For the second edition of the project “Dança com Músicos” (Dance for Musicians), Festival Materiais Diversos invited Clara Andermatt to direct a new creation for the regional Philharmonic Bands. Andermatt brings to the project her long-time collaborator, the composer and pianist João Lucas, continuing their joint work of research on music and movement and their interactions.
Focusing on the associative characteristics of the Philharmonic Bands and the role they play in aggregating the communities, the project “Dança com Músicos” proposes a voluntary participation of the members of these collectives, believing that the encounter with professional artists brings an added value and the motivation for collective creation, promoting a reflection on the very nature of “creating together”.
“A Banda” is constructed around the idea of a multitudinous, complex, and sophisticated structure of a musical group. Not all the members of the philharmonic participate in this project, giving a sense of a phantasmatic presence of the missing elements. The particularity of each individual, of each musical note, and of each gesture, reveals a singular poetic construction.
“A Banda” leads us to a quasi-cinematographic fiction, sustained on the seductive crudeness of an incidental sociocultural reality. The piece is a testimony of the fragility and the strength of the encounter between individuals when this encounter is based on free choice and not on institutional obligations.