It was a good luck that the festival MaerzMusic had two promising focal points – the human voice and the Brazilian music. Especially in Brazil the experimental and most involved musicians often are getting in touch with popular music. Chico Mello lives in Brazil and in Germany. He created his own style of music theatre. Here he is combining the for the Brazilians very important form of TV soap opera, the „Telenovela“, with Bossa Nova. The result he’s calling TELEBOSSA. His piece, with the title „Destino das Oito/ Fate at Eight“, was first performed in a marvelous light and ironic-imaginative production by Christina Tappe at the Berlin festival MaerzMusik.
The dramatic basis gave the British author Caryl Churchill. On the other side Chico Mello discovered with his own son how important repetitions are for narrating stories.
For this reason Mello was able to reflect in a light and ironic way the stupid and at the same time abysmal rituals of every day rituals, constantly served by TV soap operas.
Musically Mello connected the cool sensuality of Bossa Nova. He permitted the singers and musicians just to use certain notes and rhythms. The result was a sound on the golden mean in-between Alban Berg and Joao Gilberto. Rarely contemporary music theatre as Chico Mellos DESTINO DAS OITO – without falling in cynicism – offers so much ground for laughing and reflection
Volker Michael, Deutschlandradio Kultur, Berlin
The play
A family waits for the return of the daughter. Captivated in the vacuum of every-day rituals the couple Brian and Alice repeats together with aunty Maisie again and again the same procedures. Change lies in commonness with trivial problems: misunderstandings, conflicts with the wayward drunk son, feelings of guiltiness, fear, old secrets, affairs, addictions, absurd encounters, departure, death. Will the daughter arrive? Will she bring the redemption from the deadlock?
„Destino das Oito - Fate at Eight - Schicksal um Acht“ is the setting to music of the drama „Heart’s Desire“ (1997) by the famous British Author Caryl Churchill. Caryl Churchill, born 1938, is one of the leading British dramatists. Her plays are extremely political and deal with social alienation and mechanisms of power. Very effectively she combines formal dramatic experiments with exciting political issues
In „Heart’s Desire“ the realistic situation of waiting for the daughter becomes a dramatic unrealistic elaboration – the story of waiting is narrated in a non-linear way. The dramatic development constantly is interrupted and restarts from the beginning. In a situation of a reset the story gets a new possible development. Every reset, every repetition includes musical and scenical variations. The result: an absurd and funny, constant perplexity of references in time and space.
The grotesque play with repetitions and interruptions get in the musical setting of Chico Mello a new dimension. Every beginning brings new variations and events and clears up the exciting patterns of the dramatic play.
The concept
The narrow patterns of family, the family issues themselves are very similar to the dramatic constructions of popular TV soap operas, of the famous Brazilian „Telenovelas“. The action itself seems to be realistic, full with social and psychological situations of the brasilian every day life. This genre of soap opera gives a high emotional identification for a huge audience. For a big part of the brasilian population the main protagonists are as close as family members. The everyday life is dedicated to the world of Telenovelas – the Telenovela copies problems of the common life.
The formal and dramatic constellation of „Heart’s Desire“ gives an ideal basis for an investigation of this entanglement. Similar as is in a TV setting the audience can experience how the protagonists fall into their own soap opera. For this reason the play „Heart`s Desire“ becomes a free interpretation in the fictional telenovela „Destino das Oito - Fate at Eight - Schicksal um Acht“.
By linking together different possibilities of action and dramaturgic developments in one series, by the scenic interaction of real action and telecasting, by mixing pictures from real telenovelas and live-videos arises a performance where the borders of TV and reality, of real and artificially produced experiences fade away.
The most important Brazilian telenovela is daily broadcasted at eight o’clock: a collective fate, broadcasted at eight, played by fictional protagonists, experienced by the majority of a huge tv-audience.
The music
The musical composition takes this dramatic structure and works with it’s patterns of repetition and variation. The recurrent basic situation is taken for a musical fundament and opens many possibilities for the exploration of an own musical language. The composer develops a special musical vocabulary. This he adds to the harmonies of the vocals of the English text. The result will be a fine grid of melodies, that are not motivated in a psychological or affective way, but offer an artificial construction for the naturalistic scene. In this exciting combination of Chary Churchill`s excellent composed text, the artificial vocal inflection and a naturalistic scene the rich diversity of the play becomes evident. The funny absurdity and the complexity of trivial daily scenes become even more obvious.
The clear language patterns made the composer develop an own “alphabet“ of pitches directly out of the vocals and consonants of each syllable of each word. Chico Mello constructed an own system of composition that gives every figure it`s special character, and of course repeating non harmonic - melodies to each reply. The basis of the work is the entire text.
Each singer-actor has 1 or two 2 accompanying instruments, as follows:
Brian + Bariton Saxophon + Contrabass
Alice + Clarinet + Viola
Susy + Celesta
Maisie + Oboe + Violine
Lewis + Tuba + Contrabass
Official + Percussion
In the new music-dramatic form of „Telebossa“ the dramaturgy of telenovelas is so to speak „bossanized“ – an exciting contradiction, intensified by the scenic action.
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