"Multimedia opera by Vasco Mendonça and Sandro Aguilar premieres in the UK"

Lusa | iOnline, 20.03.13

PING, a multimedia piece - the result of a collaboration between composer Vasco Mendonça and director Sandro Aguilar - will have its international premiere on 26 March in Wales.

Produced by Music Theatre Wales and staged by Michael McCarthy, PING will have its premiere at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff, followed by two more performances: on April 17 at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre and on April 18 at Clwyd Theatre Cymru in Mold.

This piece is a setting off a text by Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, and was premiered in 2011 at the Teatro São Luis in Lisbon, within Temps d'Images Festival.

The opportunity to perform it abroad originated from a meeting in France with the british director, where they found " compatible visions of theater and a shared admiration for Beckett", said Vasco Mendonça to Lusa.

In the new production of this rather hermetic text - that talks about spatial constraint and claustrophobia - McCarthy has chosen to to separate the spoken and the sung parts, by using an actress and a soprano.

"There is a kind of transposition of the various levels of consciousness that are present throughout the text, thus being made visible throughout the show," the composer has said.

Unlike what happened two years ago - when director Sandro Aguilar was operating the video in real-time - this production will display previously recorded sequences.

Still, it will use the same "abstract images, sometimes with an organic component, almost eschatological."

Vasco Mendonça and Aguilar have collaborated before, in a piece also based on a text by Samuel Beckett - a sign of interest in multidisciplinary productions.

However, working with video "is difficult and risky" because it can become a distraction.

"It is difficult for the energy on stage not to be dissipated, because video is a media that sucks our attention in a rather brutal way," he admits. (...)