Microoperas of Today 

Act One: The Skies Won’t Keep Their Secret
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 Skies Won’t Keep Their 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?

Act Two: Aura
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 13^th 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. 

Act three: You Shall Disinherit the Earth
Liceu

You Shall Disinherit the Earth the story 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, and a young woman, lost and broken, seeks 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 possible regeneration of our future. A piece that wants to reflect on our collective responsibility regarding the transformation and degradation of what surrounds us, inviting us to rethink our complicity with destruction. 

The scenography, with an organic earth that beats with fragility, reflects the decadence of the planet, while large canvases, 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 sensorial atmosphere that, intertwining pain and hope, challenge us to rethink our connection with the earth and the need to find resurgence as a species confronting the drift to which we are accustomed.