The countdown to an exceptional world premier has started: on Saturday (May 8) the first performance of the “Amazonas Music Theatre” will begin at the 12th Munich Biennale, the international festival for new music theatre. The show focuses on a threatened environment – the Amazon Rainforest. Music theatre, media art, technology and science: the multimedia project, co-produced by the Goethe Institut, the Munich Biennale, the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe and other international partners, has been developed together with the Yanomami people, one of Brazil’s last great indigenous tribes.
In the Music Theatre’s three-part production the rainforest plays the leading role, throwing a new light on the essential life-giving “green lungs” of the continent. Each new day threatens to shrink the rainforest, through mass logging, livestock breeding, monocultures, the production of energy and raw materials. The aim of the show is to give the rainforest a voice using artistic means. In 2006 European and Brazilian media artists, composers, sociologists and anthropologists teamed up with the Yanomami people to develop the idea for the “Amazonas Music Theatre”. The production successfully combines the latest scientific insights with Indian cosmology and spirituality.
The result is an impressive alliance of language, music, movement and images, space and time: music theatre and contemporary media art flow together, music becomes visible, images and data become audible. The composers invite the audience to discover unfamiliar sounds, noises and acoustics through music. “Three perspectives converge in the Music Theatre: the absorbing European, the preserving indigenous and the questioning view of the future. The theatre piece reveals the aspects of the Amazonian future using all of the virtual and multimedia potential of the modern music theatre,” explains Peter Ruzicka, artistic director of the Biennale.
The Amazonas Music Theatre will be running until May 12 at the Munich Biennale which is taking place under the motto “From Another View”. Additional international performances are scheduled in Rotterdam (May 29 and 30), in São Paulo (July 21 to 25) and in Lisbon (October 4 to 8).
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