ELS Comediants have closed the Olympic Games in Barcelona and they have - unintentionally - exorcised the Palace of Justice in Bogota they have opened the Carnival in Venice and the Avignon Festival with just one visit to Galway, in 1985, they changed the face of Irish popular culture (see panel) and left the city with one of its most cherished festival memories.
Tomorrow night, Els Comediants return to Ireland, and will seek to transform our conception of celebrating St Patrick's Day when they perform Dimonis - "Devils" - on the roofs of the Bank of Ireland and Trinity College.
Els Comediants are a troupe of Catalan artistes who work on a grand scale. They create spectacles indoors and outdoors which use fireworks and lighting as essential elements, but always retain, usually through humour, a human scale as well. They have plundered the circus and the Mediterranean festive traditions shamelessly, using acrobats, stilt walkers, giants, caricature masks and puppets. But they are not folkloric or nostalgic in recovering old traditions they have created a new one, entirely their own. Music - usually raucous, the sound of the people's street band with ruthless percussion - drives their whole dramatic machine.
Dimonis, which was originally commissioned for the Venice Carnival in 1981, and has since travelled to 26 countries, is a celebration of irrepressible energies. The powers of the Established Order are challenged, not by evil but by explosions of laughter, sensuality and vital powers.
The Catalans traditionally divide human behaviour into seny (reason, canny good sense) and rauxa (the wild forces of sex and nature). Tomorrow night, as the red Devils chase dragons, dance lasciviously, and seize the high ground of the city from the white robed forces of repression, rauxe is a feeling that Dubliners should inhale with the sulphurous stench of the fireworks.
A word of practical warning here: the company suggests that spectators "wear old clothes and go with ganas" (literally "desires", but the word implies participation). As to the first Els Comediants have a superb safety record, but my old leather jacket which has been through Dimonis twice, has lots of tiny scorches to prove it. As to the second, this ain't Macbeth at the Abbey: the company aims to stimulate responses during the show. Shoots of Foe! Foe! Foe! (Fire! in Catalan, with the familiar ring of an expletive expressing primal delight) are a good start. They help the Devils feel at home.
At this stage, if you are of a nervously religious disposition, you may be wondering if such participation is a venal or a mortal sin. Dimonis has been branded as a "Black Mass" by neo fascists in Spain, who expressed their particular brand of Christian charity by beating up spectators in Seville.
The charge would have been ludicrous if it did not carry such menace.
Els Comediants are not satanists: they are, in their own words, "children of the carnival". They first came together in 1972, as a radical commune dedicated to reviving the subversive and mocking arts of Mediterranean street festivals. For nearly 40 years, Franco's dictatorship had suppressed not only democratic politics, but also any expression of the playful mockery and carnal indulgence which traditionally preceded the grim abstinence of Lent. Els' Comediants were most unconventional revolutionaries. "We proposed a way of life based on joy, pleasure and laughter, and on expressing that life through theatre," says Paca Sola, one of eight remaining members of the original core group of 11. Nearly a quarter of a century later, she attributes their survival - often precarious, even recently - not so much to their shared ideology as to their total commitment to theatre.
"We used to make a big deal of rejecting the state, the church, marriage and our parents. It's not that we have reversed our attitudes to these ideas but they have lost their force for us. What remains is a common desire to make theatre and to make a living from theatre."
She roars laughing when reminded that a spokeswoman for the Partido Popular, currently trying to form Spain's first right of centre government in 13 years, recently described them as unfit for export, an example of how the Socialist governments wasted money, and they are exponents of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll rather than theatre".
"Would that we were," says Paca, ironically. "The reality is that we have paid the price for all sorts of experiences and we have survived. We may not be as good human beings as we were but we are less naive".
There were certainly many more echoes of 1960s idealism, naive or otherwise, when this reporter first visited the Comediants commune at the wonderfully ramshackle Villa Soledad in 1985. Forty kilometres north of Barcelona, overlooking the Mediterranean which inspires their work in so many ways, the home of Els Comediants seemed idyllic, and so did the lifestyle of the communards.
In the spacious dining room there was a huge stewpot, rich with the produce of their own gardens, which are set among orange and palm trees around the house. The company ate together in collective good humour and, at least theoretically, decided policy at collective meetings called at a moment's notice.
What marked this commune off from many others, however, was a pervasive sense of order. Paradoxically, the safe use of the very fireworks which expressed chaos in performance demanded rigid discipline from the pyrotechnicians. It was also notable that, although several couples were in long term relationships, there were no children. There was a half serious "joke that this was a policy imposed by the low profile but very influential artistic director, Joan Font.
ALL that has changed now. In the liquid light of a spring evening, the Villa Soledad looks as impossibly lovely as ever. But it is fenced off, not only from the public but from many of those who work for the company. Most of the original core still lives here, but it is now divided into five apartments. If they eat together now, says Paca, they do so for pleasure, not from principle. And most have children.
Behind the house and gardens, there is a new complex of buildings, "La Vinya: Centre de Creacio Comediants". The centre houses utilitarian offices and workshops, underground store rooms for hundreds of costumes and props, and ingeniously constructed outdoor rehearsal areas. There are also three tents, ranging from a geodesic dome to an "igloo", which double as performance and rehearsal space.
"We have survived because we have had to organise ourselves as a business," says Paca, former actress and now company manager, sitting in the offices among tidy filing systems and a new generation of Apple PCs. "We all wanted to make theatre, that's what made us last and that's the only reason to go on. As a collective dedicated to a different way of life, we would have died."
Tic arrival of children she had the first, eight years ago - changed everything. Their needs dictated the timetables, so noisy rehearsals could no longer take place at night. A line had to be drawn, however reluctantly, between art and life.
There were darker reasons for change as well. "We suffered a lot from heroin," says Paca. "We lost friends in different ways. Some died from AIDS, some began to steal, even from us. I used to think taking hard drugs was a matter of choice, but now if I see someone taking heroin, I want them out. Soft drugs are a different matter."
Above all, however, there were huge financial problems. Their 20th birthday, in 1992, was supposed to be the "the year of Comediants". It saw them at the forefront of two of the great cultural events that year, the Barcelona Olympics, where they devised the closing ceremony, and the Seville Expo, where they choreographed the daily parade. Behind the spectacular scenes, however, their finances ran out of control and they ended the year almost bankrupt, with debts of £800,000.
That was the year the house was divided up, and any residual anarchic attitudes to the state and financial rectitude were finally dispensed with. "We tried to live outside the law and it didn't work," says Paca, simply. Three years later, Els Comediants's finances are in order, partly because they do a great deal of commissioned commercial work, from companies ranging from Swatch to British Airways.
"This income permits us to do the work we really like," says Paca, "otherwise we would depend on the state". As things stand, only 10 per cent of Comediants income comes from subsidy, and since half that comes from the Catalan government, they can afford not to be too concerned about a possibly hostile right wing government being formed in Madrid.
But if Comediants might seem to have been made safe for capitalism, their roots are still in magic. Despite their own disavowal of any esoteric intent, that magic sometimes takes more than a theatrical form.
In 1988, they were asked to perform Dimonis in the shell of the Palace of Justice in Bogota, Columbia. The palace had been the scene of a terrible and controversial assault by the Columbian army three years before, in November 1985, which wiped out not only the guerrillas who had seized it, but many of the staff, including most of the senior judiciary.
"It was very hard," says Paca. "While we prepared the show, we were walking on the ashes of the building, which were also the ashes of the dead. We all noted phantoms, presences, a ghastly sense of oppression and death. But we were too embarrassed to acknowledge it to each other until it was over.
"A public of 100,000 people watched us, and then we found that they believed we were performing an exorcism, so that the palace could be knocked down and rebuilt. At the end - imagine how strange this was - hundreds of women approached us and asked us to touch their children, for luck. At first we laughed and refused to do it, but they began, to weep. So there we were, giving luck to the children and they were so happy."
The normal magic of Comediants is a much simpler matter, based on the everyday miracles of the sun and moon, the seasons and the sea. In their workshops you can find "boxes of dreams", beautifully conceived and constructed do it yourself theatre kits which are sent out to schools. All over Catalonia and far beyond, the old joyous traditions of popular festive drama is being recovered.
"The little towns all have kids playing devils now," says Paca happily. "We didn't invent it, it was always there. But we have had the pleasure of beginning it again."