Fidelio & the White Hands Choir
White Hands Choir
The White Hands Choir (Coro de Manos Blancas) is the leading group of the Special Education Program of the National System of Orchestras and Youth and Children's Choirs of Venezuela (El Sistema). This program was created in 1995 with the main objective of integrating children, youth and adults with functional diversity or physical and cognitive disabilities into daily life and artistic activities, using music as a tool for development and inclusion.
The White Hands Choir is made up of 120 young people who form two sections: the Vocal, directed by professor Luis Chinchilla, made up of children and young adults with visual and cognitive deficits, motor impairments, learning difficulties, autism, as well as those who do not have any disability; and the Gestual, directed by the teacher María Inmaculada Velásquez, made up of Deaf and/or hard-of-hearing children and young adults who perform a unique form of movement art choreographed to music.
In the their performances, musical works are amalgamated into a single voice, through body expression and gestural language, generating new paradigms for the creative performative arts in society and in education for people with functional diversity.
Beethoven: Fidelio
Personal freedom and creativity
Members of the El Sistema’s White Hands Choir (Coro de Manos Blancas) in Fidelio, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2022.
Throughout his musical upbringing in Venezuela, Gustavo rehearsed and led the White Hands Choir in various programs through El Sistema, notably conducting their first-ever symphonic concert. In 2020, he envisioned a new production of Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio, to mark the composer’s 250th anniversary of his birth, which explores his identity as a deaf artist.
Beethoven, one of history's most popular and influential composers was, for over half of his life, hard-of-hearing and completely deaf. In fact, when he conducted the premiere of Fidelio in its final form in 1814, Beethoven withdrew from public life because of it. When Gustavo visited the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, Germany and fully immersed himself in the composer’s life, it was clear to him that what was perceived by some as a limitation, in reality, was actually reinforcing and furthering the composer’s creativity.
Gustavo began developing this innovative approach to Fidelio with director Alberto Arvelo, which places the Deaf artists at the opera’s narrative core, a story itself which speaks to limitations of personal freedom and the fight to overcome obstacles. Through the support of the Dudamel Foundation, the White Hands Choir prepared to perform Fidelio in a tour throughout Europe with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in April 2020. Unfortunately due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the production was forced to a halt.
Ludwig van Beethoven, 1804-05. Joseph Willibrord Mähler (10 June 1778 – 20 June 1860).
The expressive power of sign language and the search for human expression
In April 2022, the Dudamel Foundation supported the White Hands Choir on their journey to Los Angeles, CA to join Gustavo, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Tony Award®-winning Deaf West Theatre at Walt Disney Concert Hall for the world premiere of this new Fidelio, created for both Deaf and hearing audiences.
Told through the composer’s music sung by hearing vocalists and acted through the expressive gestural poetry of sign language by deaf actors, the performances explore the search for communication—both primal and sublime—that is at the heart of all artistic expression.
Fidelio’s Echo
excerpts from an essay by Gustavo Dudamel published in Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces, (Princeton University Press, 2021).
“In Beethoven's immense oeuvre, there is no work more expressive of the overcoming of adversity than his only opera, Fidelio. The transcendent, transformative power of human expression is fundamental to my understanding of art, and Fidelio is the most vivid, compelling dramatization of that principle.Not only in its musical language but thematically and symbolically, the composer dramatizes aspects of his personal condition, connecting those struggles to universal themes.
“I cannot think of Beethoven in general, and of Fidelio in particular, without thinking about the spiritual father of my country, Simón Bolívar. Beethoven and Bolívar were two courageous, passionate visionaries, direct contemporaries whose parallel lives straddled the transition from the Enlightenment to the revolutionary Romantic era, who came of age in the shadow of Napoleon and went on to dominate the cultural consciousness of their time. The message of liberty and struggle for freedom presented by Beethoven with such ferocious beauty resonates with the story of Bolívar, who faced colonial armies, survived political intrigues, and suffered personal tragedy, yet ultimately set millions of South Americans on the path to freedom.”
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