Safo

“In a garden on Lesbos, an island between East and West, the poet Sappho has summoned the Muses, protectors of art, to find out what will become of her name. The goddesses stop their game to take Sappho on a journey through time: from Ovid to the 21st century, from lost verses to a Christie’s auction. But we will also get closer to the human Sappho, to the artist who played at weddings and sang of desire for different women. Sappho invented our way of understanding love. Tonight, hand in hand with the Muses, we will try to understand her.

Sappho is a scenic, musical and visual poem that explores the figure of the great poet from Lesbos. Enigmatic and mysterious, she is an author revered and respected to this day, who composed more than ten thousand verses, of which, however, few complete poems and single verses have come down to us. In contrast to the glaring absence of her work, her legendary figure has only grown with time.

Our stage proposal traces Sappho’s universe through what has been imagined, projected and speculated by scholars and artists over the centuries, and reconstructs from what remains – the enigmatic incomplete verses, the influence on later authors such as Ovid, Catullus, Nosis or Erina – what she could have been and what Sappho means in a mostly male canon that for centuries has tried to reinterpret her figure according to the values and prejudices of each era.

A metatheatrical game, a dialogue between present and past to celebrate Sappho”.

6TH INTERNATIONAL CLASSICAL THEATRE FESTIVAL