Agata Tomšič’s interview by Luigi Colella on Medea Material, October 12 2025

Exclusive interview with Agata Tomšič on “Medea Material” in Catanzaro
Luigi Colella, October 12th 2025

“On Sunday, October 12, Materiale per Medea, a new production by ErosAntEros, will make its national debut at the Marca Museum in Catanzaro. Agata Tomšič interprets Heiner Müller’s writing, filtered through her sensitivity and the group’s multimedia work. We gathered her considerations a few days before the premiere.

Agata, let’s start from the title: “Medea Material”. In what sense is this Medea material rather than a character?

Heiner Müller composed three monologues around the figure of Medea between 1949 and 1982, which he also staged as a triptych. The second of these is titled Medea material. I decided to use it as the title of my show because, semantically, it encompasses all of them, and because this title reflects the complexity and deliberate fragmentarity of the text, both as a whole and on each individual page, which is also what fascinated me about it from the very beginning. Müller is a post-dramatic author who writes in verse, without punctuation, assembling symbols drawn from literature and myth with the crudest and most vulgar images of his contemporary world. He refrains from narration, psychology, and linear storytelling, and this is what makes his Medea not a character, but a material that re-acts with the experience and unconscious of those who watch her, or rather, in my specific case, especially those who listen to her, so that each individual viewer has the freedom to create their own personal image of Medea, unique and different from all others, even if nourished and generated by the same material.

The Medea you portray on stage is no longer the woman who kills her children out of revenge. What kind of woman is she?

My Medea is a woman who rebels against the established power, the patriarchal order, and logos, freeing herself from her position as a woman, daughter, and mother within society. She does so first and foremost when she betrays her father and brother, abandoning her native land with the conqueror Jason, whom she pursues for love; then, when she refuses the role of caring for her offspring and submitting to her husband’s will, as required by the conjugal bond. The violence she was subjected to—in order to follow Jason and when he decides to get rid of her to pursue new political and erotic conquests—is poured into the sound and visual scene of my show, embodying various metamorphoses of myth, lament, war cry, and pain, until the final part, in which she places herself on the same level as the audience, both victim and executioner of the world we have built and from which we apparently have no escape.

In this work, the sound and light compositions play a central role. How do your body and voice interact with Matevž Kolenc’s musical texture?

The sound-vocal composition was created in close dialogue between the two of us. From the very first moment, when I fell in love with Müller’s text and decided to bring it to the stage, I fell in love with the musicality of his poetic words and the additional meaning they took on when embodied in voice-body, immediately becoming more understandable to me than when I read them on paper. The composer and I started with my reading of the text and some initial impressions, sound cues, and staging and directing decisions that I threw at him. During the first few days of work in his studio in Ljubljana, we created the musical and vocal framework of the show, deciding what kind of atmosphere we wanted to work with, what musical instruments to create for my Medea, and how to use them live in the show. […]”