nuvolario #MusicFor18Musicians

“This combination of breathes one after the other, gradually rising like waves against the constant rhythm of the pianos and wind instruments.” Steve Reich

Cirrus, clouds and breaths follow one another, creating a taxonomy of the sky that crosses the stage and its celestial artifices. nuvolario (Italian word for cloud atlas) is an exploration of the ephemeral and transformative power of theatre that invites us to look upwards, a tribute to the visual power of clouds in the simplest of theatrical actions; to see what is not there, a theatre of air.

Transfigurating the outer landscape into the inner ones, OHT explores clouds as the stratagem to bring theatre back to its original evanescence by transforming the breaths of Steve Reich’s masterpiece into clouds.

Music for 18 Musicians [Mf18M] begins with a series of pulsations that rapidly multiply into a breathtaking sound vortex. Once triggered, Mf18M uses air and breathing to modulate and reverberate. The breath of the female voices becomes the measure of the track’s pulsations, creating an incredible sonic vertigo, a polyrhythm of breaths, a continuous movement of air within repetitive beats.

Air, declined in its different mutations (from clouds to breaths), is a transformative agent that in nuvolario manifests itself in all its invisibility and visibility; in the appearance and disappearance of a cloud as well as in the moment of suspension between inhalation and exhalation.

Filippo Andreatta’s work is a show made up of variations, overlappings and slight phasings. Free of breaks and joints, it brings Steve Reich’s rhythmic dynamics to theatre. Historically sunk in its own weight, in the physics and metaphysics of its bodies, theatre has not had a light fate due to forgetting the air. It didn’t go any better to the orchestra, literally buried in a pit or cast into an abyss; ‘mystischer Abgrund’ in Richard Wagner’s words. Yet, in theatre, the audience’s heartbeat disciplines itself on a common rhythm, while the audience’s breathing remains slightly out of sync; just as in Mf18M, in the theatre, breathing gives the measure of our heartbeat.