Classical Theatre Workshop

THE WORKSHOP

Medea is a story. Medea is many stories: stories of separation.

Medea leaves her fatherland and her family to follow the man she has fallen in love with; she rips apart her brother’s body to help her husband; abandoned by her husband for a younger and more influential woman, she chooses to part from her children, killing them, to take revenge on the unfaithful partner.

A tragic gesture, that of infanticide, which brings Medea to the edge, to the border of her soul, tearing it apart, fragmenting it in an inner conflict that also affects the course of actions to be taken and the roles to be played: the wounded woman or the mother? Vengeance or love?

Medea’s choices take us to the edges of humankind and ethics and they keep us wondering about the meaning of a life so tragically marked. Was there an alternative?

And what if Medea, finding herself at the mirror, were to ask this question?

The workshop aims to investigate these aspects through two main moments: 1) text analysis of Euripides and Seneca’s Medea; 2) practical training for the final representation which will be held in theatre.

1) In order to do so, we are going to work on the integration of the two tragedies, Greek and Latin, harmonizing them together without disregarding their differences and specific features. In this context, the workshop includes, on one hand, a deep analysis of the text and, on the other, the writing of a part of the theatrical script which the participants will enact in theatre.

2)  Having in view the final representation, we will carry out more specific acting exercises which aim at providing everyone with the basic techniques to approach the stage and to be able to interpret different characters.

PUBLIC RENDERING

The workshop will result in two evening theatrical representation.

INSTRUCTORS

Laura Devoti graduates at the “Laboratorio di Esercitazioni Sceniche” of Luigi Proietti, with whom she performs in the Cyrano of Bergerac, at the “Sistina” theatre. She portrays many roles in theatre, such as “Laide” in Un amore, taken from the homonym Dino Buzzati’s novel. She makes her debut at the cinema with La Monaca di Monza, where she plays “Isabella degli Ortensi” with Alessandro Gassman, directed by Luciano Odorisio, and then  “Alberta Malfenti” in La Coscienza di Zeno with Johnny Dorelli, directed by Sandro Bolchi, she plays “Claudia” in Pupi Avati’s E’ proibito ballare; finally, she plays “Céline” in Belle Epoque, directed by Gavin Millar on a script by François Truffaut, a French-Canadian production  filmed in Paris which is actually her home. She has also spent some months in New York, where she studied with Susan Baetson and, under her direction, she plays “Nastya” in Lower Depths of Maxim Gorky at the New York “Public Theater”.

Melania Cassan is a PhD in ancient philosophy at the University Ca’ Foscari (Venice) and at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Specifically, she has dealt with Seneca, aiming to reconstruct his psychology and ethics through the analysis of both philosophical and theatrical texts. Her passion for theatre is not just theoretical: she has actively participated in many workshop with outstanding international instructors and she has also worked as director’s assistant for French and Italian directors in Grenoble and Venice.