It was my first contemporary dance performance in years, so the notes I took were an exercise in clichés — “raw emotion,” “lithe bodies,” that sort of thing. But two pieces stood out: “In Memoriam,” by the Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, which featured mesmerizingly violent movements performed by dancers who appeared connected by string; it put Hollywood fight scenes to shame. And “Whim,” by Alex Ekman, a Swede, was a raucous and hilarious ensemble free-for-all set to a soundtrack that ranged from Nina Simone’s version of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” — not a musical selection I expected to find in Barcelona. Strangely enough for a dance performance, language was a slight barrier: the program was in Catalan.

The regional pride that pervades the city is perfectly understandable in an area with a fervent independence movement, but it can be a hurdle of sorts for tourists. After seeing a chamber choir performance of Catalan Baroque works at the smallest hall in the grand Palau de la Música Catalana (8 euros), I mentioned to a taxi driver in Spanish that I had enjoyed the concert but was sorry I couldn’t understand what the director was telling the audience. “You were in the cradle of Catalan culture,” he replied. “If he had spoken Spanish, people would have gotten up and left.”

Of course, the barrier isn’t always a linguistic one. Lower-cost performances are often more, shall we say, experimental. To wit, a 10-euro performance I saw at Antic Teatre. This time it was an American performing: Jef Johnson, an outside-the-box clown who has been experimenting with Butoh, an already edgy Japanese movement style, creating a hybrid genre that he described in a Q&A session after the show as “swimming in a sea of craziness.” I’d agree: it was both emotional — he based it on the recent death of his sister, he said — and playfully uncomfortable; at one point he responded to a coughing audience member by entering the crowd and coughing into another person’s hair.

But what really made the Antic special: it’s as much a social experience as a performance space. The theater fits only about 55, but the sprawling courtyard, which also serves as a bar, buzzed with a young, artsy, multilingual crowd. At least a hundred packed in, clearly there to socialize, not to see the show.

The most out-there — and potentially alienating — performance I saw was at another affordable venue, the Teatre Poliorama, right on the Ramblas. It was partly in Spanish and partly in Catalan, punctuated by music in heavily accented English, but that’s only part of what made it a tough sell. “Elvis & Whitney” is a musical (of sorts) in which Elvis Presley and Whitney Houston are played by a (perhaps purposefully) terrible Elvis impersonator and a white man in drag. If I’ve got the plot right, it takes place shortly after Ms. Houston’s death. She arrives in a sort of purgatorial green room, where she is told she must sing “I Will Always Love You” to God to be admitted to heaven. Elvis (for some reason) is there to encourage her, shake his pelvis and sing badly. The audience loved it. My companion, a black Brazilian friend, found the portrayal of a caricatured, drug-addicted Houston played by a white man offensive. But there was no denying it was a riotous spectacle — and something you probably wouldn’t experience in New York.