Murmuratorium is simultaneously a music-theatre “performance” and an installation that can be explored freely and informally. An architectural space, or a corner of the landscape, is temporarily occupied by sound-art objects and people, giving voice to “delicacy”, “listening”, and the “revelation of beauty”, asking us to “be together” in a poetic and tender way.
Using sound features like Dabo Domo’s “itinerant scintillators”, metal bells identical to those used in Metamofose, interactive speakers and “murmurers”, Companhia de Música Teatral (CMT) weaves an organic scene, in deep dialogue with the characteristics of the location, which emerges to rupture the space with the frantic rhythm of everyday life, suggesting a “ritualization” of interiority.
The “performance” starts with an intervention in the street or in a nearby space that turns passers-by into audience-participants with whom the music-theatre action is developed.
It comes out of an educational project in which children, teenagers and young people—participants from CMT-Kids—establish a “creative dialogue” over several days with people from a local group (from a similar age group, or with other shared characteristics).
The word “murmuration” is part of the bird universe that CMT has been exploring recently, following various projects that focus on environmental issues. In works such as Jardim Interior, NOAH and Orizuro, CMT has sought, through art, processes of “attunement” between different people, and between people and the world: a fragile world that we have to care for.
Murmuration describes the type of flight observed in some species when thousands of birds flock in formation: countless individuals move in space as a kind of collective organism that morphs and takes on “sculptural” forms without individuals colliding. It is a phenomenon that remains truly mysterious and that will never cease to thrill us with the extraordinary beauty of the shapes created and the poetry they inspire (flying dragons, birds made of birds in a kind of feathery fractal, a biological ink that paints the sky). It is fascinating that the phenomenon of “murmuration” is described with a word that reproduces the sound. The sound of the wings of thousands of birds sounds like a murmur, so it is said. It is likely, as time passes and with what is happening in the world, that there will be fewer and fewer opportunities to see/hear the birds murmur in the sky.
For this reason, Murmuratorium is also a meeting, an assembly, summoning the urgent need to join together, and take a critical journey that relates to each and every one of us. Music calls us, unites us and, as in the meetings of the birds that swoop and paint the sky, human voices can also converge in a mass action of extraordinary beauty.
