Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
A Memory Exercise for 4 Female Voices
from an idea by Chiara Guidi
in collaboration with Vito Matera
with Angela Burico, Chiara Guidi,
Anna Laura Penna, Chiara Savoia
original sound Scott Gibbons
scenes, lights and costumes Vito Matera
sound technician Andrea Scardovi
technicians Francesca Di Serio, Gionni Gardini,
Daniele Magnani, Eugenio Resta
production Benedetta Briglia
organisation Elena de Pascale, Stefania Lora
administration Simona Barducci, Elisa Bruno, Michela Medri
administrative consulting Massimiliano Coli
production Societas
photo Eva Castellucci
In Sophocles’ tragedy, nothing that is said is also seen, and the peripeteia is entrusted solely to words and the sound of the voice. It is Oedipus who requests this: “I’m surveying every word”, and thus the act or ability of speaking, the faculty of speech and locution, becomes a verbal and musical image, a slender body made of air that leads the hero to his agnition.
Only with the voice – reading letters, syllables, vowels and consonants which, just as in cosmogonic myths, in their minimal units of sound, bear within themselves the mystery of the representation of the world – does Oedipus discover the truth of his own destiny: being the imaginary son of his father.
He discovers this with a voice that comes from the bowels, from an interior that can in no way coincide with what the eye is able to see and understand.
The mouth opens. The voice comes out and, with its sound, brings the enigma back to itself, compounding it.