ArteSonado is a concert-show that integrates three universes: musical, visual and stage-dramatic, three disciplines generally unrelated and hierarchical. Overcoming these simple but firm barriers means subverting the spectator’s viewpoint, the work stops being obvious, it is transformed into a situation in which one participates. The visual polyphonies achieved by overlaying images as counterpoint to the music are neither decorative backgrounds to distract the viewer, nor synchronic or facile videoclips. They are, instead, virtual spaces. ArteSonado is a place for memory and imagination., another way of looking, feeling and listening, another mode of perception.
On stage: a single singer-performer. The live presence of Fátima Miranda, her concentrated and powerful dramatic gesture, her voice, crystal at times, at others thunder, redolent of Japan, India, Iran, Mongolia, Russia, Bulgaria or Andalusian Cante Jondo, makes all that occurs an absolute and unrepeatable present. Breaking all vocal conventions, she spans a four-octave register, reinventing, and making her’s, all possible ways of singing, starting from before music was even codified.
The show begins and ends with a capella works for solo voice. The path leading from the first piece (a call or invocation) to the last (catharsis) is woven from strands of two, three and up to fourteen voices. Over its duration, the concert passes through marine settings, jungles, bazaars and temples, distant waves of fiesta, childhood or contemplation, dramatic, fun and sensual tones; elegant or grotesque moods; exotic, beachfront or nocturnal perfumes, shadows of ritual, fears and wisdom. Together they weave a backdrop that allows each spectator to create his own show once he is submerged in this lacework of beautiful and subtle kaleidoscopic collusions, with ears that see, eyes that listen.
The play on words ArteSonado, alludes to two terms which are homonyms in Spanish, offering us an insight into the two central ideas of the work, one esthetic, the other conceptual: an ArteSonado is a system of ornamentation employed in the ceilings of certain classical, especially Arabic architecture. It consists of simple elements which are overlapped to create a work of great beauty and virtuosity. Arte Sonado is the art of sounds. In this concert the overlapping of the acrobatic voices of Fátima Miranda offers very rich polyphonies of unusual and refined orchestral and choral character.The philosophy and dramatic idea that nevertheless underlies this formal presentation has to do, in essence, with life itself. Each person is thus many and each defined personality is the overlapping, rather than juxtaposed, sum of all those interrelated I’s.