We know that Eurydice was bitten by a snake and that Orpheus tried to save her by bringing her back from the underworld. We also know that Eurydice is the first opera in history to have come down to us (Jacopo Peri, 1600, seven years before Monteverdi’s Orfeo), and that so many composers have taken up the myth that it is almost impossible to count them.

Dmitri Kourliandski has taken his turn, plunging us into the solitude of Eurydice, surrounded by electronic voices whose distortions are thought to be caused by the distance that separates her from the world of the living. The long and magnificent poem by Nastya Rodionova on which the piece is based, divided into seven arias, is an intimate introspection, a plunge into an imaginary and haunting environment. An experience of the dark.

To stage this new Eurydice, Antoine Gindt called on Dominique Mercy, Pina Bausch’s iconic Orpheus in 1975 for Gluck’s opera Orpheus and Eurydice. He has lived this role, embodied it, transmitted it, and acquired an inaccessible memory of it. He finds Eurydice elsewhere, as if in a dream. These two journeys, that of Orpheus and that of Eurydice, take place in two time-spaces; they meet on stage and give this performance its strangeness and its fascinating hypnotic dimension.

The first stage of this project is developed in partnership with ENS Paris-Saclay and its resources. It is the subject of a Collective Interdisciplinary Programme (CIP) from September 2019 to June 2020, under the tutelage of Volny Fages, involving six students from different disciplines in the natural and human sciences.