Natalia Lassalle – Morillo

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Live Performance |

Written by Sophokles
Translated by Anne Carson
Directed by Natalia Lassalle-Morillo 
Performed at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre , California

link to live performance video excerpt: https://vimeo.com/403758912 

In the aftermath of a devastating civil war, Antigone is left standing in the ruins. One of her dead brothers is declared a traitor, while the other is proclaimed a hero. Kreon, the city’s appointed ruler, leaves his traitorous nephew’s body to rot beyond the city walls. Defying the command of her uncle, Antigone buries her brother in secret, turning this intimate act of duty into an act of rebellion, triggering a domino effect that shakes her home nation to its core. Her defiance illuminates the tactics her family employs to deal with chaos and brings their city to question our relationship to our blood, the privilege of remembrance, and the structures established by humans to understand the conditions and logic of a past that weighs on our present.

Director’s Note:

[ anti ] [ gone]  is a live theatrical reconstruction of Sophokles’ Antigone that considers the story’s current weight on our political and ancestral histories. Presented at the Walt Disney Modular Theatre at the California Institute of the Arts, this adaptation of Anne Carson’s translation of the greek text focuses on the simultaneity of experiences, perspectives and instances that coexist during an event of collective catastrophe.  The set design serves as a live installation that takes over the vast space of the Walt Disney Modular Theatre and presents a ruined Thebes that is currently under construction. The audience transits multiple performance spaces following the Guard, a female entity who witnesses and uncovers the mystery within the histories of the women of House of Oedipus. Conceived in collaboration with an all female, international design team, [anti] [ gone] brings us to question our relationship to our ancestry, the privilege of remembrance, and the structures established by humans to understand the conditions and logic of a past that weighs on our present. 

Sophokles’ Antigone is a play that has been done and redone for centuries. The words in translation resound in the hall of theatre spaces, classrooms, forests, cemeteries, homes, churches, rehearsal rooms, theatre history. The spirits of those who have spoken these words are present every time an actor speaks them.  We all have our history with these words. Escaping these spirits and this history is an arduous task. Our commitment is to embrace both. 

In this production, we are utilizing two translations Carson wrote of this play. As a base, we are utilizing her translation of Antigone, translated in 2015 for Ivo Van Hove’s production of the play , intersected by her more experimental adaptation of the text, called Antigonik, which precedes this other translation. Through the binding of these two texts, we hope that we can be in conversation with the inherited history of these words and those who speak them. 

What first drew me to Anne Carson’s translation was the simplicity and straightforwardness of its language. In her translator’s note to “Antigonik”, Carson quotes Beckett on his own aspirations towards language: “to bore hole after hole in it until what cowers behind it seeps through”. It is, in this action of boring through , where our tragedy is contained.

The tragedy is a machine with a moral agenda. We discovered that Sophokles constructed this text with such precision that each action is meant to be experienced at a specific moment in time. Time then piles up on itself, functioning in a strange manner that is not meant to make sense to us in 2019. In our process we have been investigating the tactics each one of the individuals on stage has to deal with the chaos evoked by this piling up of time, which leads to the inevitable cycle of catastrophe we witness. 

Who gets to escape this piling up of time?  

Antigone? Eurydike? The messenger? The performers ? The audience? The director?

I hope you are able to find your answer, or your question, in your own experience of witnessing.  

Performed by //
Antigone // Sivan Ambrose
Ismene // Juliana Alvarez
Guard // Ashley Sánchez 
Kreon // Ryan Adame 
Haimon // Nic Prior
Teiresias // David Blindauer
Eurydike // Yaasmeen Brown
Chorus // Gabriel Girón Vives
Chorus // Kayla Ibarra
Chorus // Nina Hosseinzadeh
Chorus // Daniel Strausman

Creative Team
SCENIC DESIGNER / María Fernanda Videla Urra
COSTUME DESIGNER / Xiyu Lin 
LIGHTING DESIGNER / Peiyu Lai
SOUND DESIGNER / Gahyae Ryu
VIDEO DESIGNER / Kam Ying Lee
TECHNICAL SUPERVISOR/ Zachary Palenchar
TECHNICAL DIRECTORS / Gabe Bennett, Francisco De Leon
SCENIC ARTIST / Andrew Carey
ASSISTANT SCENIC DESIGNER / Fallon Williams
ASSISTANT COSTUME DESIGNER / Maria Laura Sandoval
ASSISTANT LIGHTING DESIGNER / Euisun Yoon
ASSISTANT SOUND DESIGNER / Jacenta Yu, Alena Delval
ASSISTANT VIDEO DESIGNER / Emmanuel Bradshaw
ASSISTANT TECHNICAL DIRECTOR / Todd Piedad, Ky Docter
ASSISTANT SCENIC ARTIST / Travis Moelter
PROP ASSISTANT / Rashi Jain
DRAMATURG / P. Sazani

Management Team
PRODUCTION STAGE MANAGER / Ethan Hollander
PRODUCTION MANAGER / Xiaoyue Zhang
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER / Samantha Brounstein
GENERAL MANAGER / Rui Xu
MARKETING MANAGER / Sophie Blumberg
LINE PRODUCER / Rui Xi 
DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS/ Jared Pixler 
Photography by Xiaoyue Zhang