Beyond the Milestone,
an original zarzuela by Sergio Camacho
On July the seventeenth 2008 the Spanish opera Beyond the Milestone was premiered as part of the Vamos Festival at the Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Supported by the CETL, Sergio Camacho’s latest artistic effort gathered a nearly full house audience who witnessed an innovative piece that combines orchestral music, spoken dialogue and songs, outlining a story set in a small village in the post civil war Spain, where every young man seems to be enchanted by the lures of a distant but rich land: Venezuela. A passionate story about broken families, far away dreams…and loss.
Stage director Luis Ortega provides a powerful vision of the hard life led by people in the Spanish forties and succeeds in creating an atmosphere that conveys the shades of their lives. He led the multicultural panel of actors and singers of Teatro de Nieve to a moving and passionate recreation of a close but distant time when emigration was the shorter route to hope. Together, Camacho and Ortega presented a magic realism tale, where the characters exposed their inner and outer worlds through the duality intrinsic to Zarzuela; text and music; word and sound. The outer, real world devised by spoken dialogue, in English. The inner, poetic world of thoughts and feelings, sung in Spanish.
Rooted in Italian opera and precursor of modern musicals, Zarzuela was the main music theatre form in Spain during the 19th and early 20th centuries and more than 10.000 were premiered during that time. Now, after a century of creative oblivion, Zarzuela has become in Spain a repertoire genre, with scarcely any new compositions recorded in the last four decades.
The zarzuela devised by Camacho and Ortega and staged by the artistic team of Teatro de Nieve is meant to share with the British audience the historical and cultural heritage that Spain has to offer.
