The man has fallen. The skull opens. Time expands.
What is left of the the memory fades away on the floor. He has just lost the notion of future, only the past and his automatisms remain.
He was an actor, without the basis of theatre — a puppeteer?His life is nothing more than the ruins of memory, and it is fragmented, divided in 4 characters. In the moments when everything is constructed and reconstructed as easily, the borders between worlds become even more permeable. The space of the stage is the inner space inhabited by the 4 characters coming from the unconscious, but captured in the world of stage acting.
(from the notes to OVO)
@c’s Ab OVO stems from their work for the soundtrack of OVO, a play by the puppet theater of Porto, developed in late 2011 and early 2012. Starting from an original idea by Eric de Sarria, OVO was created cooperatively during a series of rehearsals that involved all the participants in the play — actors, puppeteers, musicians and other creators — and premiered on February 10, 2012 at the São Bento da Vitória Monastery. The musical outcome of this process were 19 recorded compositions that constituted a majority of the play’s sound.
Ab OVO results from the realization that a music so tailored to a particular context could not be easily detached from it. When considering how to publish this work and what it would become without the stage, actors, puppets and dramaturgy, Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais felt the need to rework all the pieces, opting for revisiting parts of the original soundtrack and for composing a series of six new pieces that are now presented in this CD.
The end result, although remaining close to the play’s soundtrack, is an album that chiefly preserves traces of memories from the play and expands its creation process, thus rereading, reinterpreting and rediscovering OVO.
OVO was created by Edgard Fernandes, Eric de Sarria, Isabel Barros, Rui Queiroz de Matos, Sara Henriques and Shirley Resende, with puppets and scenic objects by Rui Pedro Rodrigues and Filipe Garcia, video by Albert Coma and costumes by Eugenia Piemontese. Photos by João Tuna © Tuna TNSJ.
