“Fambles walking along the frontiers of the world “. He thus describes the bodies that inhabit the scene of Après les Troyennes the choreographer Claudio Bernardo that, with the Belgian company As Palavrasgave birth to the theater-dance show that will be staged in Syracuse on 26 July and which is inspired by The Trojan women directed, in 1988, by Thierry Salmon.
A moment from the Après les Troyennes show.
Bernardo saw that cult show for an entire generation in Brussels: “I was a young aspiring choreographer then and I was shocked. I did not understand the language, the ancient Greek, but on stage there were very powerful women who, through the songs, the music they produced with their body, hand claps, percussion on the chest, brought at the heart of Euripides’ tragedy. It took thirty years to assimilate the idea of exile, of the defeat that, from the classical world, came to us, now, in Europe, where a fratricidal war is being fought. On stage there are mature women, icons of dance and theater, some had already acted with Thierry, others have joined “.
Après les Troyennes.
We worked for three years on the staging, during which we witnessed the massacre of migrants in the Mediterranean, then to Covid and finally to the war: everything has entered our story. And our stories: I too, like the Trojan women, walk along the edge of the world’s frontiersI lost my Brazilian identity without ever completely acquiring the European one ”.
Turkey, France, Africa, Brussels, Vietnam, Italy. The Trojans come from the four corners of the world to stage the most anti-militarist of classic tragediesthe story of the expectation that, after the conquest of their city, the death of their comrades in war, will see them exiles and slaves.
Elena, daughter of Italian migrants
«I am the daughter of two Italian emigrants who came from Puglia to Belgium to work in the mines. In my house we spoke dialect, I learned Italian with the courses of the consulate »he says Carmela Locantore who in Après les Troyennes it’s Elena, “The cause of all misfortunes. I was 6 or 7 years old when, at the Belgian school, I learned a poem and I told myself that those lines were my country, divided as I was between the Mediterranean and Wallonia. Then I met Thierry Salmon at the conservatory. He said to me: “Someday you and I will work together”. When he staged that great project he called me, he liked that, with my story, I embody a political idea: I came from a peasant society, without books, he liked my archaic past. And now, three decades later, at the age of 65, with my white hair, I am again on the stage to pay homage to that magnificent and very modern adventure ». An adventure that also recalls the superintendent of Inda (National Institute of Ancient Drama of Syracuse), Antonio Calbi, whom this show strongly wanted for the end of the season.
Après les Troyannes.
«I still remember the emotions that The Trojan women triggered in the spectators. I saw him at the Teatro dell’Arte in the Triennale in Milan, with the audience on the stage and the actresses in the room stripped and flooded with earth. Après les Troyennes is a tribute to a director with a feminine sensibilityan act of love for the theater, a work on time and memory ».
Among the performers of that time there is also the Italian Maria Grazia Mandruzzato, Ecuba who, in Bernardo’s mixed-media work, appears in video: «Hecuba, queen of Troy, is now a prisoner of war» he explains. «You are left with the memory of the beautiful days and you can only sublimate the immense pain of death. Her is a tragedy declined in the present, the link with what is happening in Ukraine is powerful, the war is obscene, rape as a weapon of war was used then as it is today. And our inability to open up to those fleeing the war is tragic. We must ask ourselves to which humanity belongs those who welcome Ukrainian refugees and not African citizens who lived, worked, studied or Syrians arriving from other routes in Ukraine, equally fleeing from conflicts and persecutions ”.
Words that inhabit every time
If Mandruzzato, who has shared ten years of life and work with Thierry Salmon, leaving his Padua for the many stages where the theater has taken him, says he has refused, before this, many proposals to redo The Trojan women “Because that first show was an initiation for me”, Cécilia Kankonda, who today plays Andromache, she says she is certain that «in thirty years I will do Le Troiane again, because it has become part of my DNA. When Claudio called me I reread Euripides and I said to myself: “Oh my god, these words have followed me ever since, they can live any time: Jean Paul Sartre made them his own to talk about the Algerian war, we take them back today. As well as the songs by Giovanna Marini who created the common language between all of us on stage, regardless of the passport we have in our pockets ». Cécilia Kankonda has two: «I am half Belgian, half Congolese, daughter of the people in both cultures. I lived on both sides, until it was time to ask myself how I could best serve mine metissage. And the answer I gave myself was: tell stories. So I became an actress and musician ».
Après les Troyannes.
Cécilia is part of a collective, in Kigali, which tries to create, for the shows and art exhibitions it produces, «also other routes that do not necessarily pass through Europe. All my life I have felt not exiled, like the Trojans, but uprooted. Having roots in two continents, with all the taboos that this entails, means having more problems than the average, but it also allows you to see things through a different spectrum. Now that we are in an age of confusion I tell myself that perhaps I, who rarely feel in the right place, can offer a useful paradigm for the generations to come.
Europe is an unrealized project and perhaps without a future, but if there are forces that disappear, others emerge. I am part of this old continent to which I feel very attached and, like everyone, I struggle to accept that it is losing meaning and energy. But when I work in Africa I strongly feel that there are forces there that will perhaps take the place of those that are fading elsewhere. And I find it not serious, that it is part of the history of the world. Euripides, four centuries before Christ, with The Trojan women he gave to his contemporaries a powerful lesson on the cruelty of war and the irremediable rifts it produces. Well, Euripides is still here today, and he is thanks to these extraordinary women ».
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