DIONISO E PENTEO. Tragedy of Theatre

with Alessio Papa,  Boris Ventura, Diana Ferrantini, Katia Raguso, Fiorella Tommasini, Marina Carluccio, Silvia Massicci, Elena Fioretti.
scenic elements Ulrico Schettini e Martino Ferrari
assistant director Roberto Domeneghetti
music and direction Massimo Munaro

Sinopsys of the myth as is told in Euripide's BACCHAE

Dionysus (son of the god Zeus and of the human Semele, who is son of Cadmo, founder of Thebes) come back to Thebes, his hometown, as a foreigner and he's disowned by the young king Penteo (his cousin), who thinks that Dionysus' orgiastic rituals are dangerous for the ethics and for public order.  And so, Dionysus is captured. As a result, Dionysus seduces Penteo and he guides him on Mount Kithairon, telling him that he could satisfied his longing of seeing Bacchae's orgies without beeing seen. But Penteo is discovered and torn to pieces by his mother Agave and the other Maenads. Dionysus realizes his terrible revenge.

Euripides' Baccanti, staging the god of theatre, Dionysus, could be considered a reflection on theatricalism and on theatrical crisis.
Theatre, under the sign of Dionysus, was essentially a reciprocal relation (“I see you while you see me”), a collective ritual where the telos was a dispersion of subjectivity that could bring to an osmosis with the divine. This relation is impossible in Euripides' tragedy. Here we've got a conflicting relation, a detached and voyeuristic gaze, that makes impossible any reciprocity, any real union. Tensions are polarized, refusing any conjunction. Agave and Pentheus are mother and son and they share the same hubris that lies in not recognizing their numinous side (Dionysus).
Between the hysteria that comes to the Bacchante Agave who does not recognize his child and tear him to pieces, and the need of rational order of Pentheus that wants to see without being seen (prototype of the modern spectator), there is an equal sign: both are unwitting tools of the god's revenge.
DIONISO E PENTEO can not be a fully and happily Dionysian show, because here the god is a god of revenge. Revenge against actors and spectators, polarized in a statute which, also if it may appear abolished, it will be reaffirmed just when it seems to reverse itself. Barriers are abolished just to restore them with more force, the boundaries that seems to be dissolved, in reality have always been there. Relational distorsion, that in this performance is carried to extremes, was created by the refusal to recognize the other in us by the rejection and denial of our deepest desires and instincts that come back to tear us when we refuse to recognize them.
In Lemming's performance the relation between actors and spectators is under the sign of human relations that, most of all, are conflicting and opposed.

The performance is for seven spectators at time (seven repeates a day). Duration of each reply: 35 minutes.

press review extract