dossier
selected press
program
press reviews (de)
reflections:
- edith hall (professor for ancient greek literature)
– dr. laura gianvittorio-ungar (senior postdoc, research on greek theatre)
- constantin leonhard (actor, director and performer)
a full audio-visual documentation of the performance can be send on request. write to: buero@theatercombinat.com
|
|
tantalus, as punishment by the gods bound on the tartarus rock and therefore in eternal hunger and thirst, is dragged from the underworld by the fury to prolong the curse on his family and the enmity between his grandchildren atreus and thyestes. in the fight for dominance over mycenae, the betrayed atreus forges a cruel plan: out of fear of a civil war, he invites his banished brother and his sons to share the power over mycenae. thyestes becomes the victim of the staged revenge of atreus, who kills the sons of his brother thyestes in a ritual and feeds them to him. thyestes devours his own sons, unknowingly, in the certainty of having a share in the power. out of horror at this unimaginable crime, the cosmos collapses and daylight disappears forever.
contemporary bodies, which with their biography
inscribed in their flesh,
encounter the ancient tradition of a brotherly conflict,
moving it through and within themselves.
they spit out the result. cb
claudia bosse stages thyestes by seneca as a text-space choreography of fragile bodies that meet the language of the roman empire. language that moves naked bodies and is moved by them. language, which surprises in its explicitness and challenges our imagination: absorbing, speaking, swallowing, breathing, eating. the five actors take hold of the figures tantalus, furie, atreus, thyestes, messenger. they are at the same time the choir and negotiate the constantly growing thirst for revenge.
a former cafeteria of the siemens factory becomes the location for the choreographic staging: a factory-canteen-architecture for the reproduction of working people and employees in the design of the globalization of the 1980s.
in the negotiation of past and future, the ancient theatre text touches on the present: the violence of myth, which triggers a cycle of competition and the production of revenge, while territory, power, property and (family) solidarity are at stake. fragments of karl marx's „grundrisse der critic der politischen ökonomie" confront seneca's language with economies of the present, the circulation of raw materials, people, goods and capital, until the world sinks into ecological chaos.
a story of the (re)production of guilt and revenge, a conflict about unconditional power and superiority. atreus lets his brother thyestes unknowingly devour his own children. in a cycle of violence, the digestion of one's own children becomes an act of the greatest tenderness. a local youth choir expanded the choral organism in the 4th act of the piece, wandering through space. |
