Ho Ka Kei’s take on the last canonical part of the story of the House of Atreus; Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) opened last night at the Aki Studio in a production directed by Jonathan Seinen. It’s a very funny and very thought provoking take on the story that will likely be best known to opera goers as the plot of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride. I want to start with the three questions that the playwright set out to answer:
- What does it mean for mainly POC’s and marginalized folks to be taking this tale on?
- What do we gain/ what do we lose/ what may feel erased/ what is truly universal about this tale or is that an assumption due to its status in the canon?
- When we end a cycle, say a cycle of vengeance, what other cycles emerge?
This interests me especially because I’m not in any real sense a marginalized person. Indeed I’m almost “archetypically” of the group that has made the classical canon its own; i.e a white male with a traditional classical education(1).
operaramblings 