Zfinmalta's upcoming production, Voyager, is the brainchild of Paolo Mangiola, the national dance company's artistic director. Armed with a three-year contract, Mangiola is beginning to leave his mark at ZfinMalta, pioneering fresh thinking about contemporary dance on our shores.
Although he has already performed during the Valletta 2018 festivities, this production will be the full debut for Mangiola in his capacity as artistic director.
Mangiola is a choreographer, dance educator and performer working within ballet and contemporary dance practices. This production, a joint collaboration between Mangiola and Maltese-born visual artist Austin Camilleri, is inspired by NASA's mission into space in 1977 when the Golden Record, a gold-plated time capsule was launched on the Voyager spacecraft to communicate the human story to extraterrestrials.
This 60-minute brand new production questions how our past, present and future hopes might be represented now.
The sounds from Earth got Mangiola pondering on what type of sounds and historical images we would send to outer space if a new Voyager mission was to be launched in the near future.
The audience would get the drift of Mangiola's thinking through the dance routines they will be witnessing during the performance, which should open up a lot of questions about who we are and what we are up to.
Mangiola says that once we immerse ourselves into the production, it will make us realise how we treat this planet, what we take care of and what we neglect.
The performance follows two parts; the first is the launch of Voyager and the second part is the kind of message and sound we will pass today if we were to send another Golden Record to space.
Mangiola has been fascinated by space from an early age and always wanted this challenge to express his thoughts and appreciation of the solar system through dance choreography, while he continued to question himself - if dance would have been recorded and sent out to space to communicate something about what we represent... would dance be a good medium?
Meanwhile, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecrafts are exploring where no one and nothing from Earth has flown before. Continuing on their more-than-39-year journey since their 1977 launches, they both are much farther away from Earth and the sun than Pluto.
The primary mission was the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn. After making a string of discoveries there - such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon and intricacies of Saturn's rings - the mission was extended.
The adventurers' current mission, the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), will be exploring the outermost edge of the sun's domain... and beyond.
Who knows, this might inspire Mangiola for a sequel production in the future.
Voyager is being staged on 2, 3 and 4 November at 8pm at the Manoel Theatre. You can book your tickets for this much-awaited performance through the Manoel Theatre website: https://www.teatrumanoel.com.mt/default.asp?m=shows&id=765.