I know I´m late, but I wish everybody a good 2016, I was a bit distracted after finishing my theater music for Antigone in Basel and didn´t post anything on my website until now. Since there´s still time to catch the play, here is a bit of information about it.
Oedipus’s sons Polynices and Eteocles are dead. The twin brothers have killed each other in a dispute over the throne. While Eteocles is celebrated and buried according to the religious customs, the new King of Thebes forbids the burial of the apparent traitor Polynices. Anyone failing to obey King Creon’s order shows contempt for the laws of the state and must pay for his crime with his life. Antigone, sister of the dead, can and will not accept the will of the Gods being defied by this decreed omission of the burial ritual. She scatters earth over her brother’s dead body, thereby risking her own death.
The Swiss playwright Darja Stocker transfers the ancient tragedy by the Greek poet Sophocles’ from 442 B.C. to a contemporary context. Using her own research into the most recent resistance movements in Arab countries as well as in Europe she investigates the Antigone myth afresh: who is mourned publicly and collectively in Western societies and who is not valued in this way? Why are some victims of violence almost voyeuristically slaughtered in the media while we are barely made aware of other deaths? Does some sort of community feeling determine who will be mourned collectively? Who are “we” – and can the experience of loss and the anger at a lack of recognition be one feeling which links people across borders, from which a new, different and boundary-breaking “we” could possibly emerge?
As the long-time director in residence for the Schauspielhaus Vienna, Felicitas Brucker was responsible for numerous successful world premieres. Following her successful production of «The Oresteia» and an adaptation of the Oedipus myth she now continues her examination of ancient material in Basel.
