A twentieth-century shaman who brings earth and sky into contact. A priestess who dares to frighten the unconscious. Euripides’ Medea, directed by Federico Tiezzi belongs to a world where the flow of time turns its back on the hands of the choir. Gradually, the daughter of Aeetes, king of Colchis, dispels the fear of ghosts and the jaws of crocodiles that surpass the anthropomorphism of the more plastic Disney-like alligators (Bianca and Bernie or Peter Pan). Hers is a tribal, archaic look.
During scene changes, under the stars-flames of the Greek Theater, the children by Jason are even lowered a sacrificial rabbit’s head, while vertigo and delirium take possession of the system and every image or vibration frees the theater from the constraints of the cocciopesto, of the orchestra and the whole cavea, in a treadmill of lugubrious nightmares.
Tireless, tyrannicidal mother
When Medea (Laura Marinoni) enters the scene, after the nurse has narrated how the princess descended from the Sun followed Jason from Colchis to Corinth, only to be abandoned in favor of Glauce, the daughter of King Creon, the Greek theater of Syracuse turns into a phantasmagorical factory, a ringing of visual art that starts from afar, perhaps precisely from Heiner Müller’s Medeamaterial (1988), with Marion D’Amburgo, and here it becomes a real social ritual. It is no coincidence that the works of Alighiero Boetti, Mario Schifano, Gae Aulenti, with whom Tiezzi collaborated, up to Alessandro Mendini and Franco Raggi or contemporary musicians such as Brian Eno and Jon Hassell are reflected in the blood of the Lombardi Tiezzi Company. “The first trip I made with my partner was to Syracuse. We were in high school and wanted to see Magna Graecia. I still remember the smell of the oleanders that surrounded the theatre” the director tells us. “In 2015 I had measured myself with Iphigenìa in Àulide that Euripides wrote to the court of Archelaus. Using terms that have to do with Jean Genet or other theater theorists, in Syracuse one has the sudden sensation that the theater itself is the object of a ritual”. In the team work, among others, stand out Marco Rossi (scenographer), Giovanna Buzzi (costume designer) and Francesca Della Monica (choir teacher); Massimo Fusillo’s translation deconstructs the space making that theater the triggering place of a dream.
Henry James
Henry James’s Altar of the Dead then opens the door to Ernesto De Martino’s Magical World, a half-world pierced by Jason’s post-industrial society. And when the Euripidean text becomes a bourgeois drama à la Henrik Ibsen, Haitian chants, missionary languages, Africa, Roman Catholicism advance… The Medea, within the theater season of the National Ancient Drama Institute, is a witch similar to Danza of August Strindberg’s death or at Nora’s A Doll’s House. In the Giasone-Medea relationship, Tiezzi confides, there are the attraction and the incommunicability of Pina Bausch’s choreography.
Consequently, the tetragonal brushstroke of the couple is razed to the ground: Jason, the cynical adventurer who becomes bourgeois, the bearer of a neo-capitalist violence (the violence of exclusion), is opposed by the material one of Medea. However, each interpreter does not betray the shadow line of someone who feels ‘nothing’ when he loves and hates. A well-fed nothingness and passion: certain passages of tones and winds definitely resemble Wolitz and Pollock. “For several years in a row, on the afternoon of Good Friday, I saw The Passion of Joan of Arc on television” Tiezzi recounts. “I remember my mother, at home, pulling two chairs together and, although I don’t know why, we watched that film together. The sense of sympathy I felt being with her—my arm brushing hers, that feeling of communion in front of Dreyer’s images—is indescribable. I only know that, since I started this profession, this is what I have been looking for, and will always look for, in that wonderful social ritual called theatre”.