Maria del Mar Bonet returns to the Olympia after 51 years to champion free art

Maria del Mar Bonet will return to Paris’s Olympia theater 51 years after her first appearance there, bringing with her a defense of free art, Mediterranean culture and a slower way of doing things in an age of immediacy.

The 79-year-old Mallorcan singer and songwriter first performed at the legendary venue on April 27, 1975, in the months before Francisco Franco’s death. She appeared at a festival called Chansons en Liberté, an occasion that also led to the live album “A l’Olympia,” remastered last year.

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Art is a state that should always be very free.

That concert became one of the defining moments of Bonet’s career. As a leading figure in the Nova Cançó movement, she helped keep the Catalan language alive during the Franco dictatorship and contributed to its international reach despite political repression and censorship.

Bonet will perform at the Olympia on October 11 as part of events marking 60 years of her musical career. A discussion with her at the Sorbonne, organized by the Ramon Llull Institute, the university’s Catalan Studies Center and the Catalan government’s delegation in France, precedes the concert.

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Creating music, poetry, painting, theater, everything that is art, creating. For me, that is the way.

“Art is a state that should always be very free,” Bonet said. More than half a century after her first Chansons en Liberté appearance, she said she views the world with apprehension and sadness because of the rise of the far right.

Her answer is to keep creating music, poetry, painting and theater. Her latest album, “L’aigua no cansa,” released this year, refers to the 2024 dana floods in Valencia and the continuing murders of women linked to gender-based violence. Artists, she said, have a duty to represent all of life, “not only love and little birds, but everything that surrounds us.” She also said she prefers to do things slowly and by hand, because she knows no other way.

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Not only love and little birds, but everything that surrounds us.