Choreographer Clara Andermatt reunites with her long-time collaborator, the pianist and composer João Lucas, for this new piece. The two share a complicity that stems from questioning the expressive relationship between movement and music.
Inspired in Italo Calvino’s "Palomar", the piece “Parece que o Mundo” invites us to gaze from a window onto a world that observes and is observed. Just like the novel, the piece oscillates between three distinct layers: observation, narrative, and meditation.
In the confluence of intuition and methodical thought, our attention to things drifts through an immensity of possibilities - our limitless relation to the cosmos and infinity and, at the same time, to the more confined realm of everyday observations, the domains where symbols and meanings are forged.
From Calvino’s writings, with its many possible interpretations, derived the ground rules for the creation of gesture and sound. In the novel, the world is scrutinized in a search for a systematic order in the unmeasurable magnitude of things; the piece tries to re-enact the mysterious intensity of the world, placing the spectators in an observatory of their own experiences.
The very particular sound is the result of the multiple experiments to which a small family of string instruments – a violin, a cello and a contrabass – is subjected, unravelling into possibilities that push past the threshold of the instruments’ musical functions; in their potential as objects, in their articulation with the interpreters, the set and the possibilities of the mise-en-scène. To this soundscape, a parallel electronic music discourse is at times added, suggesting other symbolic territories.
“The name of Clara Andermatt’s new piece suggests, from the very beginning, a particular mental disposition; suspended perception and existential wanderings seem to be the territories to which “Parece que o Mundo” leads us on a journey.”
Luísa Roubaud, in Público (2018)
“In a daze we watch a very complex set of elaborate proposals on stage; no longer the unassuming past (that would no longer be possible in this post-modernist 21st century), but something that goes beyond an artistic proposition; the elaboration of a complex, profound concept, amplified in its multiple fields − artistic, philosophic, even scientific − surpassing even the ingenious Calvino.”
Ivette K. Centeno (2018)
“Parece Que o Mundo” was shortlisted for SPA (Portuguese Society of Authors) - Best Author Award in the “Best Choreography” category. It was also elected “TOP 5 of the Year 2018 / Dance category”, by the influential weekly newspaper Expresso.