Antigone_fragments
„thirsty dust“

Text-fragments by Sophokles

A Performance in three languages German, Korean and Portuguese

1.  Premiere:  11th June 2004   : Modernes Bad, Berlin Neukölln
2.  Premiere:  01th December   : 2004 WERKSTATT DER KULTUREN Berlin

„Thrown into wild ways" ...“
Sophokles ANTIGONE
 
“Antigone:  Elle existe dans le contre.”   

Louis Jouvet
 

Three actresses from Germany, Korea, Brazil step into a kind of laboratory, where they encounter the matrix of human relationships as they are drawn within the dramatic bedrock ANTIGONE. They explore the relationship between man and wife / sister and sister / sister and brother / power and powerlessness / lover and beloved / reasons of state and the individual / between sacred and profane. Three actresses are decoding thematic text-fragments of ANTIGONE by constantly changing roles and by reflecting their autobiographical experiences at the same time. 
ANTIGONE _ fragments is a kind of theatrical ritual, an experimental arrangement,
a multilingual urban ritual. 

„Changing oneself into threatenable dust.“ 

Heiner Müller

„The word - like a wounded silence.“ 

Edmond Jabés

The body of the voice
One focus of this project is on the body of the voice, on the presence of the voice, its freeing referred to their theatricality.
Which voices can be discovered between/below/above the layers of this canonical text Antigone?
Which voices do the actresses explore with their tongues while they are flying back and forth between mother tongue and foreign language: - in their daily lives, in their art, in the education of their children?

"... to migrate from the mother tongue is to alienate the mind of any idea of omnipotence of the word, of any illusion that the word can completely detect and reveal ..."
Massimo Caccia: The whiteness and the blackness, in MIGRANTS

„The live music provides at the same time a rigorous as well as emotional range of gestural sounds, like violin, frame drum, wood, stones, metal plates and balls using.
My responsibility: not to resort to clever imitation of classical forms or take on a postmodern ironic posture.”
E. Gradman

ANTIGONE _ fragments allows us to ask for other rites of respectful treatments with the deceased by gestures of a spirituality that point at a vibrant culture of the one-in-another of life and death, being and non-being.
Can we inter-cultural-urban-performers discover through the essential basic principle of theatre, transformation, our distinct ties to one of those archaic ritual gestures that appeals to Sophokles?

„It is death that fills everything with life.“
Korean-shamanic wisdom

An empty and ineffective ritual 
-
"Faced with the Civil War in which her brothers have killed each other Antigone takes a rigorous position. She does not defend her uncle Creon and the law of the State which he represents. She also does not join the army of her brother in the war against the state. She is very conscious of the role she has chosen.
And she acts in a manner that is loyal to this role. She leaves the city at night and goes to the battlefield, taking a handful of dust and scattering it over the body of her brother, whose burial Creon has denied. A symbolic ritual, empty and ineffective against the horror. But she is executing it because of a personal need.
And she pays with her life. This is the theater: an empty and ineffective ritual that we fill with our "why" : with our personal needs."
Eugenio Barba

 
Supported by: Berliner Senat für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kultur Berlin 2004,  
WERKSTATT DER KULTUREN Berlin