Fragmentos de teatro imaginario (versión larga, instrumental y escénica) (2009)
((stage version))

Fragmentos de teatro imaginario (Fragments of an imaginary theatre) was written for Ensemble Ascolta. It is a cycle of six instrumental pieces that have very different tonal color characters, but are nevertheless linked by some common musical building blocks. These building blocks appear again and again unexpectedly, in changing contexts, in changing formal functions. The result is a theatrical game with surprises and confusion in the listener's imagination. Hence the term ‘imaginary theatre’ in the title of the piece, which has already been used in different ways by other composers such as Hans-Werner Henze or Mauricio Kagel.

While up to the middle of the cycle this term refers to acoustic phenomena that appear in the listener's consciousness as theatrical play through a dramaturgical treatment, the production of sound itself is theatricalized as the piece progresses: The emergence of the musical building blocks in the ensemble is increasingly staged from the fourth piece onwards, the members of Ascolta gradually crossing the threshold from musician to performer, some everyday objects appear in the already familiar sonority of the building blocks and develop a life of their own... It is not so much the concert situation itself that I want to thematize, as we know it from Mauricio Kagel and the Fluxus performance. Rather, the scenic moment arises from the joint production of sound, whereby the boundaries between musician and performer or instrument and object are explored. From the middle of the cycle, the ‘theatre’ shifts from the listener's head to the stage, from imagination to visualization.

Elena Mendoza