Writer
M3DEA
by Vittorio Parri
‘‘…And you, left aside:
lonely; fragmented.
And him: Absent.
And a scream
that rips your thoughts;
A cold sound
that like rhythmical Drops,
erodes your soul, remaining
imprinted in your mind:
Where were you Jason?’’
-The Old-
The Project
M3dea is project that started many years ago from a series of images that I had in my mind, long chats with friends and an exhibition at the Royal Academy that sparked my imagination, and gave me the impulse to write.
M3dea is an adaptation of the greek myth of Medea; my personal way to put order to a series of fragments, versions, and older adaptation to what is widely considered the most cruel of greek tragedies.
M3dea is a call for freedom, a personal step stone into my development as a theatre practitioner, and a creative.
M3dea is a long lasting labour, who still has to see the lights of the stage.
The Story
Medea is a foreigner in a foreign land, a stranger amongst strangers. Her faith has been decided by the Gods when, in her Motherland — the Colchis — Eros carelessly shoots the most painful of his harrow at her, and she falls in love with the first of the heroes: Jason.
Her love is an apparent freedom, a clean cut from her land, her family and the world she has known.
Upon her arrival in Corinth, Medea already has two children: physical portrayal of her love for Jason.
But Jason is not there anymore. He left him for another woman, Creusa, Princess of Corinth and Daughter of Creon, king of Corinth.
Trapped in a life she never chose and abandoned by her husband and the Gods, Medea is battling for her own freedom, in search of her free will.
But the path to freeing ourselves comes at a cost that nobody is willing to pay.
The concept
Cubism and Theatre
In 2016, I had the chance to visit Hockney's solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Travelling through the many phases that this artist had throughout his life, I ended up, at the end of the exhibition, in front of some work he developed between the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s. His work in that period revolved around the idea of applying the concepts of cubism (hence, to reproduce the three-dimensionality of a subject on a bi-dimensional support) to photography. What came out of that is a series of photographic portrayals taken from different perspectives and rebuilt in what appears to be a cohesive image of the subject.
Whilst observing the mesmerising details of these works, I started questioning myself on the possibility of applying those same concepts of cubism to theatre, conceiving the text and images we create on stage as bi-dimensional representations of reality.
The concept revolves around the idea that in front of a character written in a text, every actor decides how to approach it based on what is closer, in terms of reliability, to his personal background. The difference in background and personal stories gives us the chance to calibrate certain aspects of those written characters and to leave out some others, returning a partially incomplete image and resulting in what we recognise as different performances.
One character, Three Souls.
In order to try to tackle the main problem that revolves around Cubism and Theatre, hence the fact that Theatre is already by definition a three-dimensional media, I decided that my solution would have been found in looking at the different aspects that build a character (emotions, words, and physicality), and to apply the concepts of cubism to those factors.
What came out of it is a character (Medea) seen from three different perspectives: The Young (a version of Medea before she meets Jason), Medea or The Mother (the version of Medea that lives in the present moment, mother of two and wife to Jason) and The Old (the future version of Medea, that has already killed her children and has freed herself from the will of the Gods).
These three versions of the same character work as a chorus in unison to deliver the story of Medea.
The subsequential passage was to give voice to these three characters. Starting from the Most recognizable one (Medea or The Mother), I decided to write her in prose her words as a representation of how we speak daily, down to The Old written in poetry to represent the freedom from structure and the wiseness of her character, passing through the Young a Medea that is entrapped and silenced in her free will by the decisions that the Gods made for her, and hence developed in her entirety through physical theatre and movements.
The Next Step
M3dea currently stands as early draft piece in search help for further development.