1990 is popular again… now in the night scene of Costa Rica of early 2010. Plancha, as the genre was later called, revived the nostalgia associated with songs that ‘our mothers and grandmothers listened to when doing housework’ (plancha literally translates into ‘music for ironing clothes’). This music, full of theatricality, often celebrating the fantasy and suffering of romantic love, is closely linked to melodrama and telenovela culture. It was also the raw material for the art of the transformistas (drag queens) in gay bars and were dearly treasured in the jukeboxes of the various old cantinas (bars). During this residency, Mario Barrantes Espinoza and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld will navigate through the vast sound-worlds of the plancha genre.