Emma Dante, the groundbreaking director of plays and operas, works on textuality with a visual and visionary eye. Through contextual codes borrowed from a number of media she builds a network of images, whose relational activity enhances the actual, aesthetic and symbolic significance of the play.
Schooled in the study of classics, inspired by Kantor’s and Grotowski’s physical theatre, Dante’s originality stems mainly from her own Sicilian culture. Indeed she uses images taken from both Christian and orthodox Sicilian iconography as they are expressed in religious rites and in traditional forms of entertainment, in paintings and sculptures, in music and songs, mixing the ancestral with the contemporary to enhance the expressive and the symbolic meaning of her work. In the last decade her imagery has extended considerably to include dance, choreography and body language taken from rituals around the world.
Euripides’s tragedy Heracles which she directed in 2017 for the Teatro di Siracusa, Sicily, epitomises her dramatic language. Written in about 416 BC, the tragedy consists of two main scenes. In the first, Megara, Heracles’s spouse, their children and Amphitryon, the hero’s father, prepare to be sacrificed by Lycus, the usurper of Thebes. In the second, Heracles returns unexpectedly, kills Lycus, but taken by a divinely induced frenzy murders his own wife and children.
The themes of sorrow and pain in the first scene and the one of revenge and tragedy in the second, considered by some critics to be loosely connected, are in Dante’s treatment  unified as cause and effect. Having chosen a flowing narrative format, she reinforces it with a sweeping circular action whose relentless rhythm is more cinematic than theatrical. As in a film montage, an unbroken activity of visual and auditory images of actors, drummers, dancers and chorus replaces the separation in acts. The grandeur of film scenography together with religious iconography have inspired her depiction of the constant theme of death in the monumental set. It fills the stage as stunning as the colossal scenes built by the Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures in its heyday: a four-tiered white mausoleum of burial boxes with the framed images of the dead preceded by cubiform tombs filled with water. The language of religious iconography recurs in expressive and symbolic images: Megara dressed as a processional Madonna, an incense burner appears as a prop, stylised spinning crosses are dotted on the stage, ablution and water are constitutive images for the preparation of the human sacrifice, red mourning lamps surround the tombs of the victims and the choir’s reversed flowery gowns mirror earthen burial mounds.
Languages from other media are called upon to build a network of visual and metaphorical images. Oriental dance inspires the three rotating dervishes and the allegorical spinning Death. The renowned Sicilian Teatro dei Pupi (puppet theatre) with its sixteenth century stories of Crusade heroes is the source for costumes, gestures and movements of Heracles and his friend Theseus. They do not walk, they run and jump, they physically clash cuirasses and limbs, they genuflect and leap, they throw violently down their long black hair to cover their faces when in distress and fling it back when determined or hopeful, just as the puppets are made to do with the flowing mane decorating their helmets. Music increases the activity of the play dialogues with religious chants and horrific mourning cries, and, at the other end of the spectrum, with pop and digital music. The distorted movements and the mask-like grotesque facial expressions of servants and choir are paralleled by the costumes. Painting lends an expressionistic palette to their colours: long black gowns combined with white bibs as beards for the choir and with strident fucsia for the hooded tops of Lycus’s malign helpers. Pre-Raphaelite paintings inspire Megara’s clothes.
In short, Dante’s process of transformation and migration of forms and content between media enhances the productivity and the plurality of signification of her work, in which ethnographic and anthropological dialogues cross with symbolic discourse and visionary creativity.
