Performance in the Grecanic language with Italian surtitles

Rubble.
In an age of rubble, there is no other possibility than to work with what remains, to blow on the ashes in order to rekindle the fire.
What remains of tragedy: words without sound.
What remains of the polis: a society of strangers.
What remains of ritual: a burnt-out dramaturgy.
What remains of myth: a story worn thin.
What remains of a hero: a figure out of focus.
The song of Oedipus rises from the rubble.

Antiphanes writes in the comedy Poiesis:
Tragedy is a fortunate art, because the spectators already know the plot before the poet tells it; he only needs to remind them. As soon as the name ‘Oedipus’ is spoken, everything else is already known — his father Laius, his mother Jocasta, his daughters, his sons, what he suffered, his guilt.

How can we rebuild today that collective knowledge which once spared the tragic poet from having to turn myth into prose, and allowed him instead to summon immediate visions in the audience?
How can we accomplish the tragic today?
What language is it, what do we wish to say to the spectator through Sophocles? And in which tongue?
Sophocles’ Greek was deliberately elevated and musical, a language that tears us away from the plane of reality and places us on a level of transcendence.
How can we offer the audience the perfect dramatization of the perfect myth in a language that is not hostile and conceptual, but musical, instinctive, sensual?

Alessandro Serra chose Grecanic, a language that still resonates today in a remote corner of what was once Magna Graecia.
An age-old idiom, marked by languages imposed from above and by subaltern dialects that grew spontaneously in the sublime field once sown by the Greeks — such as Calabrian and Apulian.

The tragedy of Oedipus is set in a city reduced to a flicker, arid, sterile, decomposing. And yet Sophocles guides the spectator toward an inner light that will reveal itself at Colonus, in the sacred grove where Oedipus will be literally absorbed by the gods.

As part of the Fabbrica Europa 2026 festival
In collaboration with Fondazione del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

Tickets will be available soon