Oedipus Steps

C_Music NOW

‘1-1-1’

Rest assured – this is not yet another production by the Athens Epidaurus Festival devoted to the iconic tragic hero. Sophocles’ two unsurpassable tragedies have been placed in deliberate fallow for this season; yet their legacy is too vital not to invite a refracted gaze. One might imagine Oedipus Steps – by composer Zesses Seglias, appearing at the Festival for the first time – as the “unseen footage” of those works. Or as an unknown piece nested within a known one: a wayward theatrical fragment that unfolds outside stage time, in the realm of what is implied rather than spoken.

For the protagonist here is not Oedipus as we know him through the poet’s immortal words, but a handful of hours: the hero’s final moments as he withdraws from the stage – from the text itself! – and walks alone into the forest, a role without an audience, to confront the reckoning of his life on earth. What might have passed through his mind in those hours? Would he have arrived at a state of calm acceptance, or would he have been consumed by an inner monologue of fractured whispers and cries?

These questions fuel an oblique musical work that registers the hero’s inner temperature and the fading echo of his footsteps as he moves away from his creator – and from us. Dramaturgically, the composition rests on the solo double bass – a backbone of dramatic intensity – forming the spine of the performance and tracing the conflict that rages within him.

The work lasts just forty-five minutes. Within this brief slice of time unfolds an adventurous encounter between music, dance, and text – but also something more: a flickering intuition that classic works conceal untapped dramaturgical veins within their blind spots, and, above all, a gleaming reminder that the Theban Cycle remains an inexhaustible laboratory of meaning – one that continues to converse, across the centuries, with the most daring and contemporary musical explorations.