branco, branco, branco...

branco, branco, branco is a short opera of a post-operatic nature, without a linear narrative, constructed from 15 scenes conceived as fragments of moments from José Saramago’s Blindness. Each scene is born from a sentence in the novel, taken as a moment of suspension or a focal point of meaning, rather than a narrative element. These sentences function as poetic and symbolic material for creation, and more than dealing with the theme of blindness, they interrogate us about the human condition and what we are capable of in extreme situations.

The work is organized into fifteen brief movements, without thematic development, presented as sonic and visual miniatures: suspended instants that mirror key ideas from Saramago’s universe. It assumes the audience is broadly familiar with Saramago’s work and is capable of reconstructing the whole from the fragments our opera proposes.

Saramago stated that he wanted the reader to suffer as much as he suffered while writing the book. In this sense, the piece is sometimes bitter and is also born from that suffering, moving between a certain lyricism and anguish, distress, fear, pain, death, violence, sadness for a life interrupted by something uncontrollable, and the awareness of what we are capable of doing to survive. At the same time, branco, branco, branco affirms the possibility of finding beauty amidst chaos and, in moments of overcoming, the hope of finding happiness.