The Passion of the Trojan Women (Paphos)

Performed by the Cantieri Teatrali Koreja of Italy.

A room. A dead man. Crying women stress the memory of him; the memory of a missing is the echo in their crying, only in their crying that memory has a sense.

The choir makes possibile the creation of sounds and atmospheres which take our mind to so distant, so close places where feelings, voices, words come out together with actions and images. Live music is composed by the same musicians on stage, interpreters of the musical part which is on the same level of texts and actions. So musicians, singers and actors become protagonists of a performance between theatre and music, between concert and theatre performance. And it is extraordinary natural, at the end, finding ourselves coming back to the essence: the human pain of a mother and the sacrifice of the beloved son's innocence, a tragedy.

The Passion of the Trojan Women is a work which tries to conjugate Euripides' The Trojan Women with the theme of the Passion of the Christ, chosing to start a dialogue with the tradition of the "Grecìa Salentina" a region which traditional culture expresses itself in "griko", an ancient dialect quite similar to ancient Greek language. The song "Passjuna tu christu'" is a beautiful music work in "griko" dialect; this song was born and still lively used in Salento in the "griko" area. Our idea is to find a connection between the weep of the Trojan Women and the "moroloja", a crying some women used to make a long time ago (getting money for that) when somebody died, sometimes even someone whose name they didn't know before. The idea consist in creating a structure which makes the Passion of the Christ crossing with the passion of Astianatte, Andromaca's son; this crossing may take to the universalization of this crying. This is called "greek crying", actually it is a weep coming from Greek colonies, exactly from the "Grecìa Salentina".

Little and innocent Astianatte's death, in Euripides' tragedy, reminds us the cricifixion of the real Innocent, the Christ, the one who didn't have sin and sacrificed himself for the human kind's salvation. For this reason, Andromaca's crying mixes with the crying of the Virgin Mary in a unique, big pain which is that of all the mothers forced by the destiny to renounce their sons. The most important moments of the tragedy are accompanied by the singers of the "griko" Passion: by their body expression, they express the culture of poor people, land workers, who find the sign of the human quality of the God in his pain. And the pain described in The Passion of the Trojan Women is deeply human; here the femininity is the strongest element: the figures of Andromaca, Ecuba and Cassandra emerge first. Even though they must accept a cruel destiny, they do not renounce their dignity, they do not fall in front of the Greeks' cruelty and they show with all their pain and indignation how terrible is the war between men.

This performance is part of the 13th International Festival of Ancient Greek Drama.