Olindo Rampin on Medea Material, “PAC”, May 15 2026

Tomšič, Kaupinis and Minasi at Polis Teatro Festival, Ravenna, “PAC”, May 15 2026

https://www.paneacquaculture.net/2026/05/15/tomsic-kaupinis-e-minasi-al-polis-teatro-festival-di-ravenna/

We enter the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna for the POLIS Teatro Festival. The audience for Heiner Müller’s Materiale per Medea (Medea Material), staged and performed by Agata Tomšič, is arranged in an ellipse around a podium. For a few moments, coming from nowhere, sighs of darkness arrive, followed by words of rancor and desolation, of eros and death, uttered—as we now see—by a shapeless lump on the ground, which slowly comes to life in the dark. It is a woman, slender and hooded, who now stands up and paces back and forth, menacingly, behind the backs of the defenseless spectators.

On that podium, the center of a sorcery, three simulacra are hoisted: a microphone and two imitation-gold balloons, placed on top of two stands. The first will reveal itself to be a ritual drum: by striking it rhythmically, the wrathful priestess will elicit a gruesome thud, a prediction of death. The imitation-gold balloons, as we will discover later, are Medea’s doomed children. The actress caresses them, those balloon-children, with her thin, sharp hands—irritated touches that produce sinister sounds, joined, in the dark noise-art of Matevž Kolenc’s soundscape, with the savage vocal intonation of growling invectives, and the abominable plans of revenge against her rival and the treacherous hero.

Restless in her high, black, thigh-length boots, shiny and tight-fitting, wrapped in a mantle that leaves one dismayed—a sinister little Little Red Riding Hood dress and a dark black-and-gold robe of the Queen of the Night—Agata Tomšič is an emaciated and ferocious child-woman. With “fathomless blue eyes,” like those of Aleksandr Blok’s The Unknown Woman, she is the restless muse of a nightmare poem, in which the echoes of the Vienna Secession darken into the tremors of a black fairy tale. Ineluctable as a condemnation, her voice growls, threatens, and announces the fury of slaughter: not the laments of an abandoned woman, but flashes of extermination.

Illuminated or overshadowed by Gianni Gamberini’s sepulchral lighting design, Agata-Medea officiates an orgiastic celebration, the religious striptease of a quivering sorceress. Shedding the black and gold peplos, she steps down from her narcissistic pedestal as a funereal preacher and slowly extracts from it a polyester Golden Fleece, which she unfolds at the feet of the restless and fearful audience of the faithful. With her very long eyelashes and her forehead adorned with gold, made even more proud in her solitude, the actress vibrates with an angular, androgynous nudity, insinuating like a threat beneath the gold skirt cut at the front by a deep vertical slit. Then, the golden underskirt is also cast aside, in the liberating display of an absolute nudity, sacrificial and oppositional, worn like a hoplite’s uniform, gently streaked by a red band across the middle of her back.

Vengeful like an Eastern sovereign, Agata Tomšič weaves her vocalizations of malice and her gloomy anathemas with obsessive rhythm, dampening any interpretative, moving, or captivating intention: a cold and angry nursery rhyme, a sequence of grim verses, knife blows that elongate the final vowel of every word into a note of hatred, into a blasphemy of pain and rage. In her workshop, in her alchemist’s study, the Slovenian artist has recreated a Heiner Müller pregnant with turbid scents, demonic vocal experimentalisms, obscure sexual obsessions, and dramatic conflicts from magical ages, both archaic and deeply modern.