FADO WHILE WAITING

This is about longing, passion and loneliness inspired by the musical genres fado and tango.

 

Early morning in a train station cafe.  Everyone is on their way from something to something else - lonely souls who need somewhere to be while they wait. Everyone longs for something that is past, or that will never come. They meet one early morning with birds above the roof and blue tones on the walls.

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Through the characters' relationship with music, a series of stories are created about different human destinies that intersect at an apparently random point. Passion and great emotions are conveyed without irony. Here there is warmth and subtlety, people who don't usually open up find someone to share their stories with: strong human destinies and completely everyday love stories are woven together.

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SITE SPECIFIC MUSIC THEATRE
Fado becomes the vehicle to connect and move forward, enhanced by low-key tango elements. The play has become a story about how music becomes a way of staying alive. Love dies and love comes, out of these people, who meet through music. The story is a bit decadent, as if we are making the old-fashioned films come alive in an atmosphere that is also the stories of Europe today. The idea is to find existing suitable locations in addition to stages that allow the audience to be included. The play wants the audience to be absorbed by the performance, and invites the audience to join the performers at the end.

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THE MUSIC

Twelve songs are integrated: A surprising mix of seven exquisite Fados, a Brazilian waltz, a European Song Contest winner, a song from the opera Dido and Aeneas, and two great tangos. The musical landscape is a mixture of these songs and new compositions, depending on our collaboration partners and what they want to bring into the work.

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ABOUT THE PROJECT

The musical theater concept has been developed through research into fado and tango since 2017, and is great as a touring performance. A performance that includes music, theater and dance, as well as film and sound design. The project can be done in collaboration with another country and with practitioners from both countries. This is musical theater that is suitable for a diverse audience, for many different venues, and is just as relevant in and outside of Portugal - which is the homeland of fado.

BACKROUND
Lene Therese Teigen lived a year in Portugal with her family in 2007-2008. Lene sought out places where Fado was performed and began to explore the history of Fado. After she moved back to Norway, she met actress/singer Ida Holten Worsøe, who also got a role in the Portuguese feature film "A morte de Carlos Gardel". Through her work in Portugal, Ida became fascinated by fado, also because she had been told earlier in her career that her voice had "fado potential". Ida studied fado in Norway and had lessons in Lisbon before singing at an Alfama restaurant to great applause, with Teigen in attendance. They then decided to create musical theater with fado at its core.

 

RESEARCH AND WRITING PROSESS
When Teigen started working on the idea for Fado while we wait, she was also working on the play "Time Without Books" – which deals with people's life after living in a dictatorship for many years. That project was indeed linked to Uruguay, but she found that some of the research material was related; reading about Fado led her to think about how  we deal with memories. This is the core of both works – even if the result is different.

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