The Book of Disquiet

Libretto after Fernando Pessoa, adapted by Michel van der Aa (E,G,Pt)

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The Book of Disquiet is a collection of fragmentary texts, diary entries and autobiographical anecdotes only published fifty years after the death of Fernando Pessoa. It was assembled from loose sheets of paper, found in a box trunk on his death. Michel van der Aa narrowed down the texts through a process of selection in order to create a piece that could exist in ‘real’ time in the theatre. A series of recurring themes group the fragments by subject matter, for instance isolation, love or dreams.
There are realistic scenes with the alter-egos of Bernardo Soares but also scenes that are much more abstract, drawing upon entries found in the book to create a more dreamlike mise-en-scène. So the video switches between imagery that literally extends the physical events on stage, and more surreal scenes that make us delve deeper into the mind of the protagonist.

Poetic