Orestea

#1 NESTS

From Agamennone by Eschilo

In the first chapter of the trilogy the extreme state of feeling, the passion that moves and pushes towards death, the tragic killing of the hero, the mystery of the human condition take shape in the oscillation between weakness and strength, vulnerability and power of the psychic body of Cassandra, the foreign prophetess of misfortune, prey to war and slave in the house of the Atrides, refracted ray of Clytemnestra's poetic and violated physics.

The installation of the first chapter highlights a pedestal-nest that draws formal inspiration from the work of Mario Merz, in which the female characters of the tragedy – Clytemnestra and Cassandra – lay and incubate their own eggs. The desecration of the nest triggers the tragic conflict between the forces, the irreparable act that sentences their double death.

The performers of #1 Nidi are Sandra Soncini, protagonist of the most important creations of Lenz in the role of Clytemnestra, and Carlotta Spaggiari, sensitive actress, in the role of Cassandra, already an extraordinary incarnation of Ermengarda in Adelchi and Angelica in the cycle inspired by Orlando Furioso; together with them, in the function of Iphigenia and Choir, Valentina Barbarini, icon of Lenz and interpreter of Iphigenia in Aulis, first paragraph of the diptych inspired by the myth of Iphigenia.

#2 MILK

From Le Coefore by Eschilo

Having returned to his parents' home after the estrangement desired by his mother – who lived an orphaned, humiliated and mocked childhood – Orestes is convinced by his sister Electra to establish, in revolt against maternal power, an anti-authoritarian, intolerant, antagonistic child collective. The performance of extreme acts such as the destruction of the house and the killing of the mother, guilty of the murder of the king and father Agamemnon, transfigure the innocent child into a delusional and furious adult.

In Latte, the second episode from Le Coefore, the stage installation prepares – symmetrically to the nest/bed inhabited by the mother Clytemnestra – some ordinary and active elements of domestic physics: an artificially nutritious board – flooded by the black milk of hatred inspired by Paul Celan's Todesfuge and Anish Kapoor's liquid vortices – and the lair/cradle in which Orestes will hide to escape the fury of the Erinyes.

The performers of #2 Latte are Barbara Voghera, in the role of Oreste, a sensitive actress who has already played Hamlet and the major creations of Lenz and Sandra Soncini, in the role of Clytemnestra; together with them Lara Bonvini in the role of her sister Elettra and Valentina Barbarini as Ifigenia and Coro.

#3 PUPIL

Da Le Eumenidi di Eschilo

In the final episode of the trilogy, the persecution of the matricidal Orestes by the Erinyes and his final acquittal by the Areopagus tribunal take place. The protagonists of the last act are the deities: Orestes, the Shadow of Clytemnestra, Athena, Apollo and the Erinyes. In Pupilla, the third episode from Le Eumenidi, the stage installation prepares, after the destruction of the house carried out by Orestes, a non-domestic space functionally referable to the waiting room of a public service; in this anonymous place, sanitized by the emotional violence that tragically transfigured them, the family members hope to rectify their identity and reclaim a new destiny.

Performers of #3 Pupilla are Barbara Voghera in the role of Orestes, Sandra Soncini for the Shadow of Clytemnestra, Monica Barone – former interpreter of Iphigenia in Tauris by Goethe and Gluck – in the role of Athena, Carlotta Spaggiari in the role of Apollo, Valentina Barbarini and Lara Bonvini in the role of Choir and Erinyes.

About the Oresteia at the time of the pandemic

Maria Federica Maestri

We have not been ‘devoured’ artistically by the weight of the tragic chronicles of pain and death that have been delivered to us daily for many months now. There are no direct traces of it in the stage figurations that have found fulfillment in this pandemic war period, because theater is by its nature tragic art, a work of mourning and catharsis, a place of metamorphosis of evil/disease – which in the tremendous initial electrocution of Oedipus coincides with individual evil – in heroic experience of loss. During the rehearsals of the last chapter of the Oresteia – Pupilla – it was taken into account in formal terms: it certainly interfered in the performance modus of the six actresses of the ensemble, who could not touch each other and who, to work safely, had to remain forcibly distanced. It was about transferring their artistic suffering, their physical disempowerment, into conceptual empowerment, I tried to guide them in search of an antiretorical body, more sensitive to the inner impulse, capable of exalting their emotional field in a new grammar of retention. The stage installation, underwent a strong formal variation, ‘ionized’, emptied of material solids, acquired a superior energetic charge, became more vibrant, activated by a new live virtual signification.

Oresteia by Lenz

Francesco Pititto

Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris, #Nidi for Agamemnon, #Latte for Coefore, #Pupilla for Eumenides, the saga of the Atrides, the authority and power of the gods decisive, the equalization of the Polis testifying to the stalemate. Erinyes for Eumenides, Eumenides for Erinyes, theater cannot save the world and what remains today is the ferocity on which the world was formed. Has the war stopped? The progressive destruction of the planet?

Not even in an idyllic dream, and perhaps only in nightmares can it resurrect the bestial origin that lives within every human being, man and woman, single and in a group, and in particular in the clan, in the family. And here we must return, the world confined within the home is, as always, the theater of discovered, true and direct human feelings and behaviors, for better or for worse. Power, affection, love, hatred, revenge seem to remain intact within the hereditary nucleus, partly refractory to what happens outside; even if closely linked to the given order, to the democratic norm of participation, rights and duties yes but first those of the inside, there the citizen is first son, mother, father, uncle, grandfather and so on.

The child is always the most beautiful, the most intelligent, I could die for my son, my nephew, my sister... From this simple course of things we can investigate the meaning of the quote, the opportunity of the interpretation, the rewriting, the staging of this trilogy. I think of a representation of the mathematical arrangement of fundamental dramatic figures which is, before any contemporary reading, imprinted in a framework of truth and, paradoxically, of anti-mathematical representation.

Thus the rewritten text becomes a tragic crossword, a complex puzzle of emotions and disastrous actions. Since there are no longer divinities to regulate roles, the chessboard, the fundamental element of madness, irrational fury, Dionysian whim, titanic strength is missing. Here then some new protagonists, tragic figures of contemporaneity, intervene like Amazons to bring back the hubris necessary for the human to rebel again. By changing the pattern induced by the play, these tragic atoms can deflect the direction of their fall, the pattern of dramaturgy can be lost temporarily, and then return and make the action proceed in the labyrinth of the scene. There can be no tragic representation without the presence of these protagonists, those we like to call “sensitive actors”, endowed with that unlimited expressive power that allows them to tell the truth, even the crudest. They have a timeless breath, anti-academic and anti-experimental vocality, echo of an elsewhere of thought, natural posture without affectation, functional gestures.

Carlotta Spaggiari's Cassandra, and then Athena, bring darkness, animality and reason, Barbara Voghera's Oreste stands in an infant body with a voice already old and already dressed in bloody experiences, Monica Barone's Athena lives with her daily ceremonial and is an oracle of life without a voice, and then the broken Iphigenia of Valentina Barbarini who was a doe in Aulis and then with Monica a silent priestess in Tauris, between tragedy and romanticism; the Clytemnestra of Sandra Soncini first mother and then murderer, the Electra of Lara Bonvini sister and accomplice of Orestes: here is the Family mirror of human nature, and it is in particular the figure of the woman – mother, sister, daughter -, which like a black hole of love and hate, draws and drags every tragic passage into the bottomless. And all together also Choir, a living choir, a participant like the one wanted by Aeschylus, not only an observant party involved. We excluded the image, as in the first two episodes I did not accompany the rewriting of the text with a parallel imagoturgy. We did not feel the need to add virtual figures, real-world epiphanies, to the antimatter brought by actresses: they were already, in addition to bodies, a true, sincere, material image. Instead, during the course of the opera, together with Lillevan – composer of the music for the entire Trilogy – we had created a video installation with a live performance, Orestea Concert, at the Farnese Theater in Parma. A concert of sounds and images, a sounding of the imagoturgy, absent from the theatrical rite, but immanent to theatrical action.