The Spanish Agency for International Development and Cooperation (AECID) and the Embassies of Spain in Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, New York, Tokyo and Washington, DC present the digital project #ThisIsNotAMusicBreak, a series of collaborations between Spanish artists and artists from other countries, in video-clip format, incorporating music, dance and avant-garde performance.
#ThisIsNotAMusicBreak is a project of the AECID’s Window Programme: A Window on Spanish Culture, with the aim of continuing to promote – despite the difficulties imposed by the current pandemic – the internationalisation of Spanish artists, creators and cultural industries, working in networks and mainly through digital media.
The first piece in the series #ThisIsNotAMusicBreak is Carceleras de “Barbián”: Zarzuela-Kabarett, in which Fernando Carmena directs, exclusively for the AECID’s Programa Ventana, the impressive performance by Rodrigo Cuevas, with arrangements by the German Frank Merfort and the Dutch Richard Veenstra. This is a contemporary reinterpretation, a liberating and radical musical transfiguration of the piece “Carceleras”, originally composed by Ruberto Chapí in 1885 for the zarzuela “El país del abanico” and later adapted for “Las hijas del Zebedeo”. (1889). The video-clip “Carceleras” is part of the production of the show “BARBIÁN: ZARZUELA-KABARETT”, and was recorded during Rodrigo’s confinement in his Asturian farmhouse and Merfort and Veenstra in Berlin.
