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extremes at the same time. If the political gender is male, mourning is female. Both the tears and the women were kept out of political debate. But on the stage, that which had been shut out made its return in the frenetic and destructive grief of Medea, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Electra, Cassandra and others. What they express is'excessive' and cannot be contained within the political discourse of the citizen:'The spectators of Greek tragedy were individually and collectively addressed less as members of a political community than as belonging to the anything-but-political collectiveness of the human race or, to give it its tragic name, the race of mortals.' (Nicole Loraux). Between the sort of speech that is intended to express everything and the weeping that has no words, Lauwers has developed the art of singing. The group singing that he has now used intensively in several plays probably comes closer to the Greek chorus than to that of Brecht. It is not a matter of didactic dissociation, but much more of the communication of collective emotion. We are small people with a big heart', is what everyone sings at the end of the show. Or, as we hear in the Song of the Melting Man, 1 There I was and then I was gone/ It could have been better/What went so wrong?' There is no answer to that question. We can only share this question with each other and try to build the deer house as solidly as possible.'lts a real art'.