At the end of the new production of the 19th-century Brazilian opera O Guarani, performed at the Municipal Theater of São Paulo, a shaman – the indigenous actress and artist Zahy Tentehar – bursts into the set unexpectedly. He sings a poetry mantra in Guarani while walking among the corpses of Portuguese victims of a massacre perpetrated – according to the libretto – by the landowner Dom Antonio de . A dozen members of the Guarani choir accompany him with their song of complex harmonies.
It is the most successful dramatic moment of a groundbreaking production of the opera by the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes, based on the romantic novel by José Alencar, with a libretto in Italian, premiered in 1870 at La Scala in Milan. Little remains, after seeing it, of the noble savage on the way to disappearing who stars in the novel, in the style of The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826).
With the creative direction of the indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak, O Guarani incorporates a second narrative, that of 19th century romanticism, through videos, dance and music from the Guarani choir and drawings by the indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa. The alternative perspective “places us in the present and casts a critical eye on the opera and its stereotypes”, wrote Krenak, author of a series of books with suggestive titles such as Com posposar el end del mundo or La vida no és utilis, which incorporate the indigenous animist worldview into the Western metaphysics of the 21st century.
The truth is that the 900,000 indigenous Brazilians spread over 300 towns are not only growing in number – with more favorable demographic trends than the rest of Brazilian society and a new generation of university students – but also in influence. And, after bordering on catastrophe during the four years of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency, they are beginning to occupy previously unimaginable spaces in Brazilian official culture.
The message was clear on the night of the opera, when the Guarani choir and other inhabitants of the Jaraguá Indigenous Land descended the modernist staircase of the iconic theater-lyceum, built in 1911, while singing demands for the demarcation of their lands, two of which are in the megalopolis of São Paulo itself. The Guarani were the majority people in southern Brazil, as well as in what is now Paraguay and part of Bolivia and Argentina. Now, there are almost 300,000 in the four countries, many already established in the big cities. “Perfi, people are starting to realize that there are indigenous people in São Paulo too,” said Jaduca Guaraní, who was selling handicrafts at the theater with other families from the small land of Jaraguá, in the municipality of São Paulo.
“When we decided to do the version of the opera, we were very aware that the Municipal Theater was built on Guarani territory”, explained Andrea Caruso Saturnino, theater director, in an interview. “Theatres and lyceums are a kind of European brand of the 20th century, imposed on the societies that were colonized”, he says. “A new perspective was necessary; the question is: why did it take us so long to do it?”.
Even during the Bolsonaro years, major institutions began to open their doors to indigenous artists. Since the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year, museums, galleries, theaters and festivals have incorporated a new generation of indigenous artists and intellectuals.
Along with Krenak and Yanomami writer Davi Kopenawa, Baniwa is a key figure. He has dedicated himself to decolonizing art through painting, performance and video. Some of the best-known works attempt to subvert the same traditions of Brazilian romanticism as Gomes’s opera, especially the drawings of Jean-Baptiste Debret, the best-known prints from the colonial era.
Baniwa’s drawings, projected on a screen on the stage and in the dome of the theater, constitute an alternative narrative to the opera book, with questions taken from Krenak’s thought: “What is it like to be civilized?”, “Is progress good?”. “An important part of Denilson’s work was to take the images and reproduce them with a plastic commentary by inserting current images, and Ailton proposed to do the same with O Guarani”, said Caruso Saturnino in the interview.
The same indigenous assault on the institutions of Brazilian high culture takes place in the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, on the other side of the battered historic center of the Brazilian megalopolis. And, here too, one of the protagonists is Baniwa, born 39 years ago in the Amazon state, near the territory of the Yanomami people.
In the midst of the sacred works of official modernism by Candido Portinari or Di Cavalcanti, Baniwa has erected an installation in the form of a tower, painted with colors of symbols and claims in several languages ??and topped with a Wiphala flag, the flag of the original Latin American peoples.
Likewise, three art exhibitions related to indigenous culture have been inaugurated at the emblematic Art Museum of São Paulo (MASP). One is from huni kuin artists, an indigenous people who are fighting for demarcation in the Amazonian state of Acre and whose culture and psychedelic colored art owes a lot to the transcendental effects of ayahuasca. The other two samples at the MASP are by Carmézia Emiliano, Alvida Árbol and the collective Bepunu Mebengokré.
Also in Rio, the Museum of Modern Art, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary, has exhibited under the title Acts of Revolt a series of works, many by black and indigenous artists, about the barely told history of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous rebellions throughout history. Rosana and Gustavo Wapichana, from the Wapichana people in Roraima, also in the Amazon, lead the display of an indigenous collective entitled “We are living frontiers”, which includes a representation using Wapichana symbols of the indigenous revolt of Platja de Sang, in the northern Amazon, in 1790.
Glicéria Tupinambá, from the Tupinambá indigenous land in the south of Bahia, presents a video of an equally psychedelic feather dance, and in another video Uyra Sodoma walks the streets of Manaus with her body painted with the scales of the Amazonian pirarucu fish. “In the city of Manaus there are 45 native villages”, he reflects, while contemplating the immense Amazon River from the chaotic metropolis of the jungle. “I didn’t ask to be here.”
