RECENT PRACTICE (2024)

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What is given in the immediate experience of character Medea, and how? 

The reason of us re-exploring the story of Medea is because female insight in classic Greek drama has a notable gap. Women, though having previously been involved in dramatic and religious ceremonies, did not perform in public in Athens in the fifth century BC, nor were they part of the audience. Yet female tragic heroines dominate the plays of this period, and female tragic choruses greatly outnumber those of males. The silence of actual Greek women is overlaid by their vivid and complex dramatic presence in the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, as well as in Homer’s verse, and in the way they continue to inform and stimulate contemporary cultural theories and dramatic performances. Conventional critics might regard this absence as simply a patriarchal construction that suppresses women, but it can also be explored as a complex intersection of many other cultural elements. 

Re-staging of Medea in this case, would provide us a contradictory reading, demonstrates the notion of this title character is ‘only a woman’. Medea is not weak in will, intellect or physique, and she refuses to be bound by the roles of civic subject, wife, daughter and most notably mother, but she also grieves with a watery characteristic deemed especially feminine. Having been victimized and criminalized thereafter, this complex female figure continues to stimulate strong feelings. This re-staging will not focus on revert of the original text of Medea, instead, it will explore how the text ranges widely in a current setting. It is to against the totalised acknowledgment as we live in a “singular-plural” world. Its experience should never be limited; rather, it should be seen as participating in the public sphere of a pathic world. This re-staging is an attentive and aesthetic gaze of our daily situations, which trying to shift the ordinary towards the extraordinary. 

In this adaptation, we portrait a two character one act play. It reimagines Medea and Iason, in our times, as working lawyers dealing with aftermath of rumors of the death of Iason's mistress and many others. Medea has then fled to an uninhabited forest and it is here Iason finds and confronts her.

Woyzeck is a stage play written by Georg Buchner. The work was incomplete at the time of the author's death, but it has been posthumously ‘finished' by a variety of authors, editors and translators. It has since become one of the most performed and influential plays in the German theatre repertory. Büchner probably began writing the play between June and September 1836. It remained in a fragmentary state at the time of his early death in 1837 and was not performed until November 8, 1913, at the Residenztheater, Munich, where it was produced by Max Reinhardt. The play is often seen as a working-class tragedy of a military man. However, it can also be viewed as having another dimension- portraying the perennial tragedy of jealousy. 

This adaptation was generated from the protagonist in the play, Woyzeck himself. It followed his perspective and narrated what happened to him. As a one-act performance, the structure was set in a circle without either conflict or a solution and was told in flashback. Although the original Woyzeck does not have a narrative order with scenes, the most influential adaptions left the murder of Marie at the end of the play. In this adaptation, the first event the audience witnessed was her murder, followed by Woyzeck going through his memories of what happened before Marie's murder. There were two sets of memories: the first based on the reason for the murder generated by jealousy because of her affair; the second based on the reason for the murder as a result of Woyzeck's mistreatment by society and his increasing madness. In between the two sets, Woyzeck became the narrator and asked the audience directly whether he was a murderer. This broke the performance into the two very different parts. 

The most challenging part was to make Woyzeck act out other characters from the original script: the drum major, the captain, Andrew, and the doctor specifically. Here, Woyzeck was not acting or miming the invisible characters, rather, he was expressing and explaining these characters outside his body from his inner state of mind. The set was designed with artificial materials that can be manufactured without a specific cultural context. The aim was to create a universal space where the character's story could be told and re-told. The openness of the performance was intended to bring a deeper interaction between the content and its audiences so that the audiences could interpret and interrogate or generate meanings. The aim of this approach was to liberate and justify such a process- not to hide it with a fixed statement or more rigid means of interpretation.