Deucalion dreams of going to Mars, speculating on that distant planet and returning as a hero. Pirra, like her mother Pandora, is an explorer and dreams of digging up and resurrecting the history that sustains us and then live peacefully on the hump of our mother Earth. He knows he has to keep conquering. She knows that, in the depths of time and on distant Olympus, a vessel keeps the philosopher’s stone of Hope and she is sure that by rescuing it, she will relax Zeus and his vengeful lightning. Thus we will rest from all the punishments that beset us today.

Talia, the Muse of comedy, feels inspired by this couple and sees a way to take revenge on her sister Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, who terrifies humanity and also always reaps success. Talía goes down to the arena to breathe her version of events into the young people, she manages to get them in a car and take them to Olympus. Here they come across magic, the most difficult game yet, entertainment, tension and everything necessary to change history; always with the help of her mother, the Muse of Memory, and her father, the mighty Zeus.

The story is always the same, because it is written about the deeds of a hero from the eyes of a poet, from the soul and bowels of the artist, and inspired by the Muses of Olympus. Here Zeus, the immortal cloud-gatherer, still rules and has sent men the best of gifts, woman.

Every explanation, with its prejudice or veneration, is part of the imagination, the subconscious, the legend. Everything is fiction and true at the same time. Put disbelief aside and enjoy a comedy integrated with dance, circus and a magical universe.

Duration: to be confirmed.

Recommended age: For all audiences.

This is a brutal story. The story involves real people who existed and crossed paths in the streets. In the first years of the 1st century AD, the Romans continue to invade the lands that surround the Mediterranean. They give power to monarchs, savage dictators, to subdue the people. They arrive in Judea only to meet princess Salome. She secretly supports the rebels who resist the rule of the corrupt puppet King Herod. Even though the king is appointed by Rome, he is a man without morals and rules without law.

John the Baptist, a spiritual leader of his people, cries out against the invader and becomes a captive in the prison of Herod’s Palace. He gives life to a new time. He is a Prophet. He says that hope is the breath of all dreams, and ignites the princess’ desire.

Salome yearns desperate for her beloved John the Baptist. Rejected by him, she transforms into a bleeding woman. Salome is the expression of Absolute Sensual Power and exalts her desire for John the Baptist, before overflowing in death.

Love and death live in a permanent embrace, and Salome crosses the red line that leads her to delirium. Egged on by her mother Queen Herodias, she dares to ask her stepfather, the King, for the head of John the Baptist. Herodias is a woman used and abused by power, a woman in need of freedom. She is floundering in a land of repression that ignores and stones women if they abandon strict morality. She drags herself through an impossible life wrapped in sex, alcohol and delusions.

And above there is Sirius. That star, the brightest in the sky, a sign of life on a planet that is destroyed from war to war and from god to god. Wars waged by the Herods of today. Yesterday and today at the same time. Sirius, that pure energy that can transform us.

And below, in the depths of the sewers, are the Guard of Moral and Order, excrement of power that insists on protecting the country from ignorant and vicious women. They cover their bodies with veils, leaving them without existence.

Sex has the power to move the world, love it and destroy it. That power is called Salome.

Magüi Mira

Duration: 90 minutes.

Recommended age: Over 16 years old.

What is the truth? What is the origin of all that we agree to call “true”? Where do the foundations of the correct answers lie?

Dear public, is not error, perhaps, the answer to all those questions? What would be true and correct, if it were not for error? Would they exist as such? Truth owes its existence to falsehood and error, since the very idea requires the opposite to exist. The authentic and the correct are always so flat, so…so boring, don’t you think?

In The Comedy of Errors we start with a death sentence and everything turns into a party by mistake. By mistake we change partners thinking we are right and by mistake we end up in jail thinking we are honest. We learn from our mistakes, but it is a mistake to think this if we aspire not to make mistakes.

Greece, cradle of our culture, mother of Aristotle, Pericles and the Dionysian festivals, grandmother of Zorba the Greek, Varoufakis and the raves of Barceloneta. Four twins, that is to say, two pairs of twins related to two twin girls, who mistakenly pair up with the twins who are not their partners while their real twins disguise themselves as the wrong twins to seduce their twins, impostors of themselves…? or is it not? …no, I’m wrong, I’m wrong. In reality, they are a pair of twins, who are not twins to each other, but to another couple who are not twins to each other either, but to the other couple, who acquire a debt with a jeweler, a friend of an exorcist who lives near an Abbey where there is a Mother Abbess who is married to a merchant traveler whom she believes to be dead and is therefore more mother than abbess…or not, am I wrong again? The fact is that everyone wants to party by the sea in Ephesus… Does Ephesus have a port? It has a library and a beautiful theater, but… the sea?

I hope that Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Mikis Theodorakis join us on this journey and that you, dear audience, enjoy the party.

Andrés Lima and Albert Boronat

Duration: 110 minutes (approx).

Recommended age: Over 12 years old

This play premiered in 423 BC and is considered, with the exception of Socrates, the best of Aristophanes’ comedies. Its central theme is the open criticism of the Socratic school and the plot develops a theme that twenty centuries later is still very current: the complicated and inexhaustible relationships between parents and children.

The story is very simple: Strepsiades, who is being ruined by his indebted lazy son, decides to enroll at Socrates’ school to learn rhetoric. He intends to use it to convince his creditors that things are not always what they seem and that actually, he owes them nothing. Faced with his inability to study, he forces his son to take the rhetoric classes. His son learns it so well and so quickly that he makes his father’s life impossible. Las Nubes is a criticism against the tyranny of children and against all those who want to make us suffer through highs and lows played by Socrates and Querefonte, two close enemies of Aristophanes himself.

We have created a version of this play completely imbued by the spirit of Aristophanes, which has made it as hard core as Las Nubes was in its time. The action takes place a few days after the inauguration of Augusta Emérita theater, in Mérida. The manager of the coliseum, a theater professional, tries to convince the main investor of the advantages of having built a theater for six thousand people, instead of the thousand expected. He also goes on about how tremendously groundbreaking it will be to inaugurate a Roman theater with a Greek play. This clearly is a “theater within the theater” genre, which allows us to poke fun at a profession which has not changed much in the last twenty centuries.

To make our adaptation we deconstructed the original text, mixed it up, cut it, mutilated and rearranged it all.  We added characters, plots and jokes, replaced songs, updated incomprehensible jokes, invented theatrical problems, and laughed at ourselves. The icing on the cake is our inexhaustible desire to want the public not only as an accomplice but also to remember this night as the best night of their lives. That’s how ambitious we are.

Duration: 90 minutes.

Recommended age: For all audiences.

Pandataria is an island belonging to the Pontine archipelago, in the Tyrrhenian Sea and measures 1.54 km2.

At the time of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the women of the empire who did not conform to the norms (adulterous, powerful, independent, political) were exiled to Pandataria to keep the image of authority clean. Julia the Elder was the first and later came her daughter, and her granddaughter at different times in her life. Life in exile on such a small island without the possibility of leaving could be very boring and suffocating, but as an island-prison Pandataria came to represent the paradise of the forgotten.

After the Roman Empire, in 1941, three men named Spinelli, Rossi and Colorni, ended up on the same island-prison under the orders of Mussolini. They had questioned the dictator’s rise to power and had been exiled to Pandataria, which had already changed its name to Ventotene. There, following in the footsteps of Julia the Greater and her descendants, they found their own paradise and wrote the text that would be the breeding ground for the Europe we know today; the Ventotene manifesto, whose full title is “For a free and united Europe.” It is curious that in a square kilometer surrounded by the Tyrrhenian Sea, and with insurmountable physical and ideological borders, the three men dreamed of eliminating all borders from the continent.

And that is Pandataria: the catchall, the island-prison, the island of the marginalized, those who are not part of the norm, those who are defective, those who are not legal citizens, the island of the unwanted, those who shake the world, the invalids. There are no instructions to differentiate the valid and those who are not, but we always recognize transgression and we separate it, we lock it up on an island of one square kilometer out of fear of anything different.

“…the island of the unwanted, those who shake the world…”.

Duration: to be confirmed.

Recommended age: Adult public, over 18 years old.

Shakespeare in Rome is an unprecedented and unique theatrical proposal based on the four plays that the great English playwright set in the Roman Empire: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus. The show unites and condenses these texts in just over two hours from four different current dramaturgical views. The show is staged by as many directing teams, with the same cast of eight actors and actresses who play 47 characters.

The Centro Dramático Galego, a theater company from Galicia, created the production to take place in the emblematic historic center of Compostela, at the Noble Hall of the Pazo de Fonseca. The staging here guarantees maximum proximity to the public, and has now been adapted for the stages at the Mérida Festival.

CORIOLANUS

Is Coriolanus an enlightened despot? A traitor to his country? An impious dictator? A bloodthirsty general? Or just a puppet managed by his mother’s capable hands? How is democracy built in our times? And what is the place of the peoples in this process? Yesterday and today it is questioning and fear that stops us, and tomorrow?

JULIUS CAESAR

Festivities and games in honor of César for his triumph in the last battle against Pompey. Groups of citizens go full of joy to the place of the festivities and, with great excitement, they invite people to leave their work and join the celebration. But there are also sectors of the Senate, followers of Pompey, who are not satisfied with the new political reality; they recriminate those citizens, forcing them to retreat and accusing them of ingratitude for celebrating the blood of Pompey, a leader whom they celebrated and entertained long ago, filling his path with flowers. Casio, Brutus, Decius and other senators exchange common concerns about the drift that, in their opinion, is leading Caesar towards a tyrannical exercise of power that could culminate in his coronation and, consequently, with the destruction of the Republic. The conspiracy begins to spread.

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

After the murder of Julius Caesar, the Triumvirate formed by Octavio César, Marco Antonio and Lepido governs the territories under Roman rule. Mark Antony, deliberately oblivious to what is happening in Rome, spends his time in Alexandria in love with Cleopatra. The queen will be pointed out as the only one guilty of the abandonment of her beloved’s political duties. Cleopatra will collide their political and personal lives to position herself as the figure of power that is within the conflicts in which the Triumvirs join. The imminent victory of Caesar after several warlike incidents and the death of Antonio will lead Cleopatra to want to end her life because, having lost power and lost love, she will not subjugate the man of Rome.

ANDRONICUS TITUS

Andronicus, the heroic victor, returns to Rome as usual: another victory, blood on his hands, rich booty, a handful of slaves, and a few other dead sons for the family pantheon. He mediates the choice of emperor, gives the daughter to the man he does not love, kills one of his many remaining children and has a luxurious prisoner killed, without suspecting that he is unleashing the wrath of his mother, Tamora, the imprisoned queen of the Goths. . What follows is the epic of revenge, the stupid senility of Tito, the rape of Lavinia, the death of his wife, the execution of the falsely accused sons of Andronicus. Rome mourns the death of the innocent, if there is anyone innocent in this story. Times are in disarray, order is threatened by foreign force and the internal rottenness of the empire. I’m not going to tell how it ends, because all these stories end badly. Crime, absurdity, filicide, cannibalism… and a slight ray of hope.

Duration: 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Recommended age: Over 16 years.

Special Notices: Nude. surprising sounds.

The Titans were the children of Gaea and Uranus according to mythology. When the two joined together they created “The World”. The Roman Theater of Mérida’s watchman is in charge of telling the incredible story of The Titans. He tells of how they were the first settlers on Earth and why we know of them in this day and age. Adventures, songs, fighting, humor, magic, and dancing all comes together to teach us why we are the way we are today.

Duration: 1h 35 minutes.

Recommended age: For all audiences.

Our protagonists have spent years and years, centuries really, stumbling over the same stones, making the same mistakes. Most of these mistakes have been mainly caused by the laws created by men.

The goddess Nemesis, fed up with this injustice, decides to cast a spell on women so that they unite and become aware. Together they must steal the men’s clothes and seize the assembly in order to change the established laws for more just and egalitarian ones.

But they will only have one night to cross the great forest that leads to the hill where the assembly is held at daybreak.

The road is dark and full of dangers, all mirrored to them wherein they see their own lives reflected. Facing their fears, they must figure out which laws need to be changed to have a lasting effect, once and for all.

The members of assembly will make us reflect and laugh at our roles in society, forcing us to get involved and take sides whether we like it or not.

Duration: 90 minutes.

Age: For all audiences.

This is one of Plautus most successful comedies. Two brothers are separated as children. One of them, Marco Segundo, is determined to find his brother Marco Primero. After searching for him for years he has almost nothing left of his fortune. He finally arrives in Emerita, the city where his brother resides. It is precisely the confusion caused by the extraordinary resemblance of the two brothers that is the catalyst for what takes place. What ensues, sprinkled with lots of comedy, allows the classic master of laughter to serve us a hilarious story about the comedy of misunderstandings.

Show duration: 90 minutes.

Recommended age: For all audiences.

Aeschylus’ Oresteia, written in the 5th century BC., is one of the greatest works of ancient Greek theater, and the only surviving trilogy from this time.

In 1966, the Greek playwright Alexis Solomos entrusted Xenakis with the music for a new production of the Oresteia. Thus they began to work together to reconstruct the sounds of ancient Greece through the prism of their time.

“The ancient drama cannot be expressed with tonal or atonal music like serialism. This type of music is typical of another era”, explains Xenakis, who writes fascinating colourful music full of contrasts. “Collective songs and dances, invocation of Jupiter: order = disorder, madness, screams, metal, voices with different rhythms…”, Xenakis writes in his score. He explains in several letters to Solomos that the hysterical and chaotic interpretation of the choir tries to produce a sound similar to that of the demonstrations of the 1940s against the Italian and German occupation of Greece.

This is a work that swings between the conflicts of Greek tragedy and those of 20th century Greece, between balance and chaos; all this under an atmosphere of modern primitive ritual.

The Zaragoza Auditorium Chamber Orchestra – “Grupo Enigma” (OCAZEnigma) was founded in 1995 and is one of the leading chamber orchestras in Spain. The OCAZEnigma has been a resident group of the Auditorio de Zaragoza since its inception. It has also established itself through a bold program in a continuous state of crossroads, where tradition enters dialogue through new forms of contemporary expression. 

For this concert at the Mérida Festival, OCAZEnigma will join the Polish baritone Maciej Nerkowski and the Ensemble Vocal Teselas, as well as the children’s choir from Extremadura Coro Amadeus-IN. Under the direction of Asier Puga, almost a hundred musicians will give life to a work that swings between the conflicts of Greek tragedy and those of 20th century Greece; between balance and chaos; all this under an atmosphere of modern primitive ritual.

This concert is produced in collaboration with the Government of Aragon.

PROGRAM

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Oresteïa [1965-66]
Agamemnon
Kassandra [1987]
Agamemnon
Les Choéphores
Le Déesse Athéna [1992]
Les Euménides

Duration: 60 minutes (only music).

Recommended age: For all audiences.