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What does the Amazon region sound like? What do its clouds, its forests and its waves look like from above? Peter Weibel and José Wagner Garcia invite you to a multimedia flight of the arts and offer a foretaste of the Amazonas Music Theatre.

Actually, it seems as if the damp air would crush any life. Yet there is ceaseless humming and buzzing, in various pitches, from all directions, interrupted now and then by the calls of single birds. The soundscape swells and merges with the humidity and the heat. It is as if someone had put a bell jar over this spot of earth.

With roars and gurgles, the world’s largest river, the Amazon, winds through the rainforest, ever further downstream to the Atlantic. In many places the river is so wide that you cannot see the shore on the other side.

Clouds, water, forest ...

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On the northern shore of the Amazon live the Yanomami, natives of the Brazilian rainforest. For them, the material world is very closely woven with the spiritual world. Not only do people have souls, but animals and the rainforest, as well. Davi Kopenawa is a shaman. He understands the language of the archetypical landscape: “The true owners of the forest are the xapiripe spirits.”

The ancestors of the animals and the forest, he tells us, danced between the trees, over the mountains and the river. But, when humans began clearing the forest, they are forced to flee and the evil sun being comes to earth. As soon as its feet touches the ground everything will burn and the Amazon will dry out. “That is why we let the xapiripe spirits dance to defend the forest,” the Yanomami explains. The dance of the primordial beings stands for life and the preservation of order and balance.

Still, how long can the balance be held? Every day an area the size of 8,000 football fields is cleared in the Brazilian rainforest. Over the past ten years, 2,000 tonnes of mercury have been poured into the Amazon by gold diggers. An irreplaceable natural region is disappearing and along with it a people of 33,000.

The Amazon region plays a central role in the Culture and Climate series of the Goethe-Institut. The opera project Amazonas – Music Theatre in Three Parts, which will be premiered at the Biennale in Munich this May, lets us hear the river’s raging and roaring. The Yanomami are working with scientists and artists on the presentation of their habitat.

“Ever since the birth of opera with Claudio Monteverdi it has been a multimedia work,” says Peter Weibel, head of the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, in an interview for the website of the Amazon Music Theatre. “Since then it has contained three different media: images, texts and music.” If we do not define opera as multimedia, we lose sight of the nature of opera. “With the Amazonas music theatre, we are attempting to again adopt the original idea of the opera of combining a number of media.”

Together with José Wagner Garcia, media artist Weibel offers a foretaste in the video installation the cloudwaterforest.machine.

“If new audiovisual media are available to us today,” according to Weibel, “moving pictures, expanded lighting and computer possibilities, we ought to use them to carry on and update the tradition of opera.”

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