henrique cantalogo
Scenes from the Falling Sky
for large ensemble
Building musical bridges between contemporary music, traditional Brazilian music, composition and improvisation, Scenes from the Fall of the Sky is a scenic orchestral performance inspired by the book The Falling Sky - Words of a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert. The audience is invited to immerse themselves in a succession of tragic scenes illustrating the Yanomami prophecy, in a powerful and poetic form that offers a sensitive reflection on humanity’s relationship with the planet in our days.
« The falling sky is a prophecy of the Yanomami shamans.
One of their missions is to keep the sky in place.
If white people destroy the forest, spread epidemics, if the shamans die,
there will be no one left to hold up the sky.
But the sky is already sick from the smoke—
the smoke that rises into its chest and begins to suffocate and burn it.
The sky is very fragile. »
Davi Kopenawa Yanomami – shaman and leader of the Yanomami people, northern Brazil
Synopsis :
A young orchestra of 16 musicians from various nationalities explores sound, gesture, words, and stage space in a highly narrative musical performance that invites the public to reflect deeply on humanity’s relationship with the environment.
Through an immersive sonic and musical experience, Scenes from the Fall of the Sky echoes the sounds of untouched forests, the noise of relentless machines, and the laments of a civilization in perpetual pursuit of “progress”. With a sonic dramaturgy shaped by the forms of contemporary music and enriched by the musicality of diverse Brazilian traditions, composition and improvisation coexist to promote a collective, circular, non-hierarchical, open, and democratic musical practice within the orchestra.
Scenes from the Fall of the Sky is a one-hour staged concert inspired by the book The Falling Sky by Yanomami shaman and leader Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert. The piece is structured around three major ecological crimes that took place in Brazil in recent years: the Amazon forest fires (first movement), the oil spill on the northeast coast in 2019 (second movement), and the Brumadinho dam failure (third movement).
A short film presenting the creative process and the inspirations behind Scenes from the Fall of the Sky.