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La Voz de los Arboles (The Voice of the Trees):
Bel Canto
and the Natural World
All the action in
Bel Canto
takes place in a relatively
confined space.
“The piece could be very easily claustrophobic,”
explains filmmaker and projections designer Greg Emetaz, “because it
all takes place in the same room.” The production team addressed this
issue with projections that Emetaz says “provide a kind of release from that
claustrophobia.” The projections—of clouds, butterflies, the city, the jungle,
the cosmos—“take us outside, take us to magical places, and to some
extent show the passage of time.”
The projections bring the natural world into the mansion. Nature is vividly
present, as well, in the language Nilo Cruz gives the characters to sing.
General Alfredo, in describing the social revolution he seeks, sings:
I don’t want anyone
to deny me the wind,
the earth, the right to exist.
César, the prodigy Roxane takes under her wing, learned how to sing from
the trees:
It was the jungle…
The great voice
of the trees
that taught me
to sing.
As she reflects on her identity, Carmen compares the mysteries of herself to
those in nature:
In my body there are rivers
and volcanoes unknown to me.
Undiscovered stars and gardens
navigate through my blood.
It’s not just the soldiers who draw upon images of nature. So, too, do
Hosokawa and Roxane. As she waits for him on the night of their tryst, Roxane
sings:
This night has traveled like a bird
and landed by your feet
so you may walk on it.
The characters may be from different worlds, but their shared kinship with
nature highlights a common humanity.
These images of the natural world bring to the opera a quality of magical
realism, a literary genre which incorporates fantastical elements into a
realistic narrative. According to Naomi Lindstrom, a professor at The University
of Texas, magical realism “fuses lyrical and, at times, fantastic writing with an
examination of the character of human existence and an implicit criticism
of society, particularly the elite.” In his own take on the term, Cruz has
described his writing as “realism that is magical.” Though no magical events
take place in
Bel Canto
, the opera depicts a world in which ordinary lives
are being lived in extraordinary circumstances, a world in which arias are
juxtaposed with guns. As butterflies flit across the walls of the mansion and
the skin of its inhabitants, Roxane sings:
Are we being made again?
Could it be that we’re in another place?
Could this moment have no logic?
Cruz’s poetic language evokes landscapes beyond the walls of the mansion
and engenders a sense of surrealism that underscores the strange time-
outside-of-time in which hostages and captors find themselves. Another
element that contributes to this feeling of limbo is
la garúa
, the fog that
descends eerily upon the mansion, disconcerting many of its temporary
inhabitants. Father Arguedas says it is sacred; Fyodorov considers it a curse.
Again, the world outside the characters becomes a metaphor for their
interior terrain.