Oresteia Ex Machina

Mapa Teatro presents a piece in which the gods never descend to solve man’s conflicts and contradictions: their place, in the tragedy we live today, is empty. It is parting from that absence that Aeschylus’s text is questioned. We wanted to install the symbolic machines of death, the vengeance and justice that tragic poets and myths had already envisaged in order to speak to us mortals, about the dynamics of life and history, in any given space or time.

 

“Like a crude contemporary metaphor and a dramaturgical synthesis that stretches out from Aeschylus to Beckett, Brecht and Müller, Oresteia Ex Machina, by Mapa Teatro, breaks the conventions of the ‘Mise-en-scène’, makes the spectator fearful of a human crisis, it leads the spectator to pain, nausea, to the unknown(…)We are at the end of a Century, don’t you know! That phrase alone could describe a production like Mapa Teatro’s. This is not the staging of a Greek Tragedy, it is the staging of a contemporary Colombian tragedy, with universal characteristics, without localisms or immediate characterised or cartoonlike references.”

 

“Mapa Teatro’s audience for Oresteia Ex Machina, walk up the steps of an airplane, and set off on a journey along the vaults’ narrow corridors at the National Library. (…) The space is eerie; there are remnants of beams on the walls and caved in floors, and at the back, on the ceiling, you can see water pipes, that hang, exposed like the building’s guts. (…) There are five chrome plated hospital beds that enhance the cold atmosphere. Sharp and shiny hooks hang from thin cables. One gets the feeling of being in a morgue outside of working hours, waiting for the corpses to be examined.”