Marco Polo – a premiere of a brand new piece for Narrator, Brass Quintet and a Percussionist

This is a campain aimed to help fund creation of a brand new musical work, featuring some of the most talented female emerging artists in Croatia, along with some of Croatia's finest musicians.
Composer Linda Uran, author and playwright Dorotea Šušak, costume designer Ana Mikulić, stage director Christian Jean-Michel Jalžečić, musicians of the Busina Brass Quintet with Marko Mihajlović, percussionist, and Kristijan Beluhan starring as Marco Polo, will stride to show their vision of a well known piece of history that has impacted the whole world.

Musical-scenic work ‘Marco Polo: From polar winters to sand dunes // From La Serenissima to the Silk Road’ explores the performance and cultural-popularizing potential of a historical figure whose global influence is recognized both in the historical sense and in the context of various disciplines of human activity. Questioning the simultaneous neglect of his artistic potential, Marco Polo in the context of this work presents a symbolic value and semiological framework: unrestrained and unbridled spirit, fearlessness, research efforts, freedom, attempts and dedicated reliability. At the same time, the character of Marco Polo represents symbols of the omnipotence of the universal man, mythological pseudo-reality, fairy-tale and phantasmagoria.

As such, the character of Marco Polo is constituted in the opposition of faction and fiction and the systematic questioning of the real in relation to the subsequently written refabulations of his life. Thus, with his inherent appearance, Marco Polo creates stage material worth staging, but also popularization in terms of public visibility. A character enters the scene whose 'silk road' or an event such as meeting and serving Kublai Khan can be drawn with a clear trajectory of mountain peaks or boiling deserts on geographical maps, but at the same time for which the exact place of birth, middle name or list is questioned. really visited and marked sites. It is a character whose results served the purpose of auxiliary instructions for future research by Christopher Columbus or Amerigo Vespucci. At the same time, it is a character whose oral narrative tradition is known for so much qualitative and quantitative exaggeration that because of it in Venice they allegedly decided for the first time to quantify, ie label the term and figure ‘million’, as a measure of its falsification and megalomaniac appetites.

For 45 minutes, the musical-scenic work 'Marco Polo: From Polar Winters to Sand Dunes // From polar winters to sand dunes // From La Serenissima to the Silk Road', brings a three-part structure of the life and character of Marco Polo, primarily following his life in three cycles: childhood and youth. and growing up, then in adulthood and traveling the world, and finally in considering his legacy and the mythological structure of manipulating the legacy, or creating pseudo-history.