Director's Note

This project came out of a number of discussions and ideas which Liza LIM and I have developed over the last two years. These discussions ranged in subject matter from the nature of contemporary music-theatre to notions of vocal production and theatre rituals. The result is our production of The Oresteia.

We have deliberately avoided a musical setting of the original Greek work which concentrates on a cumulative linear narrative. Rather, imagine that the text, characters and rituals of Aeschylus' work have been embedded beneath the floor of our performance space.This magical and potent force acts as an `energy´ that infects the bodies, voices and instruments of the performers, resulting in a collision of possessions and trances that cause fleeting, transitory performance states.

These states derive from a number of sources. Characters or archetypes can scream or howl from the mouth of singers. The banquet becomes a mythic perversion of consumption and expulsion, whereby language and sound are literally chewed, swallowed, vomited and spat out.

The action of murder becomes not one retelling but a fractured and not wholly articulated act of remembrance. Moments, words and fragments of stories are enacted in a space which bristles with the tensions of history, memory and experience.

In our version of the The Oresteia, the relationships between breathing and singing, walking and dancing, language and sound are explored by a weaving of movement, image, music and text. Each element must be seen as affecting another so that what results is not so much an `adaptation´ or `version´ but something more akin to an aural performance sculpture.

--Barrie KOSKY