Elevate 2024 presents:

Composer Maya Shenfeld and filmmaker Pedro Maia present their collaborative audiovisual show based on Maya’s record Under the Sun.

Maybe there really is nothing new under the sun, as Maya Shenfeld says and is preached in scripture, but at the same time, in our insignificant scale, everything seems to crumble in super slow motion — climate change and other civilizational crises show us a complicated era to solve together.

Maya Shenfeld feels these urgencies on her own skin, but on stage we see Pedro Maia’s hypnotic images collected from the deep entrails of the Vila Viçosa quarries, symbolising the apparent impassiveness of the planet which we so want to save. It is before the sanguine textures of the Alentejo marble and its gigantic blocks, like funeral urns, that we understand the cycles of this and other worlds — some perishable, some symbolically eternal, some destroyed by Humanity. Synths, brass, choral voices and field recordings make up Maya’s transcendental soundtrack, which radiates like a beam of sunlight reflected in the deep, turning chaos into a spectacle of dramatic and almost impossible landscapes and scenery.

Commissioned by Semibreve & A4  (2023)
Premiered at Semibreve Festival, October 2023. Braga, Portugal

Further presentations:
Next – Advanced Music Festival by A4, November 2023. Bratislava, Slovakia
Elevate Festival 2024, March 2024. Graz, Austria