Oedipus Rex – The Desiring Machine (2009)

“Contemporary dance dialogs with Carnival and Hip-Hop cultures”

Oedipus the King by Sophocles has become a modern and postmodern icon for creating characters that were adopted by psychoanalysts and philosophers, when expressing the most secret human desires. The story of this tragedy, which arises from a Greek legend, was instrumental for the conception of the show, as it allowed the range of images and movements to be broadened.

The story of Oedipus – Laius and Jocasta’s son, the father of Eteocles, Ismene, Antigone and Polynices – is considered to be the tragedy of tragedies as it focuses on issues such as parricide and incest; but it is also the engine of thought and research of subjects such as the oppositions and interactions between the public and the private, the norm and the transgression, the destination and the invention.

 The complex and puzzling analysis of this capitalist and schizophrenic world by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the work by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, was central to this new show; especially chapter 1, The Desiring Machines. In contrast with the psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud and by drawing on various writers, especially Antonin Artaud, its authors do a striptease of organs stripping the human being in their studies on the contemporary society.

It is of pus, pustule, an illustrious wound ÉdiPus a desiring machine.

The Body and the culture that surrounds it; contemporary dance searched by Cia. Corpos Nômades interacting with both Carnival and Hip-Hop cultures.

These so universal cultures relate to the idea of nomadism, which underlies both the onset and the concept of body language of Cia. Corpos Nômades. Other points of connectivity of choices for this show are the notion of “placement”, plus there is a reference to the public and the private; and in the case of Carnival / carnivalization with the Oedipus legend, concerning his great-grandfather Labdacus: the latter suppressed the cult of maenads, who earned extreme religious and political influence in the city. He would have desecrated an altar for Dionysus, what raised the fury of the Bacchantes, who killed him by dismemberment.

These sources of inspiration that hovered and infiltrated in the nomadic bodies of the Company are related to the idea of ​​choreodramaturgraphy to build a “smooth and striated”, densely imagetic foundation populated by references: masochists, schizophrenic and paranoid bodies that appear in the analysis of Deleuze and Guattari; the bisexuality of Laius with Chrysippus; the riddle of the Sphinx to Oedipus; the struggle of Eteocles and Polynices, sons of Oedipus for power; Antigone, the confined sister; the lineage of lame people that involve Oedipus himself; the prophetic blindness of both Tiresias and Oedipus.

The show was sponsored by SABESP, under the Programa de Incentivo à Dança Paulista – 2008 (2008 São Paulo Dance Incentive Program).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRqL3psMh7M