a theatre / opera / media myth
She is the odd one out: the retellings of the tragedy of Iphigenia in Tauris, from Euripides to Gluck to Goethe, are just
not all that tragic. No hero is thrown into misery. No shattering violence tears apart a community. That slaughter is done.
The many murders of husbands, mothers, and children that make up the story of Iphigenia's house of Atreus, have already
happened. Here a brother and sister reunite and escape a reality so drenched in violence that it has become ordinary. Only
to return to one just as drenched.
If this is a tragedy, then what makes it tragic? iph.then sets out to discover what happens to a story told again and again, to terror repeated, mediated, and multiplied so that it ceases to be extraordinary. Into this world technology exists neither to increase understanding nor to shock and awe, but to mediate our grasp of the story. But what we record in images and sound does not necessarily bring us closer to the world of Tauris. On the contrary, it disjoints and disfigures just as, for Iphigenia and Orestes, words and bodies have ceased to relate to one another.
Perhaps, on this island of Tauris, Iphigenia's myth is not all that far away from us after all. We cannot see any violence here on the surface, but it determines everything. And life goes on as usual.
Ramona Thomasius
Dramaturge