BACCANTI RAVE

Baccanti Rave is an immersive experience that transforms Euripides’ tragedy into a contemporary ritual, blending theatre, techno-Arab music and visual art.

Dionysus descends to Earth in the form of a fluid human being, neither man nor woman, determined to disrupt a world oppressed by male control. To challenge the established order, the god calls women to rebellion: they abandon their everyday lives and begin to dance in a collective ritual of freedom.

Gradually, some men, drawn in by his energy, also join the circle, allowing themselves to be carried away into an ecstasy that dissolves the boundaries between genders, roles and power. Until the whole world comes to a standstill and begins to dance.

The audience becomes an active part of the bacchanal. Rather than sitting and watching, spectators enter the rhythm of a real DJ set, where lights, sounds and images surround every participant. Dancing becomes a ritual and cathartic act, a way of immersing oneself in the vital chaos that Dionysus brings with him. The audience thus finds itself within a contemporary party that is also an ancient ritual.

THE PROJECT

The project is developed in collaboration with Alektron, a multidisciplinary artist working in the field of visual art. The bacchanal unfolds through a constantly changing visual fabric: video loops taken from Giorgio Ferroni’s 1961 film Le baccanti are manipulated and “played” live in sync with the music, creating an ongoing dialogue between image and sound.

Artificial intelligence also plays a key role, used on the one hand to reconstruct some of the gaps in the original Greek dramaturgy, and on the other to generate an original monologue entrusted to the synthetic voice of Matteo Salvini, who here embodies Pentheus, the ruler of Thebes. As a figure of power attempting to repress the Dionysian ritual, Pentheus (Salvini) becomes the protagonist of the “Anti-Rave Decree”, an ironic and unsettling contemporary parallel to his edict against the Bacchanals.

Baccanti Rave has a modular structure, conceived as an organism in constant transformation. The performance incorporates an element of improvisation in the selection and mixing of sound tracks, following the logic of a DJ set, where each performance emerges from listening to the moment and engaging in dialogue with its context. For this reason, there is no fixed duration: the performance adapts to the needs of each programme and to the spaces that host it, taking on a different, unique and unrepeatable form each time.