Orpheus

Eurydice dies under tragic circumstances. Orpheus is left on his own. What next?

We take different paths through mourning. One leads, first, through savannas, then, over mountainous landscapes and seas. Another starts at the Polar Circle, and then moves across several time and climate zones. There are people who begin wearing black. There some who don’t cry, though they feel they should.

Mourning in the modern world has been removed from the public sphere. The rituals which in archaic communities were to connect the individual with the collective, interrupted life with life that goes on, have died out or have been weakened. A culture of forgetting, which treats mourning as an anomaly or an obstacle on the road to happiness and success does not teach us about loss, making it impossible to respond in a mature way to traumatic collective experience, such as pandemics, natural disasters, or armed conflicts.

In Orpheus, we invoke an ancient myth to examine ways of experiencing loss or new rituals and their potential to bring people out of loneliness. Mourning interests us in both an intimate and political dimension: by undermining the omnipresent imperative of constant productivity, it has, after all, an anti-systemic capacity, whereas talking about mourning offers a chance to strengthen social ties and experience pain in solidarity.

As he turns back leaving Hades, Orpheus loses Eurydice forever. The gesture, interpreted usually as a moment of weakness, becomes a recurring refrain around which the theatrical reality of Orpheus and the mourning Orpheuses is built.

Financially supported by funds from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage from the Promotion Fund for Culture – a national special-purpose fund.

The performance is cofinanced from the funds received from the City of Warsaw.