Yet another performance in this Holland Festival about the confrontation between a closed community and a mysterious intruder, following Angela and Metamorphosis of a Living Room . And actually, the protagonist, the 'environmental activist', in the festival-opening performance Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was also an outsider. In mythology, intruders with a mission that is pleasant or unpleasant for those around them are as old as the world. Gilgamesh, Akhenaten, a large part of the Biblical prophets, Siegfried.
The Greek tragedian Euripides also featured such a character in *The Bacchae* . The play is about the ultimately fatal relationship between a Theban king, Pentheus, and his mother, Agave.
Tensions rise when a stranger arrives. That is Dionysus, the god of religion and myth, of wine, lust, and ecstasy. He wants to convince the world that he is a god by descent from Zeus, by force if necessary. Pentheus does not believe him either. But the citizens of Thebes do, or at least they soon join Dionysus' orgiastic cult.
As a result, Pentheus loses authority over his people. When he eventually gives in, it is already too late. He mingles with an unruly crowd of revelers in the woods near Thebes, where he is torn apart in the commotion; his mother beheads him and brings the head, impaled on a wooden stake, to the city. Only when the intoxication has worn off does everyone realize what has happened.
Queerness has always been a part of Euripides' intense text. In the orgies, too, gender identities are heavily intertwined in Euripides' work. It is perhaps no coincidence that the (gay) Polish composer Szymanowski based his opera *Król Roger* on a similar mythology concerning a Bacchante-like Christian cult in Sicily, in which King Roger II of Sicily suffers roughly the same fate as Pentheus.
In this production of The Bacchae by the Greek ensemble ODC (Odyssey!), we see a set of white screens bearing projections of images from the cosmos. Agave and the seer Tiresias sit at a table while staff serve. At a certain moment, a projection of a comet appears on the screen, and it is announced that it is Dionysus, who, as a comet, could destroy the Earth.
First, Pentheus arrives, an equal to a statue of Apollo, but in tall red patent leather boots with stiletto heels. It makes him even taller, but also more gender-fluid . Then Dionysus enters in human form. Just like in Euripides, he brings a cult with him. In this cult, everyone can enjoy themselves without restraint. In this new world, sex differences have been abolished. Humanity has returned to an amoeba stage, of the organism originating from the first evolutionary phases of life on Earth that reproduces by dividing.
A 'musical queer version of Euripides' The Bacchae, in which*every* form of desire is encouraged by the god Dionysus,' say the creators. But wasn't Pentheus already quite gender-fluid? In Euripides's work, Pentheus already dressed as a woman, although that isn't necessarily 'queer,' the creators seem to be suggesting. Pentheus's problem, we are told, is that he is trapped in conventional notions of identities.
But after his court, including his mother, has surrendered to the new cult, he sees no other way out than to let go of the reins. He is anally penetrated by Dionysus in person, in a behind-the-scenes scene, filmed by a camera and projected life-size onto the screen above the participants at the feast. But just as with Euripides, he pays for his late surrender with his life, and we hear that here too, Agave carries his impaled head to the city.
What is the message of all this? To give an example, Dries Verhoeven depicted a drugged orgy getting out of hand, in all its ambivalence, much more accurately in * The NarcoSexuals *. And by the way, is the life of amoebas the ideal form of reproduction?
The electronic music of Ariah Lester, who also plays Dionysos, is certainly beautiful in any case. He has a lovely, ethereal voice in both the lower and falsetto registers. Something between, for example, the British electropop musician James Blake and Michel van der Aa. An association to which the projections of cosmic phenomena in the background contribute.
Elli Papakonstantinou: 'As a director, I follow the waves of text, live music, video art, and dance in search of a new performing language. This piece lies at the intersection of these currents: queer is a new aesthetic. It is a pop piece with classical operatic outbursts, a dance piece with stability at its heart, a cinematic concert: it is a Greek tragedy in the metaverse.'