Amazonian Night

The performance by the Brazilian musicians and sound artists Livio Tragtenberg and Marco Scarassati takes us on a journey into the past of Amazonia and into the modern-day world of Indigenous peoples.  In the first part of Amazonian Night, they create a soundtrack for the silent documentary movie No Paiz das Amazonas (In the Land of the Amazon, 1922), one of the most important and haunting testimonies of the occupation of the rainforest. This movie was the first to document the local economy of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon region, portraying the developing economies of fishing and rubber plantation in the early 20th century.  In the second part of Amazonian Night, the musicians accompany the cants of Ibã Sales, a shaman of the Indigenous people of the Huni Kuin from the state of Acre in the south of the Brazilian Amazon. In their ayahuasca rituals, the Huni Kuin establih contact with divine entities. The ingestion of ayahuasca leads to intense visions - the visualization of an expanded level of reality.  Music plays a fundamental role in activating the power of the ritual. Tragtenberg and Scarassati, together with Ibã Sales, attempt a sonic reconfiguration of these traditional chants through live performances, original recordings of ritual chants, and improvisations.