perVERSIONES )http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28426846

(See below links to separate songs)

www.fatima-miranda.com


A FEW SONGS    perVERSIONES 
Après un Rêve (Gabriel Fauré) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28676459
La Llorona (Popular Mexican) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28431843
Walk on the wild side (Lou Reed) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28431360
La Diva de L'Empire (Eric Satie) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28430502
Chega de Saudade (Antonio C.Jobim) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28430663
Du bist die Ruh (Franz Schubert)  http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28431717
Alfonsina y al mar (Ariel Ramírez) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/29005288
 La Bámbola (F.Migliacci, B.Zambrini, R.Cini) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28431029
 La Internacional (Pierre Degeyter)  http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28432586

PROGRAMME
I. GODS PRAYERS AND QUERIES
Salmo Copto   ANÓNIMO
Composición para Raga Bhairavi   TRADITIONAL INDIAN
Saeta   F. MIRANDA - TRADITIONAL SPANISH

II. LÁGRIMAS
Flow my tears (for John Cage)   JOHN DOWLAND
Cry me a river   ARTHUR HAMILTON
La llorona   POPULAR MEXICAN

III. LUCHA LIBRE
La Internacional   PIERRE DEGEYTER
Walk on the wild side   LOU REED
Estranha forma de vida   ALFREDO DUARTE

IV. MIELES Y HIELES
Ojos verdes   VALVERDE, LEÓN y QUIROGA
El árbol del olvido   ALBERTO GINASTERA
La Bambola    F.MIGLIACCI, B.ZAMBRINI, R.CINI

V. LO JAMÓN NO QUITA LO JAPÓN
Sutra Hannya Shingyo   TRADITIONAL JAPONESA
Entre Salamanca y Samarkanda II   FÁTIMA MIRANDA

VI. NO MORE BLUES
Du bist die Ruh (por ballenas)   FRANZ SCHUBERT
Chega de Saudade   ANTONIO CARLOS JOBIM
La diva de l'Empire   ERIK SATIE

VII. ADIOSES
Alfonsina y el mar   ARIEL RAMÍREZ
Strange fruit   LEWIS ALLAN
Après un rêve   GABRIEL FAURÉ

ABOUT
perVERSIONES

Idea original, dirección y cantante performer
Fátima Miranda

 Pianistay arreglos para piano
Miguel Ángel Alonso Mirón

Fotografías para la escenografía
Chema Madoz

Fátima Miranda has always composed and sung her own work using unusual vocal techniques, either invented or learnt from traditional Eastern and Western cultures and covering a four octave range. She has come so far with her voice that what is extraordinary for her on this occasion is to come so close, singing as she always has, and also as never before, the evergreen songs we’ve grown up listening to-Quite a challenge, indeed.

The repertoire has been chosen based on the certainty of what one is touched or moved by, with no intention of covering all periods or subjects. Medieval melodies, laments, lieder, the chants of chamans or Indian ragas will intertwine in perfect harmony with jazz standards, Spanish copla, pop songs, fado or chanson, creating a map without frontiers that simultaneously addresses and emerges from the collective memory.

Among the many ways of understanding the concept of musical interpretation it’s worth highlighting two. The one perVERSIONS identifies with is hermeneutic and poetic. It has to do with the idea of translation and its objective is experience. The other, more common, conservative, mimetic and kitsch, not poetic, doesn’t hold any interest at all, being a matter of simple imitation, a postcard, a rehash, whose objective is merely to entertain.

The concert is structured in 7 parts or atmospheres, each comprised of 3 or 4 songs. Intimate constraint and extroversion alternate, harmonizing the everyday and the elevated into a result full of grace, unity and meaning.

Photographs by the distinguished Chema Madoz (www.chemamadoz.com), created ad hocfor perVERSIONS, are an essential contribution to the stage design. The collaboration between these two artists springs from both a special understanding and fundamental affinities. Both are unclassifiable, ingenious and ironical. Both love to take simple, fragile elements to the limits of rigour and perfection, always in the service of ideas and poetic feelings. In the works of Chema and Fátima the everyday becomes extraordinary, leading us to an imaginative, critical vision of reality and to levels of poetry and humour that always offer us healthy ground for reflection.

On the stage: a singer, a pianist and a piano. It’s a stage exempt of any contrived effects. A masterly lighting design and splendid costumes wrap each moment in its particular atmosphere. At precise moments Chema Madoz’s images fade slowly in and out, floating on an unconventional support that recalls the canopy of a bedchamber rather than a screen. Music, image and dramaturgy are integrated in a sensitive, organic whole.

Miguel Ángel Alonso Mirón, a daring and rigorous pianist obsessed by the stage interpretation of vocal repertoire, is the perfect musician for a concert in which the piano is not a mere servant of the voice, but instead a multi-timbral instrument, and in which the pianist becomes a performerin collaboration with Fátima, together offering us a very serious show that oozes playfulness, humour and poetry.

The title, perVERSIONS, gives us a hint that encompasses a whole declaration of principles and allows us to sense how the chosen songs, popular or highbrow, are able to offer us an other taste, an other way of listening and of feeling...






Cantos   Robados

(resume 26 min) http://vimeo.com/channels/281343/28656671

In Cantos Robados (Stolen Songs/Rolling Stones): Fátima sing solo at all possible ranges, from the top of a costume of 3 meters height, and also out of it. The costume works both as an altar of of ancient Mesopotamian or Inca godess, as home, tipi, volcano, mountain, carousel or projection surface, which sometimes turns like a monumental flamenco dancer, playing  huge castanets, and other like a ghost dervish that across the stage, always full of meaning (including that of humor), never anecdotal. Staging has been conceived and developed with the collaboration of  Mirella Weingarten

 

SEVERAL PIECES

Arrobada http://vimeo.com/29719169

Aire Desoriental  http://vimeo.com/36236689

Entre Salamanca y Samarkanda http://vimeo.com/29011091

Onomatropeya http://vimeo.com/29635645

Respiros de España Blues  http://vimeo.com/29009687

 

 


Cantos Robados


These days, when anything goes, it seems appropriate to reflect upon the true meaning of such hackneyed, spoiled terms as original, modern, post-modern, avant-garde and experimental, when applied to the latest artistic proposals. The global culture of the last few decades seems to have seen it all before, including the innovations of the avant-garde. Earlier on, poet Antonio Machado spoke ironically of those connoisseurs who were returning without ever having departed.  So, let's go, as soon as possible!  Not backwards, but towards the essence of things, towards the knowledge/foundations [conocimiento/cimiento] of forgotten traditions.  Let's assimilate the primitive, the ancient, the classical! Let's steal them! Let's uncover their archetypes to make them our own and, once they are apprehended, be able to return, really return, fostering a new art form, an other poetry.

Imitating and copying is undignified. On the contrary, stealing and appropriating the sources to integrate, digest and forget them, transcending them and converting them into something else can give rise to an original art form, art without artifice. A work of art can only be the result of a process: it can neither be created nor chosen. Everything is already there. Muses do not exist, and the new, in art as in science, is an open secret waiting to be unveiled.

The title Cantos Robados is a playful hint containing an entire declaration of principles that raises the need of process, of straying and losing ourselves on long roads, stumbling among rolling stones, constantly going back and forth, in a loop/eternal return feeding on ancient roots, now transformed and purified by an athanor transited by an infinity of musical cultures and by the most attractive, complex and strange vocal practices of this labyrinthine world, placing them in a fertile, crossbred and renewed dialogue, so as to give them another flavour, an other song.

Born of an ethno-minimalist sensitivity, Fátima Miranda turns her back on the tyranny of the canons of beauty in song and word and, facing the world her own way, she fearlessly rushes into the forest of the oral traditions which still inhabit this world: The berber alborbolas, Basque irrintxis, the microtones of the Indian Raga, griot and shaman street bands, the Dionysian melopea, Mongolian and Tibetan multiphonics, Pygmy, Iranian, Canarian and Tyrolean yodels, the nasal voices of Corsica, Indonesia and China, the interjective shouts of Japanese and Kabuki, the splintered retorts of the Korean Pansori, jazzy scat, the cante jondo and the most sublime sacred chant – such as the Indian Dhrupad, the Buddhist Shomio, Zen Sutras, the Almohedine Koran, Gregorian and Byzantine chants, and Sufi Qawwali – thus become for her a delicacy and a language, as common as bel canto or sprechgesang, loaded with phonetic memories, which possibly precede language itself, evoking extinct codes of communication which are nestled in the collective unconscious.

The dramaturgy of Cantos Robados is structured into two large blocks. The character of the first part is inner, contained, and ritualistic.  The singer seems to float enraptured high up, sculpting the air with a voice of crystal or thunder, of the Orient and the Disorient, of an ancient matriarch or a siren, generating the necessary complicity that such an imposing presence requires.  The second part is down on the ground, with a more joyful and profane atmosphere. Yet, both parts are steeped in an ironic view of the presence of the sacred in the domestic.

On stage, one voice and the gestures of a single female singer who interacts with a monumental and versatile costume-set of changing physiognomies, suggesting various architectures and landscapes (tent, house, apse or volcano), which are enhanced by a refined lighting design. Cantos Robados generates as many interpretations as there are spectators, each one nourished on and filtered through the individual baggage, the unconscious and the imagination of each person, and not based on pre-established formulas of attention.

The collaboration between Fátima Miranda and stage designer Mirella Weingarten springs from a special understanding.  Both are capable of elevating objects, attitudes and domestic elements – to which most people wouldn’t give a second thought – to the level of art.  Audacious and free of unfounded exhibitionism, both artists act just within those limits where something occasionally seems to be on the breaking point. In both their aesthetics there is something of the archaic and intangible, which appears to transport the audience far away from this world, submerging it in an elegantly sensual atmosphere, whilst an attitude of irony towards the kitsch and the grotesque exudes playfulness, joy, and even shades of fun and sagacious madness. Intimate contention and extroversion coexist in a synthesis which harmonises the ordinary and the sublime.

Somewhere between Salamanca – birthplace of the artist, where she studied Arts – and Samarkand – on the route to India, where she studied music – between the East and the West, between tradition and the avant garde, there lie the places these Stolen Songs/Rolling Stones metaphoricallyspring from and move through: the more rolling they are, the more stolen they become!