Ninguém & Todo-o-Mundo: Ópera lírico-turística em torno de Gil Vicente

What do the foreigners who visited Porto and other Portuguese cities in the time of Gil Vicente, centuries ago, tell us? What was their relationship with the city and its population? What surprised them? What disappointed them? What similarities and differences can be associated with our current reality? What virtues and problems arise from this?

Ninguém & Todo-o-Mundo is an opera divided into four tableaux, structured as if it were a round trip between our contemporary times and the 16th century, recalling figures, episodes, and ideas around the history and literature of travel and tourism in the intervening centuries. With a satirical, critical, humorous, and reflective gaze, this journey, sketched upon a constant and complex duality (the national versus the foreign), will bring together on stage two main soloists, a tenor and a soprano, who will metamorphose into various roles: Beatrice (an Italian backpacker), Barão (a bankrupt businessman), Berzebu (the main Devil), Bispo (a comical clergyman), Brünnhilde (a German investor), Dulce (an unemployed young woman), Duquesa (a bankrupt widow), Dinato (the Devil’s secretary), Deolinda (a homeless resident), and Dâmaso (a real estate agent).

Between the second and third tableaux, halfway through the opera – that is, at the most remote and distant spatiotemporal destination and, simultaneously, the most universal – an interlude shifts the exegesis to an infernal place where the devil Berzebu and his secretary Dinato are confronted with Ninguém & Todo-o-Mundo (represented simultaneously by the chorus and the show’s audience), recovering here the famous moralizing quartet that Gil Vicente conceived for a moment in the “Farsa da Lusitânia”. The farce, which is all of us and is nobody, is recontextualized here into a well-humored and timeless praise of travel in the broad sense.