Rex Revisited

"As a director, I always give my actors a great deal of freedom and responsibility in the development of material for a performance. For Rex Revisited, I delved into the age-old story of Oedipus together with students from the MBO Theaterschool Rotterdam, and we set out to find its relevance in 2024. At the heart of Oedipus’ story is an obsession with identifying and defending ‘the’ truth; this obsession can also be seen in our current society. Rex Revisited therefore puts a spotlight on how populists today claim to hold a universal truth. The performance does so by staying true to the original story, while also searching for new physical and musical narratives. In Rex Revisited  – for the first time since joining the Opera Forward Festival – I am fusing text, movement, music and song into one performance."

"For the music of Rex Revisited, I went back to the Mediterranean, where Sophocles wrote his Oedipus Rex. The centuries-old Byzantine choral tradition has a distinctive sound with dark voices, drones (elongated sustained tones) and repetitive liturgical texts. Instrumentalists Ezgi Elkırmış and Sinan Arat play on instruments that also are common around the Mediterranean, including Anatolian percussion instruments such as the davul and the def. The ney, a reed flute widely used from Eastern Europe and the Arab world to North Africa, is also defining for the sound of Rex Revisited. For the text, I went all the way back to the source: I used Sophocles’ original ancient Greek texts as well as their Latin translation."