Time & Date
Information
Duration
60 minutes
Tickets
Onassis Stegi Friends & General Presale: from 9 MAY 2019, 12:00
Full price: 7, 10, 15, 20 €
Reduced, Friend & Groups 5-9 people: 8, 12, 16 €
Groups 10+ people: 7, 11, 14 €
Νeighborhood residents: 7 €
People with disabilities & Unemployed: 5 € | Companions: 5, 7, 10 €
Group ticket reservations at groupsales@sgt.gr
Introduction
What happens if you and I together, what happens if we all become Medea? A chorus of five, each in the role of Medea, together refigure the work’s ethics, politics, and performative possibilities in a contemporary context.
Medea always survives. Euripides’ emblematic protagonist has, in her way, haunted all modes of artistic creation, from the big screen, to modern dance, to opera, and the visual arts. Trajal Harrell’s feminist revisioning begins where Euripides’ "Medea" ends. The celebrated choreographer demands narratives that examine women’s lives beyond the sensational moments of infamy. "O Medea" asks: how can others recognize and join us in the wild grief that our lives produce? And what does it mean to be with other women and men who express the weight of their lives performatively, like Medea? What does it mean to be a woman who lives on by channeling the histories of how she has loved, been loved, and been betrayed, through the ecstatic and aesthetic rituals of mourning?
“I want to liberate Medea from the most often perpetuated idea of vengeance and anger. Rather I see the killing of the children as a metaphor. She had to kill the ideals of motherhood and wifehood in order to reach her potential as a woman freed from being defined by men.” The protagonist’s dilemmas and the ritual elements of myth become the point of departure for five dancers who activate the figure of Medea. Trajal Harrell returns to Onassis Stegi with “O Medea” in a world premiere.
Photo © Nick Knight
CREDITS
In the work “Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure),” which was presented at the Onassis Stegi in 2016, Harrell attempted a reconsideration of “official” historical narratives, most of which silence issues of race and ethnic identity. In a similarly creative re-reading of history, the choreographer now imagines a hypothetical meeting between three different heroines: the emblematic Medea, Maggie from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” and Katherine Dunham, a leading figure in modern dance.
“Medea, a barbarian twice over—by birth and from love,” writes Giorgos Heimonas in the introduction to his translation of Euripides’s work. This aspect, of cultural difference, is often overlooked in readings of Medea: the clash between two cultures that also proscribes how the story will unfold. It isn’t only betrayal in love, but also the ensnarement of the subject in civilization, which shapes, even predetermines, certain decisions that subject will take.
Harrell doesn’t linger on Heimonas’s notion of Medea as a “distorted erotic figure,” nor on the “barbarousness of her erotic denuding,” her revenge on Jason, which bubbles up from her boundless, impassioned rage. Rather, Medea becomes the excuse for stories from the present to be heard, which may carry the same despair, centering around the internal schism in the person telling the story. In essence, these are “Medeas”—if one can make such a claim—since the heroine’s role is split between seven different performers.
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