Antigone

The contemporary dance performance Antigone, premiered at the Teatro Argentina as part of the first edition of the Teatro Ostia Antica Festival, thanks to Norwegian director and choreographer Alan Lucien Øyen, goes straight to the crux of Sophocles' tragedy, while radically reinterpreting its language, and transforms into an overwhelming collective ritual that shakes the audience.

In the dance show, the classical myth is represented with an essentially physical, visual, and sonic language, extremely evocative, poetic, and visionary. The soundscape outlines the space, evoking moments of celebration with recorded songs, anticipation, and anxiety with the howling of the wind, ambulance sirens, the calls of nocturnal birds, and the barking of dogs. The fog effect, present throughout the performance, creates a dreamlike atmosphere that envelops all scenes.

The curtain rises with Antigone's slender body hanging next to a chair by order of Creon, King of Thebes, who had sentenced her to death for burying her brother Polynices's body, defying orders to leave him unburied because he was a traitor to his country. A sparse set, composed of seven panels arranged in a semicircle, conveys the emotional desert surrounding the protagonist. The narrative is further enhanced by the original projections of live Steadicam video footage onto the panels, along with the dancers' movements—at first brief and composed, then sweeping and choral, and then frenetic and convulsive.

Thanks to an exceptional cast - some of the most acclaimed dancers from Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, along with dancers from the company, winter guests - they interpret Sophoclean's tragedy through their extraordinary physicality and theatricality, reinterpreting it through the physical poetry of Tanztheater, combined with words and contemporary dance. Sophocles' Antigone, therefore, three thousand years old, addresses a very current debate: how human dignity engages in a struggle for respect for human laws.

Directed and choreographed by Alan Lucien Øyen; with Enoch Grubb, Douglas Letheren, Pascal Marty, Antonin Monié, Nazareth Panadero, Héléna Pikon, Julie Shanahan, Fernando Suels Mendoza, Meng-Ke Wu.

Photo: Claudia Pajewski