Conference Agenda

In his book, Ancestral Future (2022), Indigenous writer, philosopher, and activist, Aílton Krenak defends the search for a reconnection with nature and simple forms of inhabiting Earth. His attempt to solve the “many planetary crisis” addresses not only a material reframing, but transformations to symbolic and imaginary worldviews. One applied example of this shift in perspective is Krenak’s adaptation to Carlos Gomes’s Il Guarany (1870) for São Paulo’s Municipal Theater in 2023. This opera has an ambiguous legacy in Brazilian culture regarding its pasts and historicity (Rodrigues 2011, Batterman Cháirez 2023). On the one hand, it is the most prominent Brazilian opera that reflects much of the aspiration of national elites—past and present—in fashioning a cosmopolitan modernity, both in the text and in the music. On the other hand, the plot and music efface the indigenous voices that sets the opera within a national context.

In this paper, I investigate Krenak’s strategies to subvert the colonial narrative of the opera, adding multiple layers to what he calls the “surroundings of the opera.” These strategies include adding indigenous doubles to represent a perspectivist ontology (Viveiros de Castro 2009), using projections and set designs that reconfigure the space of the opera house, and bringing Guarani’s performers to the stage. Krenak’s “surrounding of the opera” echoes Dylan Robinson’s proposed strategy to use “material and spatial forms of writing” in creating cojoined spaces for Indigenous and non-indigenous forms and audiences (Robinson 2020). In this sense, Krenak brings Il Guarany and its historical readings to the present, complexifying the meanings for indigenous identities as represented in the mythical narrative from the opera. In his first foray into operatic stages, I argue that Krenak applies a vernacular performance theory that he has been developing over the years in different spaces: from speaking podium in the 1988 Constituent Assembly to recent media interviews and books. In shifting the ways that colonial narrative is portrayed, Krenak not only updates Il Guarany and its national meanings, but also suggest paths for opera’s futures.