etb English
Theatre
Berlin International Performing Arts Center

Wer ist Medea?/ Who is Medea?/ Quem é Medeia?

How can we interpret a classic of dramatic literature in 2019? Why work with classics at all? Let’s go back…to the beginnings…and let’s start with a universally despised woman.

Wer ist Medea? is a music theater performance as well as a spoken word concert, manifesto, choreography, emotional rehearsal, a tragic monologue or maybe just an homage to all those women that are hated just because their stories were written by men.

This performance is the very first presentation of a work-in-progress, the first interaction with an audience. In between the many layers of performance, constructed upon the interpretations of a variety of authors, we work as archaeologists to understand and unearth Medea.

Who is Medea? The personification of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, a mother who kills her own children? Or the woman who sees her children being murdered by her enemies? The cruel and cold woman that betrayed her own father, the king, killed her brother and abandoned her own country in the name of love? Or a strong and independent woman that serves as an existential threat to patriarchal society? A woman blinded by her thirst of revenge or the victim of an ambitious and unscrupulous man? A mother that in a final act of love chooses to deliver her children to the embrace of death instead of leaving them in the hands of her cruel enemies?

Join us and find out.

An attempt to create a new dramaturgy inspired by the mythological character Medea, herself the subject of a myriad of different authors who wrote about her, reinvented her and imagined her, including Euripides, Heiner Müller, Christa Wolf, Chico Buarque and Paulo Pontes.

Performed in English, German and Portuguese