Dorner / Rodrigues / Guerreiro / Momeme

Fabula

Label: Creative Sources Country: Portugal

"It was Plato who wrote, "When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city will tremble," but then, Plato lived, by our standards, in a very small city, one that - with its distinguished plays, music and mysteries - we might readily confuse with a theatre, a concert hall, a place of worship, a site less lived-in than designated for ritualized performances, a place that might mark borderlines, whether between the old mode and the new, the sacred and profane, the place before and after bells, a place isolated within a larger building, like a minimalist's large-scale appropriation of Russian nesting dolls, like this performance in the town of Montemor-o-Novo some 300 miles south of Montemor-o-Velho, that is, "the old main hill," and some hundreds of miles north-west from that other room in the midst of which has been placed (box-like) a cathedral, a kind of Tennessee jar ("round it was, upon a hill"), but here in the Cine-Theatre Curvo-Semedo the performance is so intimate the theatre itself must be excluded and a new relationship installed, the audience instead gathered on stage with the musicians and the curtain then drawn to create a "black box" effect, the ceiling exceedingly high, the air cold, the bells distant, the fabula unfolding from the instruments in a way that can be neither translated nor precisely misunderstood (various secret passages present themselves; connections, routings are magnified: the trumpet's brass tubes are moving granaries; the wound wires of guitar and viola grow train-tracks in space; minutiae mask themselves and slither seductively in computer circuitry), but later, when the fabula reaches its inevitable conclusion, we all - audience, musicians, and shared air alike - discover the black box and the folds of its cloth walls no longer there, and that we can't leave, that we can never find ourselves outside of them."-Stuart Broomer