Avengers - Élektra, Médeia, Trakhis women
A co-production of the Szeged Contemporary Dance
Company and the National Dance Theater
Avengers
- Élektra, Agony of Médeia, Trachis’ women
The authors were inspired by Greek heroines’
stories when creating the brand new Szeged Contemporary Dance Group show. Characters
from Euripides and Sophocles plays’ come to life on the dance floor in the
choreography created by Pedro Goucha Gomes, Portugeise choreographer, a former
dancer of the Nederlands Dans Theater and Tamás Juronics, the Company’s art
director. Vengeance is behind the acts of Electra, Medea and Deianeira, the heroine of the Women of Trachis. The play
focuses on their internal thoughts and motivations offering a great opportunity
to the dancers to showcase exciting characters.
Élektra
(based on Sophocles’s play)
Electra: Krisztina Szarvas
Orestes: Gergő Horváth M.
Clytemnestra: Ágnes Markovics
Aegisthus: Gergely Czár
Chrysothemis: Andrea Tóth
Tutor: Zoltán Tarnavölgyi
Chorus: Vencel Csetényi, Gábor Finta, Gábor Májer
Set and costume designer: Bianca Imelda Jeremias
Lights: Ferenc Stadler
Music: Thomas Adès: Asyla
(City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – Sir Simon
Rattle)
Choreographer: Tamás Juronics
Synopsis:
Clytemnestra makes her lover, Aegisthus kill her
husband arriving back home from Troy. Their daughter, Electra lives as an
outcast in poverty and she sacrifices her entire life to grief and to vengeance
while she is waiting for her younger brother, Orestes to arrive and take
revenge on the murderers. She tries to persuade her younger sister to join her
plan but she doesn’t feel the same rage against their mother. Electra and her
mother are both very strong characters which prevents them to reconciliate.
Moreover Electra, unable to bring out her female side and live her motherly
instincts, observes with jalousie her mother’s relationship with Aegisthus,
usurping her father’s throne. The news of Orestes’s death makes her helpless
and bitter while in her mother the news of the loss is mixed with a joy felt
over the escape from the vengeance. However, Orestes arrives and Electra is
fueled by rage to get revenge and she persuades her brother to commit the awful
act of murdering Aegisthus and their own mother.
Electra’s personality – without the mythological
elements – is determined by the absence of her beloved father and her adverse
relationship with her mother. Clytemnestra wasn’t a „good mother enough”,
Agamemnon brought her to his house by force after killing her first husband and
baby. Electra tells us that she looked after the baby Orestes instead of her
mother and she always felt her mother hated her. Her mother lost her beloved
daughter Iphigenia in tragical circumstances which would have a double effect
on her: firstly, she couldn’t love the living ones as she would be angry at
them because of the sorrow she felt over the lost one, secondly she transferred
her hatred from the murderer father to his siblings (except for the subservient
Chrysothemis). Therefore, Electra is against Clytemnestra because she thinks of
her as a bad mother and she sees a father and husband murderer in her who
soiled the marriage’s purity and is aspiring for royal power and finally
because she envies motherhood from her mother which is unreachable for her. On
the other hand, she idolizes her father in a childish way. Her adverse
relationship to her mother prevents her to identify with her mother so she
won’t be able to identify with a female role model. Electra runs away from femininity, her personality has no female side, she thinks
at herself as a less valuable person, unable to act so she passively
subordinates herself to the male power, placing Orestes first, expecting him to
bring the solution. She hides her envy for male power behind her everlasting
grief and adverse female attitude. All this leads to an infantile fixation to
her murdered father so in this way there is no option to solve the
„Electra-complex”. According to the psychological interpretation – Electra
incorporates in herself all the tasks girls have to face: finding a complex
female role model and her own values. Looking at Electra, the women we can see
that her personality carries essentially all the features that modern day
psychology knows about the evolution of femininity and its difficulties.
Mrs. Agárdi Zsuzsanna Malek
psychologist
(2007)
Agony
of Médeia
(based
on Euripidés’s play)
Rather than following Euripides
narrative of the myth of Medea, I have granted myself the freedom to imagine
how Medea felt after having murdered both her children as a revenge against her
husband's betrayal with another woman. My aim has been to portray her body's
physical and emotional response to her own atrocious murders.
In Medea's Agony the tragic sense, rather than being conveyed through
the linear development of the narrative, is located in the dancers' bodies. It
is the body that in a state anterior to language (and therefore anterior to
Euripides) experiences and struggles against the overwhelming sense of pain,
panic, loss, fragmentation and guilt felt by Medea after having killed her two
sons.
Since Aristotle viewed tragedy as
a process rather than as a static situation, I must conclude that Medea's Agony does not portray a tragedy
but rather an imaginary landscape of Medea's inner life in which the past,
present and future converge into a nightmarish eternal present.
Pedro Goucha Gomes CV
The
portuguese Pedro Goucha Gomes began his dance education at the School of the
National Ballet of Portugal when he was 9 years old and completed his dance
studies at the National Ballet School in Toronto, Canada. As a professional dancer
Pedro danced with companies such as the Stuttgart Ballet, the Deutsche Oper
Berlin, the Compania Nacional de Danza under the direction of Nacho Duato and
more recently with the Nederlands Dans Theater-1 where he worked with Jiri
Kylian. While dancing for these companies Pedro became increasingly interested
in choreography and in 2006, after a few short pieces, he stopped dancing in
order to fully concentrate on choreography. Since than he has been associated
as a choreographer with the Korzo Theatre in The Netherlands with whom he has
choreographed extensively. Amongst other companies Pedro has also choreographed
for cinema (Carlos Saura) and more recently has been establishing creative
partnerships with visual artists with whom he has co-created large
installations where the body plays a crucial role.
Along with his choreographic work
Pedro also teaches in dance companies and schools across Europe, Japan and in
the USA. Pedro is currently studying History of Art at the British Open
University.
Dancers:
Flóra
Zsadon, Laura Fehér, Vencel Csetényi, Gergely Czár, M. Gergő Horváth
Costume: Bianca Imelda Jeremias
Set: Pedro Goucha Gomes
Light: Ferenc Stadler
Music: montage
Choreographer: Pedro Goucha Gomes
Trakhis’
women
(based
on Sophocles’ play)
Déianeira: Flóra Zsadon
Héraklész: Gábor Finta
Iolé:
Kitti Hajszán
Trakhis’ women: Laura Fehér, Brigitta Hortobágyi,
Ágnes Markovics, Krisztina Szarvas, Andrea Tóth
Set and costumes: Bianca Imelda Jeremias
Light: Ferenc Stadler
Music: Thomas Adès: Tevot (Berliner
Philharmoniker – Sir Simon Rattle)
Choreographer: Tamás Juronics
