Cry yourself a river

I've been reading classical Greek tragedies. Nothing happens on the scene, action is communicated in synthesis, feeling are explicitly told, no blood on show, no sharp and shining knives, no killing: everything has already happened when its news reaches the stage. There's nothing one can do about it. It's Fate, it's Doom.

How can we reproduce the effect the audience experienced in Ancient Greek when watching a tragedy? How can a figure, a character, a person, an actor, an audience bear all that today? It is a commonplace that today there is no such experience that can be defined as Tragedy (with a big T) in the Western world. Yet there is such a crave for catharsis.

How can we, artistic and cultural operators, create the conditions for the audience to experiment it in a theatre? Today people cry their hearts out mainly in front of the most commercial and predictable cinema, even for the most improbable love story plots. I don't. I don't ever cry at the cinema. It is not planned, but I sincerely just never cry. On the contrary I do cry at the theatre, watching a play, and not because it is bad. In that case I'd moan loudly during the whole performance or leave the room, for I learnt and gained a form of self respect in so many years as a theatre audience: when it's bad, it's bad, no need for masochism.

I cried so many times. Emma Dante's MPalermu, Carnezzeria (saw it three times and cried the three of them) and Vita Mia; Bob Wilson's Quartet by Heiner Muller (I wanted to be Isabelle Hupper so badly); Psychopathia Synpathica by Cooperativa ESTIA with the prisoners of Bollate, Milan (again saw it three times and, in the last one, I was the only one doing a standing ovation and shout "This is good theatre, not the one we're used to be tortured with" (I was and still am in an open polemic with my hometown's theatre programming politics); Pippo Del Bono's Urlo, among many others.

The last (and probably not least) and the most mighty crying I had was for Angelica Liddell's La casa de la fuerza (Culturgest, Lisbon). 5 hours performance. I went to see it alone cos I didn't dare inviting anyone to such a long show. It was simply grand. I started uncontrollably crying after the first 5 minutes. In the first 5 minutes I couldn't breathe properly and couldn't stop thinking "Oh my God, what's happening to me? Isto mexe bué comigo...(This makes me wriggle inside!). It was about Angelica Liddell's personal hangover after the end of a big love: getting your body stronger through training, work out and running in order to survive an inner mortal hit; touching the lowest of your possible misery and humiliation in order to temper yourself to anything. You are still alive, even afterall.

From this personal dimension to the woman condition. To the tragic events that affect women in contemporary Mexico: we're talking about something that is far beyond simple breaking of Humain Rights.

Today the Tragedy seems feminine to me. All the strongest people I've met in the last few years were women. The man seems to go through an existencial weakness. He can't take decisions, he can't do the first stpe anymore, he's having a hard time being alone.

Maybe it is time to shift the abused paradigm where the woman is the one who cries and man is the column of everything. Maybe it is time for him to step aside. And cry himself a river, for it might make him stronger.