Auroras

Auroras

1994
AURORAS is a work that brings melodrama back to its original idea: the fabulistic dimension. It is a fable, a story to be told. Like Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, he decides to throw his written works into the gutter to tell himself stories populated by kings, princesses, beggars, demons, wise men, madmen. Those stories that already contain all the questions that move people and push them to search. The more intimate and personal the thoughts, the more they reflect universal and timeless thoughts such as birth, love, death.

The body – because partial and fleeting – as an instrument of knowledge. (Philosophy without a body is incomplete. Experience is not made.)
A game of theater within the theater. Listening to memory according to a process of subtraction rather than accumulation for an approximation to silence.
The characters who are instruments and voices intervene in the narration. The singers are themselves evocations of traditional opera singers. Intimate reflection on memory. Exercise and discipline of listening.
AURORAS where the body reveals itself as an imperfect machine. Here is the body, in opposite measures, contemporary to thought and distant from it. disembodied and unreliable, a refugee between the ages of itself. The body of Aurora B.: adolescence and visions. The evoked body, she who is pure sound.

AURORAS ethereal protagonist. Aurora B.: the Radio. Associative and comparative machine. Place of comparison and possibilities. Theatre of Listening.

AURORAS or childhood.

AURORAS where the musical writing is based on the voice. The work starts from language, from the language of ages. Voices of children and old people together. Hebrew, Arabic, Italian, German, English, Russian, Hungarian. Greek, Armenian, Yiddish, Persian: the language generates a spontaneous polyphony. The original text in Italian acquires infinite forms and meanings thanks to its translations.

AURORAS where the conventions of instruments and voices of classical music are used. Resumption of the commonplaces – exaggerated – of the opera and the baroque form.
Sound environment with voices instruments coming from multiple directions, radio signals, theater tradition. “Anomalous” voices coming from different areas. electroacoustic ensemble, live electronics for continuous modification and spatialization of sound, speaking voices. singers, narrators. Voices.

AURORAS or of the lack.

AURORAS during which as a continuous anamorphosis two cities exchange their respective acoustic landscapes: Naples and Berlin. Both places of memory.

Aurora B. lives in the library from where very high stairs start. An uncovered library that collects the sounds created over time.
Where Aurora B. lives, music never stops. In the next room, and in the one after, and in the one after, and in the one after, there is always sound. All the sounds, all the voices interpenetrate without interruption.
Without beginning and without end, you can access AURORAS from any point. The window that opens onto the sound of things in the world.
Aurora B. turns and the whole city sleeps of itself.

Roberto Paci Dalò, 1994

Credits

AURORAS
Opera. Teatro dell’ascolto

by Roberto Paci Dalò

Music by Roberto Paci Dalò
Libretto by Isabella Bordoni
Directed by Isabella Bordoni and Roberto Paci Dalò
Artistical Collaboration: Marold Langer-Philippsen
Stage Design and Costumes: Alessandro Moruzzi
Collaboration: Hanna Zimmermann
Light Design: Hans Wiedemann
Sound Environment, Live Electronics, Sound Design: Roberto Paci Dalò
Collaboration: Matthias Kirschke
With:
Katalin Gyenis Voice
David Moss Voice
Claudio Jacomucci Accordion
Stefano Scodanibbio Double-bass
Isabella Bordoni Actress
Heiko Senst Actor

First Performance: Berlin, Hebbel-Theater, February 4th 1994.

Production: Hebbel-Theater Berlin, Inventionen 94,
Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Giardini Pensili