A menina gotinha de água

The opera is about the water cycle; it tells a story of a water droplet traveling from the sea and back to the sea and all the connections that can be made with nature, education for citizenship, climate change, sustainability, and the environment.

The opera was designed for all audiences, but also as a pedagogical, interactive, and exciting challenge both for the audience and for the children participants is a musical and visual work that binds contemporary aesthetics with some important matters of humankind.

The influence of the children as singers and actors/dancers, as well as their influence in the visual content through the use of interaction technology, are key factors for creating a ludic and playful mood. Paula Azguime’s virtual scenography option and choice of mixing different inputs (real images, 2D and 3D computer graphics, and children’s drawings) for the staging of the opera proved to be very resourceful in creating dynamic, imaginative, and fantastic scenery and to be artistically very prolific and rewarding.

The children’s drawings, the videos, the representations, and their transformations hand in hand with the movements/choreography of the choir, contribute to the perception and fruition both of the music and the story. The music, sung by children, joins spoken and singing voices, real-time sound transformations of voice as well as nature and electronic sounds diffused in space.

The choice of the text, being a major text in children’s Portuguese contemporary literature by Papiniano Carlos, focus- ing on a crucial matter of today’s life regarding environment and nature bind with an original composition by Miguel Azguime allowed concurrently carrying out avery close and fruitful dialogue between the story, the music, the visuals, the choir and the narrator and a strong communication with the audience either children or adults.