Since I was a child the creation of music, dance and scene was part of my vital journey, as if it were a game. But was throughout my whole process of artistic training, when I felt the need to turn my efforts into musical-scenic creation. Therefore, within the creation of contemporary music theater, stage direction and dramaturgy, there is a search for the concept of power, the strategies of powers and biopolitics, as well as the social political dissidence. All these concepts are, in turn, enhanced, reused, juxtaposed, coordinated or submitted to the use of multimedia, understood as the union between sound, video and physical and virtual spaces.

Heroes or beasts

Belenish Moreno-Gil, composition, libretto, stage direction
Óscar Escudero, composition, lighting design and electronics
José Ibáñez, Sound
Paco Pascual, Lights
Carmen17, Costumes and atrezzo
CAST
Irene Martín, María
Anasun Carmona, Isabel
Belenish Moreno-Gil, Pepa
Claudia Fernández, piccolo
Commissioned by Música en Segura, in co-production with Clammy and INJUVE (Project financed by Injuve creation grants)

Maria has just graduated with a degree in History and, with little motivation other than to get out of her precarious job, she has to start a thesis project full of doubts. After a conversation with Clau, she decides to start researching the Spanish Civil War and realises that she is completely unaware of how her family lived through it, which becomes her starting point. His grandmother and mother, who died years ago, cannot answer this question. So, in order to gather all the data needed for a state of the art to compile a state of the question, Maria turns to a government application which, fully automated by algorithms and managed by bots, provides her with an extremely detailed account centred on the figure of a great-grandmother, a great-grandmother who died years ago on the figure of an olive-growing great-grandmother. Finally, thanks to her memory, but above all thanks to her fingerprints, Maria comes into contact with and digital traces, Maria gets in touch with her ancestors on a path full of paradoxes and irony full of paradoxes and irony, in which the real, the imagined and the fake are interwoven. In parallel to our protagonist's quest, the composers, the real identities of the composers, the real identities of the singers, and zarzuela as a genre itself become genre itself become characters who, through a frenetic frenetic narrative full of time jumps time jumps, construct a plot in which nothing can be in which nothing can be taken for granted.

BIO

Autotune para el pueblo

Subnormal Europe

Concept, composition, dramaturgy,direction, constume, text, video and audio production: Belenish Moreno-Gil and Óscar Escudero.
Language: English (English Translation from Spanish: Ben Clark)
Composition and libretto commissioned by the City of Munich for the Munich Biennale
A coproduction of the Munich Biennale with Hertz-Labor of the ZKM Karlsruhe
In cooperation with Gare du Nord and ZeitRäume Basel and Wien Modern as part of the network for cross-form music theatre forms
With kind support of the Instituto Cervantes Munich

The Directorate General for Education and Culture of the European Union has delegated to the Münchener Biennale the commission of a project of innovation and development in the context of the German Presidency of the European Commission between July and December 2020. Quoting the text of the agreement between the parties, “the main purpose of this initiative is the exact technical reproduction of those instants, which have marked our History of progress in the audiovisual field. The collection must be composed by a set of files, which may be exhibit together with their originals, not being able to distinguish one from the other”. Following these guidelines, Belenish Moreno-Gil and Óscar Escudero have designed a session staging singer Noa Frenkel and sound engineer Sebastian Schottke. The team, in cooperation with the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe, will face the challenge of creating live replicas of these fragments in each of the performances. Thus, the goals of the project will be fulfilled, among them, and quoting again the award agreement: “to take the pulse of the current state of the European values and to reaffirm the sense of citizenship of its inhabitants, as well as the knowledge of our common History and its contributions to human development in difficult times for Europeanism”.

Subnormal Europe has been awarded in the Prix Ars Electronica 2021, the world's most time-honoured media arts competition, with an Honorary Mention:

“The one-woman-opera Subnormal Europe created by Óscar Escudero & Belenish Moreno-Gil follows the narrative of being European at a time where the political foundation of Europe is quite badly shaken. This work asks questions about identity, communication and the representation of things and thoughts. The result of the production of singer Noa Frenkel, Sebastian Schottke and the ZKM | Hertz-Lab is as brilliant as you can interweave fixed and interactive visuals as well as sounds and music, spoken and written texts into 60 minutes of breathtaking performance. In a triptych projection, Frenkel switches constantly between her role as performer and herself, Noa Frenkel. The music enables the listener to structure ideas using modern electronic textures as efficiently as possible. The virtuosity of Frenkel’s playing, the perfection of this live performance, and the complex integration of several layers of media and meaning truly deserved an Honorary Mention for this work.”

Noa Frenkel: contralto/actrees.
Sebastian Schottke: voice/ sound direction / Live electronics.

OST

Cocreation: Belenish Moreno-Gil and Óscar Escudero

HOC

Composition: Óscar Escudero. Staging: Belenish Moreno-Gil