Voci is an experiment, an attempt to tell the myth of Arianna and Theseus from a female point of view, searching for the paradigm of isolation and diversity, enclosed within the labyrinth. And it is an imaginary labyrinth that the two actresses evoke through gesture, song and sound, in a story in the form of a musical work in which the materiality of the word and its evocative power become drivers of vision. Through recurring motifs and quotations, extrapolated and reworked starting from Monteverdi’s famous Lamento di Arianna, in which sounds and noises belonging to Mediterranean folklore make an incursion, the soundscape accompanies us into the heart of one of the many islands of our sea. And it is precisely in this ambiguity of the place that the story seeks its universality, investigating the paradigm of isolation that in the Greek myth is perfectly embodied by the figure of Arianna.
But who is Arianna? Where is she really? In Naxos? In Crete? Or, why not? In Sardinia in search of the inventor Daedalus to ask for help once again. The Greek myth, repository of the collective imagination, has the great privilege of never dying and of reliving in the infinite rewritings that we, the descendants of Homer, persist in writing. Perhaps because deep down we are aware of the great capacity it has retained over the millennia to condition our gaze. We have tried to restore Ariadne’s lost dignity when, placing her alongside Theseus, the ancient Greeks made her a tragic heroine from a serial novel, destined to be abandoned on a desert island by the man for whom she betrayed her homeland. The labyrinthine mythologem has origins much older than Hellenic culture and arises from the need to depict the complexity of human thought, that labyrinth that must necessarily be crossed to reach self-knowledge.
According to the philologist Károly Kerényi, in the ancient Minoan culture, Ariadne was none other than the guardian deity of the cult of life and death, charged with accompanying, through the steps of a dance into the heart of the labyrinth, where the initiate would meet the Minotaur, the dark alter ego of every human being. The Minotaur, understood as a cannibalistic monster, was born later from the need of the Athenians to legitimize their supremacy over Crete. Yet when in 1900 the archaeologist Arthur Evans brought to light what remained of the ancient palace of Knossos, a very refined civilization emerged in which the lack of defensive walls would suggest a matriarchal and pacifist government.
Perhaps the myth of Ariadne and Theseus is nothing but the transposition into a story of the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy and Ariadne, abandoned on the island of Naxos, the symbol of the subordinate condition of women. For this reason we wanted to give another voice to this heroine with whom we confuse ourselves, in a biographical myth game made of mirrors that from island to island but where the labyrinth always remains the same and only by entering it can one reclaim an autonomous destiny. Because to free oneself from that subordinate role, history must be rewritten.
