ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL

Nearly two thousand five hundred years ago, Euripides described in Children of Herakles  the fate of minor refugees, begging for shelter and protection. How does a society deal with children on the run, who have nothing to do with age-old geopolitical conflicts but are nevertheless victims of them?

Fate is fickle, Euripides wrote, you can't possibly escape it. But what if it's you who loses out? Together with thirteen LARF!-teens, theatre maker Silke Thorrez examines what impact Euripides' words still have today.

The soial organisation Manoeuvre, together with a super-diverse group of participants, founded the collective Women of Trachis, based on Sophocles' tragedy of the same name. In it, macho Heracles returns to his wife Deianeira after many wars and wanderings. However, he brings home another woman, the beautiful Iole. From the perspective of those two women, the collective focuses on everyone who remains voiceless or invisible, who is abused or oppressed.

To do so, the collective combines a woolworking workshop with a dusk and silence walk. The result is an empowering ritual from dawn to dusk in which anyone can participate. Centrally, as in the original tragedy, there will be a robe, in which the names of the uncountable Palestinian victims will be embroidered.

In Sophocles' Philoktetes, a Greek hero is bitten by a snake on his way to Troy. He complains, his wound festers and stinks, and he is abandoned by the war-weary Greeks on a desert island. After ten years of war, his archenemy, the devious Machiavellian Odysseus, returns to the island. An oracle has foretold that the Greeks will not prevail until Filoktetes joins them in battle. Will the latter stay bitterly behind on the island and continue to rot, or go to Troy as a celebrated hero after all?

During five evenings, theatre collective de Roovers reads the tragedy together with students and lecturers of university UGent, and healthcare providers and (former) patients of the hospital UZ Gent. How do we deal with illness and (invisible) suffering? With the isolation of those left behind in hospital rooms? With loneliness, powerlessness and anger? Who helps? What helps? Can reading together help?

Women in Troy, as told by our mothers  tells the story of the Trojan War from the perspective of women and, in particular, mothers. Renowned Portuguese theatre maker and -writer Tiago Rodrigues wrote the text, using different versions of the Greek myth, recent world events, and stories of himself and the four theatre makers.

Present and past are intertwined, the personal and the mythological merge, heroes become monsters, victims become perpetrators, and in the end the choir claims the leading role.