Chirpy Indigeneity
Tasked with the Alkantara Festival 2023’s closure, Uirapuru by Marcelo Evelin transports the Portuguese audience into a reiterative reflection on resilience and reinvention in a time of climate and political change, decolonising both art and thoughts via ethereal birdsongs turned territory capable of re-storying the land itself.
Renowned for its loud and beautiful song, which earned it the title of musician wren in English, the uirapuru is more than just a chirpy fella. Based on the Tupi-Guarani word wirapu ‘ru, meaning “man transformed into a bird” or “decorated bird”, this singer of the forest inspired myths, beliefs and works of art alike, entering the soundscapes of both Waldemar Henrique and Heitor Villa-Lobos, two prominent Brazilian composer of the previous century (the latter being described as «the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music»). More symbol than animal, the little bird lately also entered into the realm of contemporary dance through Brazilian choreographer, researcher and performer Marcelo Evelin’s homonymous work, serving here as a vessel to evoke sounds and movements aimed at constituting «another sense of humanity that allows a landscape of bodies to launch themselves into a condition between landing and taking flight, performing life as movement and gesture and, above all, as sonority and vibratility».
Uirapuru envisions this mythical birdsong as a territory, a possibility to reinvent and resist the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism in the threatened and violated lands of the Amazon. By blurring the repetitive movements of the feathered creature with the ritualistic steps of the original people of Abya Yala, Evelin gives rise to an ancestral quest for reclamation and renewal that sees in the uirapuru a «promise of the appearance of a Brazilianness that insists on vibrating» in spite of everything.
Side stepping underneath a bountiful sky illuminated by a luxuriant cluster of lights, the six performers hypnotise themselves and the audience with their scant metronomic variations, transporting minds and bodies alike in an imaginary forest where all life concentrates in fleshy murmurations and frantic gazes. The sound creation, responsibility of cinema sound designer Danilo Carvalho, adds to the overall sensorial estrangement, plunging us even deeper in the thick of this indigenous jungle where flight and refusal represent the freedom to imagine and create an elsewhere in the here – a present future beyond the imaginative and territorial bounds of colonialism.
Constructed via a horizontal and participatory creation, Marcelo Evelin’s decolonial aesthetics both breaks from coloniality’s reliance on hyper-individualism to maintain this world and diffuses itself through shared artistic process to imagine worlds otherwise, reminding us that Art is nothing but the contentious dance of the spirit.
The show was played at
Sāo Luiz Teatro Municipal
rua António Maria Cardoso 38 – Lisbon
Saturday 25 November and Sunday 26 November 2023
21:00 and 17:00the Alkantara Festival 2023 presents
Uirapuru
by Marcelo Evelinconcept and choreography Marcelo Evelin
created and performed by Bruno Moreno, Fernanda Silva, Gui de Areia, Luis Carlos Garcia, Márcio Nonato, Rosângela Sulidade Vanessa Nunes
dramaturgy Carolina Mendonça
artistic assistant Bruno Moreno
light Márcio Nonato
sound Danilo Carvalho
costumes Gui de Areia
technical director and tour producer Andrez Ghizze
preparation and rehearsal Mariana Alves
illustration Elza Hieramente
photography Maurício Pokemon
reception/CAMPO Producer João Marcos
production director Regina Veloso/Casa de Produção
administration and logistics Humilde Alves
production and touring Sofia Matos/Materiais Diversos
artist residencies CAMPO Arte (Teresina), Teatro Municipal do Porto – Teatro Campo Alegre (Porto), La Vignette (Montpellier)
coproduced by Teatro Municipal do Porto, Festival Montpellier Danse 2022, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Demolition Incorporadaphoto by Pedro Sardinha
