Ariadne – Schallfeld Ensemble

Commissioned by Schallfeld Ensemble, financed by the   

Theseus isn’t cruel because he leaves Ariadne.

[…] No, Theseus is cruel because he leaves Ariadne in the island of Naxos.

[…]

Just a beach lashed by thundering waves,

an abstract place where only the seaweed moves.

It is the island where no one lives,

the place where obsession turns round

and round on itself, with no way out. A constant

flaunting of death. This is a place of the soul.

(R. Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony)

Ariadne is a story of absence ad abandon. A woman marooned on a desert island tries to reassemble the pieces of her life, marred by the abuses of men who egoistically took her, used her and then disposed of her or carried her away without any regard, treating her as a mere object. Fragmented memories emerge out of a dense fog where different versions of the myth blur together, although the only constant is Ariadne’s unheard voice beneath the gods careless eyes. The protagonist, as a final effort to escape her condition, attempts to find her true self again, in order to retrace a truth that in spite of all other versions might lead her to the end of her sufferings.

Ariadne is a monodrama for voice, spatialized instruments and electronics, thought of as a sort of immersive installation, which starts even before the entering of the audience in the hall, thus making so that the space of the performance, instruments, voice and public itself become all an active participant of the setup, almost symbolically. From space, which widens all the way to the foyer and its clatter, to the piano, which echoes the processed voice and its dialogue with the rest of the instruments, scattered across the hall like rocks in the sea, up to the public, at once water that surrounds Ariadne and careless eyes of the gods that observe her pain.

The very same moment in which the audience enters the hall, music starts to gradually take shape, transforming the background noises in sound through live electronics in a process that blurs the boundaries between performance and audience by making the latter an active element of the setup.