• INFO: 10.05.2019.  &  02.06.2019. AT ZAGREB YOUTH THEATRE (ZKM)

by Euripidus: THE BACCHAE

• Are you afraid you’ll go crazy?
• Always.

There are twelve women in group psychotherapy. Each of them with her own burden and desires seeking refuge from the patriarchal, capitalist, ruthless world where it has become inadmissible to show any weakness or lose control. On the path to liberation from the state of compulsive normality, they enter the mythic world of Euripides’ Bacchae and lead us to a profound journey into the human nature: through the eternal conflict of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles, the reason on which the Western civilization and our primal instincts, fears and needs are established.

All the earth will dance at once.
Whoever leads our dancing—
that one is Bromius!
To the mountain, to the mountain,
where the pack of women waits,
all stung to frenzied madness
to leave their weaving shuttles,
goaded on by Dionysus.

In the 5th century BC Greek theatre this piece was played exclusively by men who portrayed both genders. Director Lenka Udovički decides to twist this historical power relation and sets Bacchae with twelve exquisite actresses for stage to be governed only by women.

The performance relies on a powerful interplay of acting, movement and music and the magical nature of the Brijuni Islands. The music is composed based on the materials obtained by medical measurements of the actresses’ emotional states – their heartbeat, breathing and brain activity. With such approach, audience will be immersed into a performance of their own, inner human nature, in a common desire for the (un)reachable freedom.

The Bacchae – twelve women, each with her own burden and cravings, meet in a group therapy, seeking shelter from the patriarchal, capitalistic, ruthless world where weakness or loosing control is not permitted. In these scenes, which originated through improvisation, they speak out showing that the violent suppressing of human nature and its urges results in a breakdown, an explosion when nothing else is left to Woman but an escape towards self destruction, misfortunate search for her own identity – still in the male dominated society. Their problems are the source of the bacchaeistic resistance which brings the performance from therapy back to the original Euripides’ text, the rebellion story which, to this day, doesn’t come into play – it is doomed.