Mourning is a political issue
The pain and suffering of an “enslaved”, abused woman is a political issue
Tutto Brucia –Everything is burning
A live performance by the award winning Italian theatrical group MOTUS inspired by The Trojan Women of Euripides
Held on September 22nd– 23rd -24th at the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation
start time: 21.00
Inspired by “The Trojan Women” of Euripides, Tutto Brucia is a live performance held in September by the award-winning Italian theatrical group MOTUS.
The event organized by the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation within the context of the European Program “Ancient Drama: Interdisciplinary Cross Art Approaches”, aiming to demonstrate the inner connection between tragedy and horror, could become a springboard, giving a new meaning to the ancient drama and in the meantime decoding the terror and the outbreak of violence in our everyday life.
“I mourn for the sons who died in war. For the women made slaves. For the lost freedom
Oh beloved creatures, come back, come, come and take us away!”
Hecuba whispers these words, interwoven with the music and lyrics by Francesca Morello, raising questions.
“Which lives matter? What makes a life grief-worthy?”
Cassandra rips the air with a heavy knife and a peasant sickle, as in the southern European collective rites of condolence that have disappeared.
This is the opening scene of Tutto Brucia, inspired by Euripides’ “The Trojan Women” – through the words of J.-P. Sartre, Judith Butler, Ernesto De Martino, Edoardo Viveiros de Castro, NoViolet Bulawayo, Donna Haraway.
The lament spreads through that black Mediterranean which – then as now – is the scene of conquests of colonial Europe, of migrations and diaspora. Among the ruins of an empty and distorted space, covered by ashes and corpses of sea monsters, where everything has already happened, the question of radical vulnerability emerges.
Never more than now does mourning appear to us as a political issue.
Yet, it is through pain that the protagonists in the tragic scene are materially transformed – they become other than themselves, processing the violence suffered.
A metamorphosis that opens to other possible forms.
For, the end of the world is but the end of a world.
The broken body of Hecuba, the prophetic word of Cassandra, who sees beyond the end, the spectral cry of Polyxena, the invocation to the dead of Andromache, the violence suffered by
Helen and finally the most fragile and helpless body, that of a child, Astyanax – give voice to the most exposed and vulnerable subjects.
And to the spectres that besiege them/us.
idea and direction Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande
with Silvia Calderoni, Barbara Novati and R.Y.F.(Francesca Morello) on songs and live music
lyrics Ilenia Caleo and R.Y.F. (Francesca Morello)
dramaturgical research Ilenia Caleo
text editing and subtitles Daniela Nicolò
tlighting design Simona Gallo
technical direction and lights Simona Gallo and TheoLonguemare
soundscapes Demetrio Cecchitelli
live sound design Enrico Casagrande
sound engineering Martina Ciavatta
technical assistance Francesco Zanuccoli
props and scene sculptures _vvxxii
video and graphics Vladimir Bertozzi
production Francesca Raimondi
organization and logistics Shaila Chenet
promotion Ilaria Depari
communication Dea Vodopi
press office comunicattive.it
international diffusion Lisa Gilardino
production Motus and Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionalewith Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER (BE)
supported by the Residency centres: L’arboreto – TeatroDimora | La Corte Ospitale ::: Centro di Residenza Emilia-Romagna and Santarcangelo dei Teatri
in collaboration with AMAT and Comune di Fabriano
with the support of MiC, Regione Emilia-Romagna
thanks to HĒI black fashion, Gruppo IVAS
Duration: 75 minutes
“Ancient Drama: Interdisciplinary and Cross Art Approaches”.
Held by the Michael Cacoyannis Institution, co-funded by the European Union
Since 2012 the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation has been implementing an EU program on Ancient Drama in collaboration with acknowledged Academic Institutions, such as Stanford University, the University of Leeds, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Helsinki Academy in partnership with the Aalto College of Art and Design, la Fundación de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the LabexArts-H2H (ArTeC) – Département Arts et Technologies de l’Image, Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft of the University of Bonn and more.
The program activates and presents interdisciplinary synergies related to the Ancient Drama and aims to promote the dialogue and enhance the way ancient drama is presented through performing arts in the 21st century.
This year, the MCF is implementing the act titled “Ancient Drama:Interdisciplinary and Cross Art Approaches”, co-funded by the European Union and the European Regional Development Fund, through the Regional Program “Attika”, within the frame of the Partnership Agreement 2021-2027.
For this year’s edition, the MCF has invited McGill University to contribute as the academic curator, aiming to compose an interdisciplinary team of scholars and artists from Greece, Canada, and abroad. This year’s program, “Drama: Between Tragedy and Horror”, explores the affective and aesthetic connections between ancient Greek tragedy and contemporary horror media, bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives from Canadian and international scholars working in the theoretical spaces where the two genres overlap.
The program “Ancient Drama: Intercultural –Interdisciplinary Approaches” offers a learning experience for artists, students, activists, as well as for people interested in which way the two genres could be engaged, to create synergies and raise questions regarding contemporary crisis.
As highlighted by Dr Lynn Kozak, professor of the Mc Gill University, head of the scholars coming to Athens: “As modern readers or spectators of dramatized texts rooted in ancient Greek drama, we are not familiar with terror, not only regarding the story or the plot but also as regards the vivid descriptions of violence and cruelty, being so terrifying that they reach a traumatizing level for the spectator.” Nevertheless, the notion of fear is undoubtedly an indissoluble element of the ancient drama, even if it might seem, on the surface, as something awkwardly irrelevant. Fear and horror are not just forms of the ancient drama but they could be defined as descendants of the Greek Tragedy.
“A few work has been done in the field of classical studies regarding the connection between tragedy and terror”, underlines Alexandra Georgopoulou, artistic director of the Michael Cacoyannis Institution. “For the first time the program “Ancient Drama: Interdisciplinary –Intercultural approaches, held by the Michael Cacoyannis Institution, makes a creative dialogue implementing all the modern scientific trends, researching the connection between tragedy and terror and pointing out pioneering researchers’ views and combining them with a variety of cultural events such as theatrical performances and comic art exhibitions.”
Notions such as punishment, cruelty, and sacrifice, but also the inescapable nature of human destiny, the terrifying narratives of messengers, and the curses rouse the spectator’s terrified reaction not only towards the hero but also towards himself. Slaughter of children and women abused by men, a foreshadowing of evil and plight are some of the main elements of Greek Tragedy bringing together the ancient and the modern era. Tragedy can purify the spectator’s heart through pity and terror, through catharsis, as argued by Aristotle. And this can be achieved only by suffering.
Motus note TUTTO BRUCIA
During the difficult period of the pandemic, we began researching one of the foundational texts of Western culture, The Trojan Women by Euripides. This work echoed the theme of “the end,” a dimension that sadly intertwines myth and the present. Presenting Tutto Brucia now, in this time sadly plagued by new, devastating wars, places it in a different perspective. It is as if we had been working while imagining catastrophe, confined within the isolation of the pandemic, and now the performance, with its burning cry of pain, comes into contact with a reality that far exceeds tragedy, evoking all the catastrophes that have occurred in our cursed history, tainted by machismo and the will to possess.
Just as the pandemic and climate disaster mark the end of an era, so The Trojan Women begins with an end: Ilium has already been destroyed, and the women await their fate as spoils of war, gazing at the Mediterranean Sea, still today a theater of so many tragedies… Just think of the extermination of the Palestinian people! At the heart of the work is the pain of loss, which raises deeply political questions: Which bodies deserve our mourning, and which do not? What forms does mourning take? In Tutto Brucia, the stage is covered in ash; humans and animals are fused, liquefied, monstrously transformed… There are the bodies of the actresses who try to speak, to feel, to empathize, doing so with great sincerity and passion… There is the voice of Francesca (Ryf) Morello, who sings and cuts through the air with her poignant notes, recounting the inexplicable… There is much smoke and darkness that obscures vision, making it painful…
But fundamentally, it is a show and nothing more. It is fiction… something that can never, ever influence the course of events. Perhaps it can only serve us, those of us who are there in that room, to feel a little closer and more united in repudiating war and arms merchants, always, everywhere.
And then there is that final glimmer of hope in the apocalypse, that invitation from Hecuba before she exits the stage to transform ourselves:
Now it is too late; let’s wait for the future to come again…
And two thousand years from now
our name will be on everyone’s lips
and when we are but atoms and breath
you accursed ones can do nothing, nothing
against this memory that consumes you
because we will be everything
and we will be everywhere
capable of taking any form
and going on…
-Daniela Nicolò and Enrico Casagrande / MOTUS
Motus was born in 1991 as an independent nomadic theatre company, in constant movement between countries, historical moments and disciplines. The founders Enrico Casagrande and Daniela Nicolò, animated by the necessity to deal with themes, conflicts and wounds of the present time, blend art and civic engagement crossing imageries that have reactivated the visions of some amongst the most controversial “poets” of contemporaneity.
The themes of the border – physical, geographical, mental – and of the freedom to cross it, remain central in the most recent works, most remarkably in the internationally acclaimed MDLSX (2015) or in “Panorama”(2018), produced in collaboration with La MaMa ETC in New York. After their radical reinterpretation of “Antigone” (2010) in the light of the Greek crisis, the digging down into the most controversial female figures of the Tragic continues with the creation of “Tutto Brucia”(2020) and the two spin off “You Were Nothing but Wind” and “Of The Nightingale I Envy The Fate”, which pose the highly political question of what bodies are worthy of mourning. The latest production, “Frankenstein (a love story)”, the first part of the diptych project named after Mary Shelley’s famous novel, interweaves the author’s restless, complex, and often painful biography with recent gender studies, posthuman philosophy, and theories of interspeciesism.
The artistic work of the company is interweaved with an intense training programme of public meetings, lectures and masterclasses at Italian and international universities: from IUAV university in Venice, to La Manufacture – Haute école de théâtre de la Suisse Romande in Lausanne, the Master DAS Theatre of the Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam and at the Berner Fachhochschule –Bern University of Applied Sciences.
The company received numerous acknowledgements, including three UBU Prizes and prestigious special awards for their work.
Freethinkers, Motus has performed all over the world, from Under the Radar (NYC) to Trans Amériques and PuSh Festival (Canada), from Santiago a Mil (Chile) to Fiba Festival (Argentina), from Adelaide Festival (Australia) to MITsp (Brazil), from Taipei Arts Festival (Taiwan) to Hong Kong International Black Box Festival, as well as all over Europe.
In 2010 Enrico Casagrande, on behalf of the whole group, is artistic director of the 40th edition of Santarcangelo Festival. In 2020, the company is newly invited to curate its artistic direction, for the extraordinary edition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Festival. The outburst of the Covid-19 pandemic dictates a re-design of the project, which expands in a 12 months journey divided into three acts, with an emergency prelude in July 2020, a winter online interlude and a grand final in July 2021.
Since 2023, they have been curating “Supernova”, the first experiment of the contemporary performing arts festival in Rimini.
