Medea Material

Colonisation marks the beginning of European history as we know it. The fact that the vehicle of colonisation kills the coloniser foreshadows its end. That is the threat of the end we are facing. The ‘end of growth’.
– Heiner Müller

After 13 years since ErosAntEros first approach to Bertolt Brecht (first with On the difficulty of telling the truth and then with Saint Joan of the Stockyards), Agata Tomšič confronts the German playwright who more than anyone else was able to take his baton and reinvent it through contemporary languages: Heiner Müller. Like Brecht, he claimed the exercise of critique and doubt, affirmed the space of imagination and utopia, but he did so by writing plays in which the dichotomy between mythos and logos never ceases to intersect, creating dialectical devices that advance by explosions, between “thought forms as sharp as wounds and evasions of the unconscious that provoke nostalgia for a different condition of the world”. A theater in which shock, dream, cruelty, and cry are tools through which to organize a flood of materials before which the audience is forced to make choices.

To choose to work on the materials he composed for the figure of Medea, means to face a myth of ancient origins: feminist, antipatriarchal, decolonial; still extremly powerful and eloquent in our present. Woman, mother, goddess, witch, lover, murderess, but also migrant, foreigner, barbarian, slave, refugee fleeing her own land, betrayed by the man to whom she gave absolute loyalty and deprived by him of all rights.

Composed at different times between 1949 and 1982, Müller’s Medea unfolds in three parts:
– Despoiled Shore, based in Strausberg, where the last tank battle of World War II took place, headquarters of the DDR, “can be shown during the simultaneous operation of a peepshow”;
– Medea Material, “shorthand of a last-stage honorable dispute” based on Seneca, Euripide, Hans Henny Jahnn;
– Landscape with Argonauts, inspired by Wasteland and Ezra Pound, “presupposes the catastrophes, on which humanity is working”.

In a 1983 interview, the author, responding to a question about the placement of Medea in a peep show, states that “the voyeur has the opportunity to pay for a good seat from which to observe as many catastrophes as possible without being disturbed”. These words are key to understanding the performance’s space and its relationship with the audience’s gaze, especially in the third part of the work, where the spectators become jointly responsible for the catastrophes we live in and await, thanks to a reversal of perspective.

With this work Agata Tomšič continues her path of vocal-sound research, manipulating an extremely difficult, living, searing, radical textual material by connecting it with a refined audio-light composition. To do this she relies on the collaboration with Matevž Kolenc, composer, arranger and music producer, nominated for the 2024 Ubu Prizes along with the Slovenian cult band Laibach for the sound project of Saint Joan of the Stockyards.

Müller’s harsh, dry, violent and poetic, political and oniric, words become a simulacrum of sound and visual visions that are open to multiple interpretations. Placed in a special spatial-sound dimension, they embrace the audience in a barely visible scene, a world that leaves room almost exclusively for the imaginative power of the sense of hearing.
– Agata Tomšič / ErosAntEros

Black-dark-assolute and yellow-gold-sun, are the protagonists of a visual device where light is dosed with the very smallest amounts to leave the preponderant role to the sound dimension. A dark and implicit homage to the mosaic works of Ravenna, the source of inspiration for Klimt’s fatal women and Burri’s tactile paintings, contemporary icons where the sacred and the profane meet, as in the origins of Empress Theodora, like Medea coming from the regions bordering the Black Sea.

text Heiner Müller
translation by Saverio Vertone
courtesy of the Agency Danesi Tolnay

concept, direction, space Agata Tomšič / ErosAntEros
music and sound design Matevž Kolenc
with Agata Tomšič
costumes bàste sartoria
light design Gianni Gamberini
movement assistant Francesca Frani Dibiase
technical direction and set-up Vincenzo Scorza
scientific consultants Benedetta Bronzini, Anja Quickert, Daniela Sacco

production ErosAntEros
in residency at Artificerie Almagià POLIS Teatro Festival, Teatro di Dioniso Officina Anacoleti #ogniluogoèunteatro
with the support of Internationale Heiner Müller Gesellschaft
with the patronage of Goethe-Institut Mailand

previews September 23rd 2025, Ogni luogo è un teatro, Vercelli; September 26th-27th 2025, 15 years of ErosAntEros, Ravenna
debut October 12^th 2025, Festival d’Autunno, Catanzaro

duration 60 min

show recommended for over age 14