AURA
[SHORT-STORY]
Based on a short story by Carlos Fuentes…
“Recipient of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting award for Best Radio Drama, 1984.
“Combining sounds recorded in Mexico City and indigenous actors, Fuentes’ dreamlike realism
spawns an exquisite and hypnotic chiller. Felipe Montero responds to a want ad in the Mexico
City newspaper. He’s exactly right for the job—it’s as though the ad was written just for him. At
the address he meets a woman who surely must be over a hundred years old, and her young niece,
Aura. A strange force takes over and Felipe can’t help but be drawn into their lives…”
[Ivan Olson, Fresno Bee Republican] “…novelet about a young teacher of history who moves into
the mansion of an aged widow to write a general's memoirs. And there he meets Aura. Love of a
green eyed beauty and physical degeneration and death—two favorite themes of Poe and
Baudelaire—are woven so dexterously together that the fascination continues to glow long after
the book is finished.”
[Robert Nott, New Mexican, September 9, 2005] “Global DanceFest — now celebrating its fifth
year in Albuquerque — kicks off another season of world dance productions with Aura, based on
the novella of the same name by Carlos Fuentes. The piece, co-presented by VSA North Fourth Art
Center and NevvArt New Mexico, features 10 dancers who explore via movement, the sensual and
mysterious elements within Fuentes' story.
“Aura deals with a young historian who agrees to help an elderly widow with her late husband's
memoirs in her creepy old mansion. In the process he falls for the widow's young niece, Aura —
but there's something weird about the whole setup, including the widow's relationship with Aura.”
[Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times] “Carlos Fuentes, Mexico's leading writer (best known
for "Where the Air Is Clear" and "The Death of Artemio Cruz," both about the Mexican
Revolution), turns to the horror tale in his latest book. The setting of ''Aura" is a mysterious,
dilapidated, unlit house in a poor section of Mexico City. To the house comes Felipe Montero, a
youthful historian "full of useless facts," to take a job editing the private memoirs of a long dead
French general for his ancient widow.
“The memoirs — thick, musty bundles of manuscripts tied in red ribbons—are kept in an old
trunk in the widow's bedroom and are jealously guarded her and the squealing rats that infest
that corner of her room. As she hands the bundles, one at a time, to Felipe to edit, a strange
eroticism spreads through the house like a poisonous mist. Felipe seduces, or is seduced by the
widow’s beautiful green-eyed niece, Aura. Slowly at first, and then faster, the three of them are
sucked into a hypnotic nightmare as the secret of the memoirs and the relationship of the two
women become frighteningly clear.”
In 1996 a stage version was presented by the Chicago Dramatists Workshop…
In 1987. Mario Lavista received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first and only opera Aura, based
on the short story by Carlos Fuentes.
February 16 - 20, 2005
Contradanza and Rosanna Gamson / World Wide
Aura -- World Premiere
Mexico City's acclaimed contemporary dance company Contradanza collaborates with Los
Angeles choreographer Rosanna Gamson and her company World Wide to premiere Aura, a new
international collaboration. The evening-length dance theater piece is inspired by Mexican author
Carlos Fuentes' famous novella Aura, a ghost story set in a labyrinthine unnamed city. RG/WW in
collaboration with Mexican choreographer Cecilia Appleton and her company Contradanza merge
movement, bilingual text and evocative theatrical images to explore the duality of Latino and
Anglo cultures in Los Angeles.
[Gary Ferrington, “Audio Design: Creating Multi-Sensory Images for the Mind,” Journal of
Visual Literacy (1993)] “A critical difference between stereo and binaural playback is the aural
effect each has on the listener when headphones are used. A stereo recording will sound as though
it is originating within the listener's head. One seemingly becomes the soprano singing all the
high notes. The sound from a binaural recording will seemingly exist in a spatial field outside the
head forming a 360 degree sphere of acoustical space around the listener. A knock on the door, in
a binaurally produced ghost story, is quite startling. The binaural production of audio plays has
opened new production opportunities. In the ZBS presentation of Carlos Fuentes' Aura, the
listener enters the dark landscape of the mind. A young man answers a newspaper ad and finds
himself drawn into the lives of a reclusive old woman and her beautiful daughter who live in
house devoid of daylight. The ambient sound was recorded on-site in Mexico City and the use of
binaural technology enhances the listener's sense of presence's in each scene of the play.”
53rd International Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Paolo
Baratta, to be held in Venice from 25th September to 3rd October 2009. The presentation of the
multimedia work by José-María Sánchez-Verdú, Aura, based on the novel by Carlos Fuentes
(Teatro Goldoni, 1 October), is another important moment in the 53rd Festival. Born in the
context of the European performance network (ENPARTS) that the Biennale has launched with
other international partners and with the support of the Culture Programme of the European
Union, the work had its premiere at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid last May and will be
performed at the Theaterhaus in Stuttgart on 17 and 18 July before arriving in Venice.
[Denis Donoghue, New York Times, 1990] “His major fictions are projects of the bizarre and the
uncanny. He is not content for long to gratify one's sense of the usual, or one's prejudice in its
favor. I would not like to be asked to say what precisely happens in ''Aura'' (1962).
Ian Watson,
WRITING/ADAPTATION (THEATRE)
Bitter Fantasy - Loosely based on the Carlos Fuentes novella "Aura" - 1989.
La strega in amore (1966
'FRITZ' CREATES THREE-DIMENSIONAL RADIO
(Neumann KU-100 artificial head mike system)
Betty Smith...put on a pair of headphones to audition Carlos Fuentes' "Aura," the first of a series
of three-dimensional radio dramas...After a few minutes, she heard footsteps and a voice behind
her, and turned around. There was no one else in the room.
"I knew what to expect, but I was still fooled," she said... "Kunstkopf" binaural sound is a step
beyond stereo. Where stereo creates the illusion of sound originating on both sides of the listener,
binaural sound also reproduces sound behind, above, in front and below...
Fritz, officially the KU-81i dummy head manufactured in Germany by the Georg Neumann Corp. ,
is a gray, solid-rubber replica of a human head, mounted on a microphone stand pole...Fritz
embodies several improvements over early binaural mechanisms. .. By measuring more than 70
ears, Neumann calculated an average size and shape, according to Tom Lopez, president of ZBS
Media...Because the solid rubber... has about the same density as a human head, the dummy's
ears have the same acoustic properties as a human's. . . Neumann solved the loudspeaker
[playback] problem with... acoustic delays (in essence, sound filters) placed in Fritz' auditory
canals enabling the microphones to cope with the diffuse and complex sounds coming in from all
directions.. .
At a stroke, the old studio recording techniques...became obsolete. ZBS couldn't rely on a couple
of actors speaking all the parts while a sound person rattles doorknobs and rings telephones in
the background because the Kunstkopf would reproduce what was happening too accurately...
Screwing the head onto a stand and attaching it to a Sony portable digital recorder, ZBS went on
location. Lopez...carried Fritz around to record footsteps approaching over fallen leaves and
voices echoing in a stairwell... The listener hears the sound...with a devastating intimacy.
[from The Boston Globe, October 1984]
[CHRONOLOGY]
THE CABINET OF DR. FRITZ (DISC SERIES BY ZBS FOUNDATION)
Circa 1984 “Aura”
PERSONNEL: Roert Bielecki (Location sound engineer), Tim Clark (music),
Thomas Lopez (scriptwriter, producer), William Raymond (director).
CAST: Yamilla Constantina (Aura), Lope Einecka (Senora Consuello), Gregorio
Rosenblum (Felipe Montero).
EXTANT RECORDING
[SOURCES]
Ferrington, Gary. “Audio Design: Creating Multi-Sensory Images for the Mind.” Journal of Visual Literacy
(1993).
Fuentes, Carlos. Aura.