Michela Lucenti's The Phoenician Women: Greek Tragedy Through Dance and Words

A procession of men and women moves across the stage with a poignant, silent unity, their severe, wary faces conveying a profound sense of community, their hands connecting and releasing in gestures of protection and vulnerability. Their physicality is impactful, yet imbued with wrenching empathy, defining bonds woven from violence and tenderness. Labored breaths articulate the turmoil of body and soul as gestures, songs, and words intertwine. Words that wound or soothe, and others that echo from antiquity to this day, warning us of the madness of war. And then there is dance, many dances, capable of expressing what words cannot. This defines the remarkable contemporary approach to Greek tragedy and the saga of familial madness recounted by Euripides in The Phoenician Women, a poetic and rigorous collective exposition by choreographer and director Michela Lucenti and her Balletto Civile.

Lucenti translates the Greek tragedy's extraordinary ability to transcend centuries, speaking through myth with the language of reason, into "dancing a score of words." With heartfelt imagination and the fiery poetry of the body, she explores the tense and fluid corporeality that constantly negotiates movements, voices, and silences, delving into the roots of suffering that plague Thebes in The Phoenician Women. Lucenti herself notes the intention to "feel the resonances with the wars at the borders of our present-day frontiers, fratricidal wars rooted in ancient origins."

The Phoenician Women, named after the chorus of Phoenician slave women who witness the dramatic events, is a dynamic and descriptively rich tragedy, crowded with characters. Central among them is Jocasta, mother of brothers Eteocles and Polynices. She recounts Oedipus' tragic fate and tries in vain to halt the fratricidal conflict over power. Other key figures include the prophet Tiresias, who foretells Thebes' fall, and Antigone and Ismene in their inconsolable grief. Antigone, in particular, leads her blind father Oedipus into exile—a sublime metaphor for one who blinded himself for seeing too much—and declares her resistance to Creon's tyrannical rule, leaving only desolation in her wake.

The misfortunes of a city torn by fratricidal war resonate familiarly today, alongside themes cherished by great Greek theater: the arrogance of power, blind ambition, the feminine capacity for sacrifice, the wretched condition of the exile, and the defiance of violent, obscure rules. The production addresses all these themes through an exemplary scene-by-scene reinterpretation of Euripides' tragedy (dramaturgy by Lucenti, Emanuela Serra, and Maurizio Camilli). The gestural score molds solos, duets, and ensembles, while words and dialogues animate bodies immersed in sounds, metallic clangs, silences, pop notes, and melodies. A Phoenician woman in a sequined dress, before a microphone, vocalizes comments and sings Prince's Purple Rain, adding an unexpected contemporary layer to the narrative.

Bodies describing actions and evoking powerful images—such as the recurring group in a line or circle, reminiscent of Greek vase paintings—take on plastic, dynamic, and meaningful forms within a stark stage illuminated by essential lights. These choreographic and theatrical epiphanies culminate in the beautiful final scene, where Creon (Maurizio Camilli, intensely expressive physicality) cradles the lifeless body of his son Menoeceus (Giovanni Fasser, a chameleon-like and athletic performer), weeping as in a sacred Deposition. The music La Grande Folie by the Occitan group San Salvador concludes the choreography. Special mention goes to all eleven generous performers: Fabio Bergaglio, Antonio Carta, Ambra Chiarello, Francesco Collavino, Cecilia Francesca Croce, Emanuela Serra, Giulia Spattini, Mirco Tosches, and Lucenti herself.