12 years ago, Helena Bagué and Siddartha Vargas they planted themselves with a guitar at the invitation of a christening in their native Castelló d’Empúries and gave the starting signal to The Little Pot, one of the family music groups that triumph among Catalan children. Since then, this band that combines music and animation theater in its concerts has not stopped growing: it has been adding components (currently they have a show with 13 musicians), they have released five albums, have given more than a thousand concerts and have already released three illustrated albums of his songs. The last, ‘The Dragon Rac’ (Montena publishing house), has just arrived in bookstores coinciding with an award in the Awards ARC, awarded by the Professional Association of Representatives, Promoters and Managers of Catalonia, to the best tour adapted for the family audience.
“We could not collect the award because we were performing on the award-winning tour, and that has its own”, comment Vargas and Bagué, better known by the little ones as Pau and Jana, the stage names they use when they get on stage, where they tend to surround themselves with puppets like the Poruc worm, the Shameful Lion or the Dragon Rac. “With these characters we take the opportunity to transmit some value that seems important to us to talk about emotions, such as that dragon that breaks stereotypes because it does not want to eat people, as we have always been told,” emphasizes Bagué, who vindicates the work of groups like El Pot Petit.
“The audience we address is extremely important. It is essential that, as a society, we give the utmost value to the fact that when the little ones go to a theater or a concert, the experience is the best possible,” he says. “We have been fighting for a long time to be treated the same as adult music groups,” he adds.
The most delicate moment
The band went through a very delicate moment a year ago, when the pandemic forced the cancellation of all the actions they had planned. “We had many confirmed and, just when we were going to premiere a show, everything was canceled,” recalls Vargas, who acknowledges that they came to consider the viability of El Pot Petit. “Music groups survive thanks to live shows and when they cut them off you ask yourself: what now? That helped us to wake up and look for other ways to find sources of income, such as books or a concert recorded live ‘online’ and that we sold at the price that the public decided, “recalls Bagué. Now, with the ‘shows’ already settled again (despite the setbacks caused by the new restrictions), they plan to release new songs in the first quarter of 2022.
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With a repertoire exclusively in Catalan, they only have one song, ‘El cuc Poruc’, which they translated into English. “What we would like would be sing in Catalan outside of Catalonia, as do groups like Txarango, La Pegatina, or as people who sing in English and come here. It would be a way of talking about linguistic normalization, but we still have to work to make it possible “, they emphasize.
They have already tried, but without success: “At the moment it has not been possible, although we put the common thread in Spanish so that people can understand what we are talking about and then we interpret the song in Catalan, as we have created it”, they explain. And they put as an example of normalization the trip they made with an NGO to Nepal. “We were 15 days performing in orphanages, in schools, even in venues with an adult audience, and the songs in Catalan worked very well. It is true that music has no borders, it has no language. If it was possible to do it in Nepal it should also be so. here “, they finish.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com