Solène Weinachter enters the complex text of Sophocles’ Antigone playfully, with a lightness of touch that belies the intensity of the work that dates back to the fifth century BC. Her intimate solo performance, Antigone, Interrupted, created in collaboration with Scottish Dance Theatre’s Joan Clevillé and presented by Pickle Factory at the Dalhousie Institute recently, is astoundingly powerful, awe-inspiring and cheerily avant-garde. Although it questions the grave issues of patriarchy and tyranny layered with grief, familial allegiance and good intention, it never loses its infectious jokey charm.
In this piece, the text of the original play is interspersed with personal experiences, contemporary references and comical interpolations, which both interrupt it — as the title suggests — and make it more engaging and accessible. There is a sense of urgency, in movement and monologue alike, in this reimagination of the play for our times using dance, theatre, songs and storytelling. New meanings emerge from the ‘interruptions’, which offer fresh entry points into the tragedy about dissent embedded in the mythical prehistory of Greece. At a time when speaking truth to power has become more fraught with danger to life and livelihood than ever before, Antigone’s intransigence in the face of autocracy acquires a profound significance. Dressed casually in pants and a white shirt, Clevillé and Weinachter’s Antigone enquires into the premise of the female body as an object of oppression and her agency as an aggressive tool of opposition. A lone figure of resistance, she revolts proprietorially against a savage marginalisation that has been foisted on her.
Weinachter plays all the roles in the play that lasts over an hour. The body language and the vocal inflexions of all the characters are richly imagined, etched in sharp lines of great physical and psychological detail. In a powerhouse performance, she shapeshifts continually, playing dogs and other animals as well. Her enactment of their growling, snarling and barking have an overwhelmingly intense and wild energy. She offers a persuasively visceral experience of a subversive spirit with complete autonomy. Weinachter is feisty and provocative. When she dances, you wish that she would go on a little longer. When she sings, you don’t want her to stop. Such is the power of Weinachter’s communication that she holds you completely in her thrall as she tells a nearly 2,500-year-old story. She is abundantly supported by Luke Sutherland’s highly innovative and atmospheric sound design.
Another piece based on the epic character of Surpanakha, presented recently by Sharmila Biswas as part of Alekhya at the Science City Mini Auditorium, also examined gender politics and the crass imbalance of power within it. Her virtuoso dance piece, Katha Surpanakha, is provocative, personal and challenging. Having fallen helplessly in love with the handsome and valiant Ram, the princess of Lanka goes into the forest in pursuit of her hero. She has a clear sense of her own voice and values herself as an individual. Aroused by her desire for him, she is unapologetic in her quest to have him as her own.
This work is a tour de force of feminine sexual agency. Most hegemonic versions of the epic have demonised Surpanakha, but in Biswas’s personal reading, she emerges as a counter-argument of such re-tellings. She is more human than most idealised women, a go-getter, who is therefore, by default, a cause for societal discomfort.
