Librettist: Clément Bondu
Opera-ballet
Date: 2023
Language: French
Duration: 90 minutes
Small-scale
Kalis: soprano
5 ballet dancers
Paraíso may just be a dream.
Kalis tells us of her journey with the Maenads, her flight from the mainland, from the fires, war, and chaos.
In that space, in that post-Charon time, they took control. Kalis, in opposition to the figure of the ferryman, takes control.
Adrift at sea, Kalis and the Maenads arrived at an island where they created a new society based on sharing and community. Remembering ancient times and the images that haunt her, Kalis evokes the ghosts of the past, including the figures of Charon, Eurydice, and Orpheus, before welcoming the Chorus of the Living, a group of newcomers to that space. A dance, as a rite of passage, takes place among the Maenads to welcome the living, in a celebration of beauty, dreams, and possible worlds.
But this, like any other paradise, like any other dream, may perhaps be built on top of some inferno (hell). But we walk. And we walk. And we dig. And we keep walking. It is infinite.
Cl | Tpt | Vc | Egtr | Pf | Perc
Paraíso (2023), an opera-ballet by composer Nuno da Rocha, with Clément Bondu’s libretto and Marcos Morau’s stage direction, was commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the Centro Cultural de Belém, where it premiered.
The opera presents itself as a postlude to Rochas’s orchestral work Inferno (2020), premiered at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. While Inferno gave voice to the inertia of Charon, the ferryman from the Myth of Orpheus, Paraíso focuses on Kalis, one of the nymphs (Maenads), and explores the fiction of a world after Charon’s end.
It was necessary to kill Charon
the ferryman, the guardian of the underworld
it was the only way for us
to leave
to open the border
to no longer accept the law that let some pass
and refused others.
Date: 2023
Venue: Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon
Commission: Fundação Centro Cultural de Belém
Stage Director: Marcos Morau
Music Director: Pedro Neves
Cast: Eduarda Melo, Lorena Nogal, Shay Partush, Ester Gonçalves, Emanuel Santos, Margarida Belo Costa, Nuno da Rocha, André Hencleeday, Paulo Bernardino, João Silva, Raquel Reis and Marco Fernandes
