After the staging of Oedipus the Tyrant in 1993, Antigone's staging concludes the Hölderlin project, a project that for four years engaged the activity of Lenz Teatro in a complex work articulation, built through the in-depth study and dramatic and scenic elaboration of tragedies, the readings of great European actors such as Bruno Ganz, Marisa Fabbri, Edith Clever, the reflections and critical analyses of film and theater directors, philosophers and germanists.
Friedrich Hölderlin's production of Antigone, the first Italian translation and performance, concludes the project that for four years engaged the Research Laboratory in the analysis and performance of Hölderlin's tragedies, an artistic experience that profoundly influenced the poetics and theatrical language of Lenz Rifrazioni.
Exile from our language. Far from the known signs and senses we are in a foreign land. Separated from our language we begin to read Sophocles' Greek and listen to Hölderlin's German. The layering of the meaning and sound of the two texts is our memory. But it is only Hölderlin's text that is assumed in its entirety as the source text of the tragic representation.
Its lexical and syntactic order - paratactic / discontinuous / elliptical / fragmented constructions - becomes the foundation of our new word state. By pursuing extreme literalness and radical changes in its translation, the convention of our language is subverted in the invention of a transparent idiom that strips and denudes meaning. The skeleton of a language at the limits of communication, which only the actors' body-voice and the body-space of the scene can translate into tragic passion. At the origin of thought-word is not harmony but the violence of conflict and the suffering of the "body in struggle with the god"
The translation and dramaturgical writing of The Death of Empedocles (third draft), Oedipus the Tyrant, and Antigone are the result of a unified work; the double translation-origin text/translated text (translator's task) and dramaturgical text/scenic text (playwright's and director's task)-is overcome in the unity of the compositional process. The three functions –translator, playwright, and director – proceed together, elaborating the dramatic structure and scenic functions in the act of translation, in a formal and conceptual reciprocity that tends to self-generate the new text.
Hölderlin's text originates and contains the tragic mechanism and its expressive possibility, but at the same time the dramaturgical model that represents it pushes translation in search of the form that most radically expresses the meaning of the tragic action.
The triadic movement of Oedipus + Antigone + Ismene, the sign of the "Elend" - the hero's exile-misery - concluded the last act of our mise-en-act of Oedipus the Tyrant. The final image was composed as the prelude to the future conflict of ANTIGONE: the fight for the death of the two male-brothers Eteocles and Polynices and the fight for the love of the two female-sisters Antigone and Ismene, at the centre of the scene Creon.
But in Antigone everything is already accomplished. Of the struggle, only the bodies lying on the dry ground remain; it is the time of mourning. The work of burial must begin. The agon of males is followed by the ergon (work) of females, the work of pain. For it is in the work of mourning that filia (love) is regenerated. But now is the time of the absence of love, it is the time of war. Grief must be prevented. Burial must be stopped. But the work does not stop, the work must be completed. The spirit of love and the spirit of battle united in the heaviness of a single heroic body are forced into their duality. Separated they no longer know who to look at and where to go, alone they stand on the sidelines of their time and space.
In Antigone the original place of the tragic is lost, denied, taken away by time and history. The space-time fragmentation of Oedipus contains within itself the condition of abandonment and exile. The loss of the unitary place, the last visible place of the conflict, the factory-place, forces us to the border, to the foreign place: the theater is the non-place, the space of transit, the margin.
But in the condition of exile a feeling: nostalgia for the father's land. With that we cover the naked body of the theater.
The construction of Antigone's soil is the tragic act of the actors; all their acts constitute the work, a temporary and mutating monument, the scene of mourning.
Representing the conclusion of the Hölderlin project, the work on Antigone takes on an extremely important meaning for Lenz's theatrical poetics Refractions; tending to restore the original tension of the mythological structure of tragedy, Hölderlin rewrites a new work through his translation/interpretation of the classical text; in Antigone Hölderlin does not limit himself to the cultural contextualization of the text in the Romantic era, but it goes beyond the thematic reading by enucleating a new “mytheme”” of a linguistic-poetic nature: it is the poet's word that signifies for itself the necessity of conflict and tragic opposition
In establishing the form of Antigone Lenz's tragic performance, Rifrazioni will “fatally” follow Hölderlin's philosophical indications; every structural element of the show will be the epiphany of the word that kills:
Traduzione: Barbara Bacchi.
Drammaturgia e regia: Maria Federica Maestri, Francesco Pititto.
Opera scenica: Giuliana di Bennardo.
Costumes: Lorenzino Piazzi.
Drammaturgia ed esecuzione musicale: Patrizia Mattioli.
Interpreti: Simona Angioni, Annamaria Benone, Adriano Engelbrecht, Pieter Jurriaanse, Ercole Lattari, Elisa Orlandini, Bruno Pistorio, Sandra Soncini, Cristina Terzoli.
Buti, Teatro Francesco di Bartolo, 18 febbraio 1994.
