At the end of the new production of the nineteenth-century Brazilian opera O guarani, performed at the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, a shaman—the indigenous actress and artist Zahy Tentehar—unexpectedly bursts onto the set. She sings a mantra of poetry in Guarani as she walks among the corpses of Portuguese victims of a massacre perpetrated – according to the script – by landowner Dom Antonio de Mariz. A dozen members of the Guarani choir accompany her with her own song of complex harmonies.
It is the most successful dramatic moment in a groundbreaking production of the opera by the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes, based on the romantic novel by José de Alencar, with a libretto in Italian, premiered in 1870 at La Scala in Milan. Little remains, after seeing it, of the vanishing noble savage who stars in the novel, in the style of The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (1826).
Under the creative direction of Indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak, O Guarani incorporates a second narrative to that of 19th-century romanticism, through videos, dance and music from the Guarani choir and drawings by Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa. This alternative perspective “situates us in the present and projects a critical gaze on opera and its stereotypes,” wrote Krenak, author of a series of booklets with suggestive titles such as How to Postpone the End of the World or Life Is Useless that incorporate indigenous animist cosmovision into 21st-century Western metaphysics.
The truth is that the 900,000 Brazilian indigenous people 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 Jair Bolsonaro’s four years in the presidency, they begin to occupy previously unimaginable spaces in Brazilian official culture.
The message remained clear on the night of the opera, when the Guarani choir and other inhabitants of Jaraguá Indigenous Land descended the modernist staircase of the iconic theater-high school, built in 1911, singing claims for the demarcation of their own lands, two of them in the same São Paulo megalopolis. The Guaraníes were the majority people in southern Brazil, as well as in what is today Paraguay and parts of Bolivia and Argentina. Now, there are nearly 300,000 in the four countries, many already settled in the major cities. “Finally, people are starting to realize that there are indigenous people in São Paulo as well,” said Jaduca Guaraní, who sold crafts at the theater with other families from the small land of Jaraguá, in the municipality of São Paulo.
“When we decided to do this version of the opera, we were very aware that the Municipal Theater was built on Guarani territory,” explained Andrea Caruso Saturnino, the theater’s director, in an interview. “Theaters and high schools are a kind of European brand of the 20th century, imposed on the societies that were colonized,” she says. “A new perspective was necessary; the question is: why has it taken us so long to do it?
Even during the Bolsonaro years, large institutions began to open their doors to indigenous artists. Since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory 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 his best-known works attempt to subvert the same traditions of Brazilian romanticism as Gomes’s opera, especially the drawings by Jean-Baptiste Debret, the best-known prints of the colonization 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 notebook, with questions drawn from Krenak’s thought: “What is it like to be civilized?”, “Is progress good?” “An important part of Denilson’s work was to take these 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 is taking place at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, on the other side of the ramshackle historic center of the Brazilian megalopolis. And, here too, one of the protagonists is Baniwa, born 39 years ago in the state of Amazonas, 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 raised an installation in the shape of a tower, variegated with symbols and claims in various languages ??and topped with a wiphala flag, the ensign of the original Latin American peoples.
Three art exhibitions related to indigenous culture have also been inaugurated at the iconic São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). One of them is from Huni Kuin artists, an indigenous people struggling with demarcation in the Amazonian state of Acre and whose psychedelic-colored culture and art owes much to the transcendental effects of ayahuasca. The other two samples in the MASP are from Carmézia Emiliano, Alvida Tree and the Bepunu Mebengokré collective.
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, on the rarely told story of Afro-Brazilian and indigenous rebellions throughout history. Rosana and Gustavo Wapichana, from the Wapichana people in Roraima, also in the Amazon, lead the exhibition of an indigenous collective titled “We are living frontiers”, which includes a representation through Wapichana symbols of the indigenous revolt of Playa de Sangre, in northern Amazonia, in 1790. Glicéria Tupinambá, from the Tupinambá indigenous land in southern Bahia, presents a video of a psychedelic dance of feathers, and Oops In another video, ra 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 indigenous peoples”, she reflects, while she contemplates the immense Amazon River from the chaotic metropolis of the jungle. “I didn’t ask to be here.”