Syracuse | Greek Scenes

Fea­tur­ing large in the pro­gramme for this year’s sea­son of clas­si­cal plays at the stun­ning Greek the­atre in Syra­cuse is an unlikely name: Rem Kool­haas. The Dutch archis­tar and founder of OMA hasn’t taken to act­ing or even direct­ing, but was called in to design the scene for the three plays of the 2012 cycle: Aeschy­lus’ Prometheus, Euripi­des’ The Bac­chae and Aristo­phanes’ The Birds.

This is the 48^th sea­son of per­for­mances mas­ter­minded by that bas­tion of clas­si­cal cul­ture, INDA, the National Insti­tute of Ancient Drama, in the awe­some atmos­phere of the amphithe­atre, the finest out­side Greece, dat­ing back to the 5^th cen­tury BCE and almost entirely dug out of the rock. It now lies within the Neapo­lis Arche­o­log­i­cal Park just to the west of Syra­cuse, which, inci­den­tally, is yet another UNESCO World Her­itage site.

Kool­haas and his team (Bar­bara Mate­ria, Francesco Mon­cada, Ippolito Pestellini and Miguel Taborda) have designed a set­ting in three con­nected parts, inno­v­a­tive but inte­grated with the ancient struc­ture and, pre­dictably, spec­tac­u­lar. It con­sists of a large ter­raced machine in the cen­tre of the scene, a bal­cony behind it which arcs to con­nect with the top tier of the dia­zoma, and a float­ing stage in the orches­tra.

Per­for­mances begin on May 11 and con­tinue until the end of June: for more infor­ma­tion and the cal­en­dar see the INDA web­site.

Fon­dazione INDA

Corso Mat­teotti 29

96014 Sir­a­cusa

+39 0931 487200

comunicazione@indafondazione.org

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