Posted by eugene williams on April 06, 192003 at 13:08:56:
Antigone
The concept of exploring the story of Antigone, the classic tale of arrogant institutional power versus a solitary quest for justice, through the eyes of a silent witness who failed to act because of fear and socio-political conditioning invites interesting possibilities. I am unsure though whether this meant that in production, Ralli’s genric role is that of actress, narrator or Ismene. In other words is she a witness enacting her testimony or what? Also having read only seven out of at least twenty fragments, I can only make a few conjectured observations.
The choice of focus seems to inevitably remove the lens of the drama away from the purging of radical challenge of the status quo and the ultimate restoration of order. It focuses knowledge production away from dramatic action as dialectic of consequential action, driven by the will to act within the context of the patriarchal monolith and its projectiles of logic. Instead, as Teresa Ralli discovered through her research in the Peruvian landscape of what she calls the ‘curse of silence,’ and the exploration of her own intuitive and body cognition, the focus of her interpretation shifts to the margins of power, where knowing and the historiography of the heart resides.
In the four pages of fragments of the play that we have read Ralli and Watanabe have excavated two fictional perspectives that serves this intention: With a legacy of violent rupture of familial bonds in the house of Labdacus and in Peru, Antigone’s scene in which she seeks to bury the body of Polinices illuminates the act of burial as a statement against violent conflict within a house, within a family, within a society and within the tormented hearts of survivors. To open the earth and put the dead back in is to open the heart and the bonds of tradition and embrace human brotherhood and sisterhood. It is a regenerative act that preserves memory, psychic healing and cultural continuity. As Ralli also points out it is an insistence at marking an erased event and erased life in time and place.
Having Ismene bear witness, and tell the story also allows the silent Peruvian survivor who is imprisoned by fear to tell her story through her surrogate on stage. She like Creon is in a torturous lonely place akin to death without burial, a palace like a mausoleum. She too must find the courage to transcend fear and violent erasure in her own time. In this reauthoring through the lens of sisterhood, frailty and strength; fear and courage; are embraced as part of the dynamic of coming to terms with the gaps of memory and future knowledge production.