A Laugh to Cry

A Laugh to Cry explores some of the essential concerns of human beings, transported to our time in the context of a globalized world, formalizing themselves in a reflection on the hegemonic power of destruction of memory, devastation of the Earth, while speculating on the collapse of humanity. It’s a cry of freedom against tyranny, against the destructionof Art, against the devastation of the earth, against the omnipresence of arrogance and injustice, against oppression; it’s a glimpse of the loss of humanity, and the foreseen loss of civilisation as we know it.The opera develops on the border between dream and reality, between the visible and the invisible, between laughter and tears.

A Laugh to Cry with music and multilingual libretto by Miguel Azguime (Portuguese, French, English, and several other languages in the final part) is a metaphysical theatre that puts eternal archetypes to music and on stage. The interpretation involves five characters, represented by two sopranos, a bassand two narrators (woman and man); 7 acoustic instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and percussion andelectronic media in real time. The staging is based on multiple video projections built in symbiosis between music and text.