Microoperas of Today
Scene + Music
Microoperas of Today is a ground-breaking stage event that brings together three key Barcelona cultural institutions: CCCB, MACBA and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. The project involves artists from different disciplines to offer a new look at traditional opera, rethinking it from a contemporary point of view.
Setting out from shared concern about the climate crisis, interspecies communication and the acoustics of nature, it presents a journey of artistic reflection structured by sounds, words and images. Each institution stages a newly-created multidisciplinary opera lasting between 15 and 20 minutes, offering the audience a unique way to open up new views and questions concerning matters that speak to us and affect us.
With an approach specially designed to showcase young artists from the visual, performing and literary arts, Microoperas of Today reflects on the lyric genre by exploring the relationship between music, new technology and new stage writing.
Programme
Act One: The Sky Will Not Keep the Secret
Teatre CCCB
This hybrid piece combines elements of opera, installation and scenic experimentation to reflect on the history of beauty and the relation between art and nature by means of a dialogue between two anonymous voices that go through different life stages. With a format that challenges the conventions of opera, the work is presented as a testimony to the complexity of art in its attempt to capture the beauty of the natural world, even as it questions whether the effort is revealing or futile.
In a journey of time and stage, music and light, The Sky Will Not Keep the Secret is a dialogue of voices that mutate as they make their way through the stages of life (from childhood to old age), relationships (from love to friendship) and connection with the world (from scepticism to fusion). The piece uses dialogue in an attempt to resolve the question that always accompanies us: what is the history of beautiful things?
Credits
Librettist: Pol Guasch
Composer: Clara Aguilar
Designer: Silvia Delagneau
Act Two: Aura
Capella MACBA
Aura, a 21st-century opera conceived by the poet Gabriel Ventura, the composer Marina Herlop and the visual artist Rosa Tharrats, is presented as a stage evocation with mediaeval influences and a strong pantheist component.
Set in the 13th century, the protagonist of Aura, fleeing from a world devastated by the wars and crusades of pope Innocent III, takes refuge in a forest in Languedoc. There she finds a spring, where the Angel of the Waters appears to her, and they talk about her condition as a refugee. Water, in its different forms, is revealed to her as a “door and mirror”, as hope and “grace of thought”.
Inspired by the visions of women mystics like Hildegard von Bingen, as well as the forms of representation in Romanesque art (hieratism, breaking with the space-time dimension and so on), Aura features melismatic chants and digital echoes, inhabited by water spirits and voices from the other side. Disembodied, plasmatic characters, perhaps creatures of an inter-species future.
Aura therefore stands not only as a paean to nature as a place of peace and refuge, of imagination, life and thought, with water as a central element, but also as a song against the devastation of war.
In a time like our own, with a pressing climate crisis, Aura reminds us of the germinating, purifying and repairing power of water as a basic element in both human beings and the planet, while highlighting an ecosophical awareness we must cling to and nurture if we are to survive and achieve a harmonious balance.
Credits
Librettist: Gabriel Ventura
Composer: Marina Herlop
Designer: Rosa Tharrats
Stage directors: Gabriel Ventura and Rosa Tharrats
Act Three: You Shall Disinherit the Earth
Foyer room, Liceu
You Shall Disinherit the Earth speaks of a devastated world, where nature has lost its ability to sustain life. An ancestral figure invokes the forces of the Earth and feminine wisdom, seeking to connect with the roots of suffering and the memory of those who have witnessed the planet's decline. A lost and broken young woman searches for answers about her existence, a link between life and death, asking for help to free herself from the weight of existence.
Through a mystical and symbolic dialogue, we question the potential regeneration of our future. A piece that aims to reflect on our collective responsibility regarding the transformation and degradation of what surrounds us, inviting us to rethink our complicity with destruction.
The set design, with an organic floor that pulses with fragility, reflects the planet's decadence, while large fabrics, breathing through light and movement, suggest the emotional states of the landscape and the complexity of human and non-human relationships in constant transformation. Dance, music, and voice create a sensory atmosphere that, intertwining pain and hope, urges us to reconsider our connection with the Earth and the need to find rebirth as a species, confronting the drift to which we are accustomed.
Credits
Librettist: Miriam Cano
Composer: Fabià Santcovsky
Designer: Carlos Bunga
Stage director: Carla Tovias
