Mrs. Tomasa, on the big screen
The disruptive and eclectic fusion of La Sra. Tomasa, the energetic Barcelona group that blurs the boundaries between folk and electronics, pays tribute to almost a decade of dance, breaking the patterns of music with its national leap to the big screen. The movie History repeats itself: Live Sessions Show Crystallizes a collective live recorded on November 29 and 30, 2019 at La Lleialtat Santsenca (Barcelona) and experiences its absolute premiere this Thursday, May 6, in a single pass, in the theaters of the Yelmo cinemas in 12 cities in Spain, whose result synthesizes the magic and intensity of the band together with a handful of contemporary musicians regrouped under the name "El Colectivo". This little big family integrates artists like Ahyvin Bruno (Las Karamba), Maldito Child, Mr. Wilson, Adala, Marcio, Desiree Diouf, The Sey Sisters or Juli Giuliani.
"This is the history of the art of pulling a thread", declares the Gran Canaria musician Alberto Limiñana, bassist of La Sra. Tomasa and one of the two Canarians in this lineup of seven musicians together with the Tenerife percussionist Pablo Domínguez. And is that the germ of the feature film Mrs. Tomasa goes back to a series of original recordings of live sessions from songs deconstructed from his second album, Our key (2017), with the participation of different musician friends from Barcelona. «There we discovered the vein of recording direct shots completely in sequence shot and we received a feedback cool. And suddenly, one day, sitting at the table, it occurred to us to do it live », says the bassist.
A year later, Ms. Tomasa stars in a double live at the Sala Hangar in Madrid and, in 2019, they repeat the formula at La Lleialtat Santsenca in Barcelona for intimate capacity-then- 200 people, but printing a twist on the format, which was a complete success. "It was a brutal experience," recalls Limiñana. «We did it by totally breaking the scheme: we took a completely bare room - the only characteristic that interested us is that the resonance was more or less positive, without an echo - and we placed ourselves in the center of the room, without a stage, in 360º format and at the same level as the public, so that each spectator was free to move and interact.
This last initiative, produced and entirely subsidized by the band, had a budget surplus that allowed them to record one of the concerts, with no major claim than to freeze it as an audiovisual souvenir. Then it remained in memory drawers until, in the run-up to the release of the band's third album, Cheerful but dangerous (Guspira Records, 2020), the quarantine decreed by the pandemic curtailed all the tour, promotion and presentation concert plans for the album, but, in return, the band received the final editing of the Barcelona recording.
Ms. Tomasa met after confinement to view the play, which awakened the dream of bringing it to the big screen in a cinematographic format. And thus the conversations between Guspira, his office of management, with Cines Yelmo to screen the film exclusively in 12 cities in Spain, in a single pass, this Thursday, May 6: in the Canary Islands it will be exhibited in the Yelmo Las Arenas cinemas in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and in Yelmo Meridiano in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, as well as in theaters in Seville, Gasteiz, Barcelona, Madrid, Huarte (Iruña), Tarragona, Zaragoza, Valencia, Malaga and Vigo. «And that is part of all the inertia counted from the zero point to the end point, a dream that had no form and that we did, but that the art of pulling the thread leads us to interpret as the beginning of many other dreams and projects that they still have no shape, ”says Limiñana.
Strength
However, the band emphasizes that this film portrays "the strength and the bonds that music creates through it." And it is that, if one of the identity hallmarks of Mrs. Tomasa lies in its deconstruction of genres and languages, one of its strengths lies in the incorporation of less known musical talents to illuminate "An incredible artistic synergy, in which we ended up playing better and getting into other people's movies."
The result is this "Collective" of 11 musicians, seven singers and thirty technicians "being family" and united by music, by the desire to create something different and by the desire to improve that culminates in a movie theater, such as a front row trip to the best days of festivals and concerts, which will one day return.
