Enrico Pastore on Medea Material, “PAC”, September 26 2025

At Vercelli – “Ogni luogo è un teatro”
Enrico Pastore, “PAC”, September 26th 2025
https://www.paneacquaculture.net/2025/09/26/a-vercelli-ogni-luogo-e-un-teatro/

“[…] And this brings us to Medea, the foreigner, the traitor, the barbarian, the outcast. A sorceress and enchantress, she follows Jason for love, abandoning her homeland and her family, but is herself abandoned in a foreign land and, having nothing left, she even strips herself of her children, to take ultimate revenge on the man who took everything from her. Agata Tomšič, on the fifteenth anniversary of the founding of her company ErosAntEros, reflects on Medea out of the words of Heiner Müller. Throughout his long artistic career, the German playwright was obsessed with the figure of the daughter of the Sun and the Shadow, who belongs to neither world, perpetually divided, so much so that she has become a symbol of all victims of colonialism and gender oppression.

Agata Tomšič offers a version, we might say, inspired by Artaud, where the audience sits in a circle around a platform on which two golden balloons tied to microphones are seated. Medea wanders around the audience, surrounding them, and appears only through small blades of light. A voice that becomes sound and song, before it becomes meaning (remember that the music and sound design are by Matevž Kolenc), her convulsive steps, even her smell, tell us her tragedy. Then, she arrives on the platform, dressed in gold and black, so much so that Medea becomes Klimt’s Salome or a Byzantine mosaic of the sinful Empress Theodora.

The audience listens to the story of her abandonment and the crime she committed in an atmosphere heavy with sensuality. The platform is transformed into a lap dance stage and the spectators are nothing more than voyeurs at a peep show. Medea thus resembles the monster sitting on a pedestal in the brothel-museum dreamed up by Baudelaire, a dream that marked the birth of modernity, in which showing off and performing are matched with mercenary love. Those pains and crimes appear obscenely attractive and, therefore, infinitely dangerous: the spell of the gaze forces us to come to terms with the darkness.”