90th Anniversary of the 1936 Barcelona People's Olympiad

The 90th anniversary of the 1936 Barcelona People's Olympiad, a counter-event to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin, is being celebrated this week. The People's Olympiad was conceived as an anti-fascist alternative, organized by the Popular Front government. It was scheduled to begin on July 19, 1936, but was canceled due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on that same day. The event was part of a broader cultural and political movement that included the 1933 International Proletarian Theatre Olympiad in Moscow, which influenced Spanish artists. Key figures associated with the Spanish cultural scene included César Falcón, Ramón J. Sender, María Teresa León, and Ramón Puyol, who had contacts with German theater directors Erwin Piscator and Vsevolod Meyerhold. The article references Manuel Aznar Soler's book 'La escena madrileña durante la Segunda República' for historical context.