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When rock music electrifies Euripides’ words, when punk plugs the myth of the Bacchae into the mains, then Dionysus the great, the divine, will sing. Making his OCC debut, Aris Biniaris turns the clash between Pentheus the king and Dionysus the god into an angry hymn to the division of the human soul into logic and instinct.

A fan of on-stage interaction between music and drama and a dedicated scholar of ancient tragedy, the director dares couple the subversive power of rock to the violent tragedy of the Bacchae in a production which sets out to work all our senses up into a frenzy.

In an arid, seismic landscape, a band of select performers—accompanied by two musicians—are invited to reflect through music and theatre on the relationship between freedom and dogma, isolation and creativity.

With a career that started out with a psychedelic reading of Giannis Skarimbas’ The Divine He-Goat and culminated with his maiden appearance at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus with Aeschylus’ Persians, Aris Biniaris has spent recent years seeking out those corners of the theatrical repertoire that set out to illuminate issues relating to personal freedom, social dogmatism and historical memory.

Active at a time when Greek society seems stuck in a rut and unable to move on, Biniaris has settled on a work that deals with precisely these matters : “Pentheus ends up being ripped limb from limb because of his avowed and continued defiance of the god. Still, at the same time, the Dionysian life-giving, life-bearing force, the innate power of the nature of things, is never simply going to retire into the background. It is how we, as a society, choose to align ourselves with this life force that will determine our ultimate convergence or inevitable demise”.