Oreste will be back March 2021
Oreste will be back is the start of a new project is a live performance is live music is art and photography is a film is the next chapter of a new series is the power of passionate and creative encounters
Daughters and sons yearning to be free can change the destiny of an entire generation. Their strife goes as far back as classical tragedy; it’s as bygone as the Bible. They invent new revolutions. They speak of utopia, as they did in the 1960’s, in the Renaissance or in ancient Greece. In this spontaneous performance installation (everywhere from sea to land), our protagonists desire to break free, but their guilt, and their horrific hallucinations, hold them down. Thus begins Oreste’s quest to find his roots and quest of justice. A voyage that takes him through cities where he doesn’t belong, a desperate wandering through lands where he isn’t wanted, a search for a nonexistent family in a world brimming with angst.
Five chapters compose this performance/installation mixing video, art, music, dance, theatre. Each chapter correspond to a question and to Orestes life and each chapter composes a synchrony of art dance video performance and theatre.
chapters 1 outsiders / insiders 2 free soil from assassins 3 Δίκη 4 Maison Maudite /Damned house 5 ius soli
What is the new world like? Why is the moon so big? Are you an assassin or an avenger?
What role can we play in a possible revolution? How can we reclaim our land and our rights? What is your right? What is ius soli? Alessia Siniscalchi
These questions led me to bring together passionate actors, personally close to my idea of committed creation, critical of our time, seeking a real role in social change through dialogue and the sharing of ideas. After Médée Visions /Medea’s Visions (Nuit Blanche 2019), Kulturscio’k’s next creation is directly linked to the myth of Orestes, inspired by the visions of Aeschylus (Oresteia), Oscar Wilde (Salomé), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Pilade), and a new piece by Paulina Mikol. The work is improvised with inserts from these four texts. My initial impulse was to collaborate with photographer Giovanni Ambrosio, whose recent documentary based work, Ius soli, like the myth of Orestes, questions our relationships to land, heredity, rights, and belonging.
I met actor Paul Spera in 2019, and we began sharing our questions and ideas about the myth and its relevance to our times. Orestes is tormented by his matricidal destiny. He is the son of a king, he is also a slave to his fate, fundamentally unfree. As a tragic hero, Orestes is on a perpetual quest for his origins and his roots. Abandoned by his mother, he has grown up on the road; he returns to a country he does not recognize, a land covered in blood. He is an outlaw, an alien, a migrant; he has no right to exist anywhere. His generation has been slowly suffocated by the generation before. Oreste fights with ropes. He calls Electra, his sister, friend, lover. She recognizes him. He wants to show her a new world. Share this possibility. Free their land from murderers.
They question the audience and people they meet during their performative trip. Apparitions of Furies, of ghosts, of people bring them to reality or to judgment. They hide behind images of abandoned soil. The murder of Agamemnon creates a disturbing atmosphere: the tyrant king is dead, the tyrant queen has taken his place, the citizens feel lost, submerged in blood. Orestes dances in the blood. La maison is maudite. The house is haunted. Oreste writes about this curse. His voice spreads to each corner. Electra was never able to communicate authentically with her father. Faced with his death, she realizes her deep lack of, and need for, freedom. Her own freedom, but also that of others: of slaves, of foreigners, of the world.
Electra and Orestes scream “Justice!” with people from the streets to the wind, to the sea, to the mountains. The actions of the performers, the stage writing and the external interventions (voice over, music, and an important work on sound and video projections) are the expression of an unhappiness, of an intimate relationship with the land, of an impossible desire to transcend the horizon. Orestes realizes he can go no further than the trees, the buildings and mountains. He roams his land, he traverses contemporary cities, but his intimate need can never be appeased. Through the word of the gods, and also thanks to his friendship with Pylades, he comes to understand his own spirituality, and
to appreciate that society can change only through a revolutionary act. Live music by Phil St.George is created out of these ideas. Phil St. George appears in multiple video installations and he sings the revolution with all of us. We do not decide if Orestes kills his mother because he is a monster or a revolutionary. We just find a man that is alone. A fighter. His Visions, the Furies, constantly inflame his brain and influence his choices. His desires and his impulses project him towards a utopian world. We might call him a prophet, like Iokanaan (John the Baptist) in Salomé. In the end, he appears as the founder of democracy.
From this reflection, I imagined a site specific project that evolves over the years, spurred by our urgency to be activist artists today. The performance is improvised, but each step in the creation is documented by video installations created by Maria Mazzella, Alessia Siniscalchi and Giovanni Ambrosio with performers and technicians. These video installations are part of the work and become a new work. They witness a never-ending emergency to create and talk to the world through art and action. Paulina Mikol imagines a contemporary script where all these characters interact. The chaos and bloody conflicts in which Oreste finds himself drag him through innumerable doubts (Orestes like Hamlet).
He ultimately sees that he cannot change his destiny but that he can propose a new Vision of the world. “How dare anyone still say that I should be welcome, and that you shouldn’t? That I should have the right to move, to see, to hear, to discover, to express myself, and that you shouldn’t? That I should be entitled to, if only the illusion of freedom, and that you shouldn’t?” It’s our parents’ fault, and that of our parents’ parents, but also our own. Live where you want, love who you want, they sing, while the notes of “Uncle John’s Band” ( sound design by Didier Leglise) remind them that once upon a time, revolution was in the air.
Myths are easily recognizable in our daily lives, and at the exact moment of the performed act, indescribable emotions occur for the performers, for the spectators, and for the creators. The line between life and theater is very thin because, unfortunately, we face tragedy at every moment. In this completely improvised work, the casting of the characters need not follow a precise logic. The piece is completed by a live lighting design by Benjamin Sillon and live video projections that remind us that even if we are performing, our destiny has to be impressed on our bodies. We are the sole authors of our future.
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