Bitef

as Miloš Đurić puts it, "the most beautiful flower" of the ancient Greek culture, it represented the affirmation of the "will to life". Nietzsche speaks about the blitheness and even the gaiety of the tragedy, which merely shows what a complex question is the idea of catharsis. In two-thirds of his masterpiece, The Bacchae, Euripides seems to return to the tragedy's very roots - the satyr play performed at the Dionysian festivals, which did not have its later tragic seriousness. After all, music and theatre, without which the Dionysian mysteries would not have existed, are mentioned in The Bacchae several times. The theatre is the main subject and the main character of this production. The theatre reduced to its basic elements - acting and poetry. Bente Lykke Möller brought a small- scale model and costume sketches to the first rehearsal. The sets: a wall, a bench and a black ball hanging in the air; costumes: modern clothes, harkening back to styles of the 19605. Möller had a clever comment about her minimalist graphic expression: "The sets and the costumes should be boring; it is the actors who should bring what is exciting on the stage." After all, it is common knowledge that in the ancient Greektheatre,the earthquake effect inThe Bacchae, when Dionysus brings down Pentheus'palace, for instance, was conjured by the chorus actors. Since the first satyr dithyramb to modern times, the poetry on stage has been achieved by the movements of an actor's body and in it, there has always been "a piece of Dionysus."

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