Euripides Bacchae
2003 Production
Euripides' Bacchae in a new translation with original percussive music performed live, sung and danced by an international cast. An early version was presented for the Boilerhouse International Theatre Research audience in June 2003. The full performance was given at the London Cockpit theatre, October and November 2003. Subsequently it was performed at the Ancient Greek Drama Festival in Cyprus at the Paphos Odeion on July 31st 2004 and at the Kourion Ancient Theatre on August 1st 2004.
Richard Seaford, acknowledged authority on the Bacchae and Dionysiac religion, produced a rhythmical actable translation of Euripides' text retaining the value and power of the original. At heightened moments ancient Greek was spoken so that our audience could enjoy the musicality of the language.
John White, composed pulsing Bacchic music with fascinating rhythms blending sounds of Greece and Turkey's musical traditions with the poetry of the English text.
7 dancer/singers gave an electrifying performance using percussive instruments and choreography derived from trance dance movements of various cultures including ancient Greece. The choral lyrics were in English and our aim was to make these densely poetic but often impenetrable songs accessible to our audience.
2018 Revival
Euripides’s Bacchae is the poet’s late masterpiece, his drama of repression vengeance and illusion, first performed for the king of Macedon in 406BC, forbear of Alexander the Great, a profound admirer of the play.
It puts women centre stage and is the classic exploration of female rebellion and withdrawal, altered consciousness and repressed male sexuality, expressed in terms of transgendered identity and, through its chorus of maenads, the perils of chilling out and living the deluded life of a groupie.
Yana Zarifi- Sistovari and M.J. Coldiron the directors, have devised a superb multi-cultural production, using elements of dance and music which range from modern Brazil to Sardinia composed by Dr Manuel Jimenez yet remain spellbindingly in touch with the spirit of Euripides’s play and its pre-Christian Greek context which they understand so well from a lifetime of study and dramatic experience.
Their all-professional cast includes stars from Australia (Scott Middleton as Dionysos), Paris Texas (Shelby Lynn Gilliam as Agave), Sardinia (Salvatore Scarpa as Pentheus), black South Africa and eastern European(Chorus), performing in accessible English, based on the translation of Britain’s leading Bacchic scholar, Richard Seaford. The result is electrifying, one of the great theatrical experiences its recent audiences can testify.
In July 2017, we, Thiasos company, presented the play (produced by Yana Zarifi-Sistovari and Robin Lane Fox) in the outdoor setting of New College, Oxford’s gardens. The play was prefaced by a brilliant performance by Roberto Tangianu, master of the Sardinian triple-pipes, the launeddas, the instrument which experts now believe to be closest to the aulos-pipe of ancient Greece. From the maenad chorus’s first entry, followed spectacularly by Dionysos (Scott Middleton), to queen Agave’s final heart-rending lament we were swept along by the drama, which unfolded with a pace and emotional force which no other production in modern times has captured.
‘ A seriously brilliant production .We were all mesmerised…. Greek tragedy has not done that to me for years ..’… Jenny Gibbon .. (Joint Association of Classical Teachers)
‘Uniformly superb cast… A triumph. I hugely enjoyed it,as I have no other performance hitherto. Music and chorus and dance moves were stunning.’ (Professor Armand D’Angour, expert in Greek drama and music, Oxford University).
"BACCHAE GARDZIENICE"
