“Classical Greek mythology is something that has fascinated me ever since I was a child. I have memories of reading these otherworldly stories over and over and having them open my imagination through a terrifying and wondrous world that I so wanted to believe in. This wild world where gods and monsters battled and manipulated each other for the sake of power and toyed with the lives of heroes and men.
The story of the poet Orpheus and his journey to the underworld is one of the most enduring and significant in mythology. It is a myth that plays out in our daily lives as a testament to grief, love and loss, and perhaps most significantly it is about the power of art itself; the search for and commitment to inspiration and true artistic expression. Orpheus journeys to the underworld after the death of Eurydice, hoping to persuade and open the hearts of the gods to let his beloved return. His attempt is in vain because at the last moment his desire defeats him, as he fails to honour the one request of the gods; to not look back at her as he leads her into the light. Orpheus is an artist and this gaze represents both his weakness and fallibility as a man, but also the very source of his inspiration as an artist. Without this moment of failure, the source of his true inspiration would never have been found. His sentence […] is to suffer his loss in solitude and express the vision of his love through his music.
The physical incarnation of myth is the act of passing down, generation after generation. Stories are told, retold, changed, adapted, half remembered, reinterpreted and lost, only to be found again. This smudged handwritten map has given me the context of placing the work in the world of memory. Themes and passages from Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera are elevated to the world of myth by being woven into a contemporary sound score by Richárd Riederauer. Elements of the archaic and symbolic are reinterpreted into a modern design aesthetic by Zsuzsa Molnár, and the stories and characters embodied by the dancers are a retelling that is as much about how the passage of time affects our personal histories, as it is one of the greatest stories ever told.' (Cameron McMillan)

Presented by: National Dance Theatre