Miso Ensemble – Hypermedia Opera / Electroacoustic Theatre
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Presentation
Salt Itinerary transcends theatrical and music conventions introducing Miguel Azguime and Paula Azguime’s concept of new Op-Era.
Reflecting on Art and Madness, it revolves around languages, words as meaning and words as sound. Both are used as an extension of the body and melted in the construction of the staging as a tangible projection of the resonance of the words through sound and image.
Live audio and video electronic processing and diffusion of the voice, poetry, gestures, music and the drawings creates polyphony of senses and a counterpoint of meanings.
Moulding sounds, lights, pictures and movements as if being drawn, painted or carved, Salt Itinerary is a powerful, engaging and challenging combination of music and drama by one performer that shapes new grounds in electronic music and breaks boundaries between music, theatre, opera.
Salt Itinerary is performed in Portuguese, English, French and German.
Synopsis
Salt Itinerary is the end result of a creative project on writing: on musical writing, poetic writing, the gestural writing of the musician/actor and of his own image, in which the voice is the extension of the body and of the thought of the poet. Here, then, is the symbiosis between the essence of the word and the evolution of the Being, presented in the form of a new dramaturgy called Electroacoustic Opera.
The first part considers the question of the absence of the author as an unfolding and moving of his creative personality, and places the stage itself on stage.
The second part is dominated by the search for the gesture of writing, interpreted as instrumental, and therefore musical, gesture. At the basis of the gesture of writing is the sound of the word. The word subordinated to life. The word freed from the word.
The third part gives substance and image to the word. The score of the poem composes time. Who remembers time? But it is time that remembers us! Creation takes over the creator, and the question of madness returns... of its limits, of the blindness caused by the excess of lucidity, the excess of Seeing. It is the blindness of the white that burns, the white of salt. In the light, nobody sees it!
On stage, the composer and the poet, together, in one, lead us through their internal world, their personal itinerary which he calls Salt – the same Salt that represents his resistance, his will, his essence and his multiplicity. Salt (an essential substance) that we also see as a manifestation of knowledge and flavour; the itinerary which is certainly that of the creator, but which is also and at the same time the image and in the image of so many other itineraries, paths, exchanges, inspirations, discussions...
Salt Itinerary lasts about 60 minutes and can be performed in Portuguese, French or English
Credits
SALT ITINERARY (±55’)
MISO ENSEMBLEMiguel Azguime: performance, composition, texts, and concept
Paula Azguime: sound projection, electronics, dramaturgy, video directing, staging
Andre Barteski: video programming
Perseu Mandillo: video directing
Miso Studio: technical developmentsupported by: Direcção Geral das Artes/ Ministério da Cultura, DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm & TU-Studio Technische Universität Berlin
Press
"The author actor and musician Miguel Azguime, blended into whole modulations of voice, mimes, gestures and their "projections" in the video and live electronics. The possibilities of the author in this hysterical and physiological production stun, they become excellent "material" for the electronic transformations."
(Asta Andrikonyte, 2006)“After experiencing it, you will probably ask yourself about its genre: is it an electroacoustic music composition? Is it a sound poetry? A music-theatre, performance art, a multimedia opera? Or, it is all of those together?”
“Walking beyond the boundaries of major, established disciplines is one of the significant features of Azguime’s poetics. He is the author of the verses; he recites them and also performs the music composed of rhythmical profilerations of sounds, words and gestures. (…) It looks like a theatre, but it is not.”
(Jelena Novak, e-volucija, nº14, 2007)
“Miguel Azguime’s hour long mélange of video and processed vocals, Salt Itinerary, places a veneer of piquant unpredictability on a fastidiously planned and persuasively paced scheme of varied sensory events.”
“The live electronics are handled with well-nigh balletic grace. In the midst of all this, and magisterially immersed in it, is Azguime himself. Gawking into the camera, scrawling on a tablet, morphed into a cartoon, or clad in reflective white before a screen, he is the thing projected and the thing projected upon.”
“In this multimedia opera, (…), both technology and language function as playthings of equal and endless fascination.”
(Andrew Johnstone, Review on The Irish Times, 28/04/2007)“Miguel Azguime’s Salt Itinerary is an example of the hybrid intermedia made possible by today’s digital technology. The sounds that come out of the author/actor’s mouth slightly delayed, are at once the result of the body movements, what we could call the music of the voice or the poetry of the voice, and the notation of those movements. As if the sound wrote itself. And the same happens in regard to the writing: the lines plot their own possibility as a written form.”
(Manuel Portela – blog TAGV Coimbra, 16/02/2007)
“In its essence, the language makes no sense. It is no more than a sequence of sounds, just as natural as the wind in the wheat or the crackling of grains in a salt mountain. There is an uncommon coherence of these principles in the multimedia opera Salt Itinerary by the Miso Ensemble. The Studiobühne Portuguese-German Theatre Festival “Europe in Scene” couldn’t have had a better prelude.”
“Through an outstanding performance, Azguime’s poetry ascends to a completely different level. By moving his lips in an artistic manner, the actor talks in sound cascades about the “absent author” (who, quite ironically, is on stage). One cannot say that this author is “in the middle of silence” or on the “context of being quiet”; he cackles and purrs, he breaks with his teeth and barks until the word itself is broken, until it melts in pleasure and terror. The abyss of madness becomes clear through the translucent emptiness of the words.”
“(…) Azguime offers Jandl in rapture, in a digital trance of speed. Wires all over his body, with three technicians, he makes his ruins of words visible in real time, in the form of erratic and flamboyant letters on a gigantic screen. The brilliancy of the technique, the perfection and originality of the optical and acoustic tumbling alone, make it well worth to see this hour long show.”
(Von Oliver Cech – Kolner Stadt-Anzeiger, 12/03/2007)"Linking a stage presence of rare intensity to an incredible virtuosity in the electronic treatment of images and sounds, Miguel Azguime absorbs us into the interior of a whirlwind of indefatigable imagination, into the labyrinth of the invention of each moment: great planes of sense, words, sounds, gestures, situations, postures.”
“His polymorphic works, just as lyrical as entertaining, can surprise and seduce musical experts as well as absolute beginners.”
“Broadcast from an apparatus which surrounds the audience, the sound takes over the space, while the image projected on multiple screens becomes volume and territory. On the stage, Miguel Azguime leads the audience through a frenetic rhythm, in an act of madness, of astonishment, of excitement.”
“Knowing how to manage the words and the sounds with such skill and lightness, the musician and poet Miguel Azguime contradicts the severe reputation that often sticks to contemporary music.”
(Bertrand Dubedout 04/04/2006 Festival Mira)
