Antigone e i suoi fratelli

Shows

Antigone and her brothers stages one of the most important female characters in the history of theater through two tragedies: Phoenicians by Euripides and Antigone by Sophocles, because knowing the background it is possible to better understand the choices of the protagonist. Antigone over the centuries, millennia, has been the symbol of revolution but also of the most obscurantist conservation. This is what the classics are, they understand the thing and its opposite, they contain the paradoxes, they are mirrors that reflect the views of an era. The show alternates passages by Euripides and Sophocles with interventions thought up and written by the actors and actresses. The questions they pose are enormous. They question the meaning of things, the future as a promise or as a threat, and how to occupy the time they have available. There is this double feeling that I have been exploring for a few years, a feeling that, I am honest, previously generated in me a certain detachment from our young people. It seemed to me that for them it was all due. Then instead I realized the complexity that they were crossed by and of which they were bearers. I understood it by working with the Palestinians or with the girls from the East. Comparing them with the students of the acting schools that I directed or with whom I collaborated.

What have I noticed? That our kids, many of them, not all of them obviously, have a monstrous hunger for meaning. Hunger for goals that force them to devour the world. Hunger for risk. I talk to some of them and I hear them say that they look with admiration at their Ukrainian peers who risk their lives for the future of their land, that they think of their Iranian peers who risk their lives for the freedom of their mothers and sisters. To tell you, when I work with young Palestinians I don't need to ask them to concentrate, I don't spend a minute making sure they are present to themselves and to others, because they always know where they are and what they are doing. I have been working with our kids for years, just on this: that they are present, that they are aware, that they don't escape, that they don't get distracted.

Gabriele Vacis