The Kentucky Opera is presenting its third VISIONS! program production, a single-act opera about onetime Louisville resident and world-renowned ethologist Dian Fossey. The piece is titled Nyiramachabelli (pronounced Near-uh-ma-cha-belly), a word that appears on her tombstone and translates to “the woman who lives alone on the mountain” — an affectionate appellation from the native Rwandans who supported her work against gorilla poaching.
The libretto authors are all high school students who participated in the program’s two-week summer workshop, which had them create a story line and a thematic composition about the chosen honoree’s life (past subjects have been Muhammad Ali and journalist Helen Thomas). Theater, music and playwriting professionals, and a resident composer, who refines the music ideas for the finished product, lead the process. The collaboration is helpful for both the students and for the professionals, who, as director Michael Ramach says, “really feed off the enthusiasm of the kids.” This year’s librettists came from a wide variety of high schools, including Presentation, Sacred Heart and Mary Ryan academies and Jeffersontown, Ballard and Brown high schools.
Fossey, born in 1932, grew up in California and moved to Louisville to be the director of occupational therapy at Kosair Children’s Hospital from 1956 to 1966 before leaving for Africa. With no background in anthropology, biology, ethology or zoology, but enough ambition to impress revered paleoanthropologist Dr. Louis Leakey, she began her work with the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. Fossey established the KarisokeResearchCenter in 1967 between two volcanic mountain ranges in Rwanda’s Parc des Volcans, which provided a base for her studies of gorilla behavior, as well as for tracking the gorillas in an attempt to keep them safe from ever-present poachers. (The animals’ hands and feet were used to make ashtrays, while heads decorated the walls of the wealthy.) She received a Ph.D. in zoology from CambridgeUniversity in 1974, and continued to dedicate her life to the mountain apes until her brutal slaying in 1985. She was found in her cabin at the research center, presumably murdered by resentful poachers.
Nyiramachabelli is a one-act opera that provides a snapshot of Fossey’s life and time in Africa, particularly her interactions with the simians, her guide, and her lover, photographer Bob Campbell. Technology finds its way into the opera, with National Geographic images of gorillas projected on a screen onstage, transforming the dancers behind the screen into gorillas. Members of the University of Louisville Opera Workshop, the Louisville Youth Choir, the West Louisville Boys & Girls Choir, and dancers from local high schools perform it. The opera may be short, but the goal, according to Ramach, is “to get people interested in Fossey’s mission and wanting to find out more. Her work is ongoing — it continues to live long after her.”
The world premiere takes place on May 23 at 7 p.m. in the Bomhard Theater at the KentuckyCenter. It is free and open to the public. For more information, call 584-4500 or visit
www.kyopera.org.
— Katie Brown
