Remembering Paco Ibáñez at the Olympia: A political communitas in exile

Abstract

In December 1969 the Spanish singer-songwriter Paco Ibáñez gave a concert at the Olympia in Paris to an audience composed of Spanish exiles and French students. Ibáñez’s selection, interpretation, musicalization and performance of a wide range of mainly Spanish poems for the occasion created a text that denounced the policies of Franco and, at the same time, allowed the French part of the audience to express their solidarity in a political cry for freedom. This article begins by situating Ibáñez in exile in France where, avoiding Francoist censorship, he thrived as an anti-Francoist musician. Focusing on the emblematic Olympia concert that epitomizes Ibáñez’s artistic output, the second part of the article analyses the performative text created by the poems chosen and interpreted by Ibáñez together with the audience’s reaction to them. This text, the article argues, encouraged collective struggle in the face of oppression, and the communitas generated that night exemplified it.