The Annunciation of Cassandra
by Dimitris Dimitriadis

I will not speak to you about the end

With the end, everything comes to an end

The events of the past, and those that were meant to be spoken,

have taken place, and have been spoken

Let us therefore begin from here

Desire – and dare

It is time

It is time for time to be

Before you, it will be I who stands

D. D.

After years of devoted research into Dying as a Country by Dimitris Dimitriadis, Gemma Hansson Carbone furthers her creative dialogue with the writer’s oeuvre, presenting this year at the Festival The Annunciation of Cassandra. Here, the Italian-Swedish actress and director ventures deeper into Dimitriadis’s universe – a writer who wields language and voice as instruments of invocation and awakening – embodying the text herself in a vocal and physical event where everything is transfigured into a hymn.

Cassandra, in this work, is no longer the cursed prophetess of an inaccessible future, doomed never to be believed. She becomes the custodian, the voice, and the body of a radically new world, one in which oppositions are reconciled, negation falls away, and desire emerges in its a place as a life-giving force. In Carbone’s approach, the text finds flesh through voice, breath, and movement while the body becomes the very site where language dies and is reborn. As the director herself notes, “the word is never something to be recited, but something you pass through.”

Through circular sequences that seek out new gravitational planes and ancient kinetic patterns, choreographer Gloria Dorliguzzo and Carbone pursue a physicality that oscillates between disbalances and chiasms, carrying onto the stage the tension between genesis and destruction, eros and negation, past and present.

The set design by Alessandro Panzavolta and Francesco Tedde constructs an open, immersive environment – the World of Now – in which Cassandra and the audience cohabit a field of light, reflection, and diffused sound. The vast expanse of fabric that envelops her functions as a second skin, extending both costume and installation as it unfurls toward the audience, pulling them into the space of the performance. Her voice courses through this environment as a force that exceeds the body’s physical limits – a body that moves within language even as it pushes beyond it.

After centuries of silence and disbelief, Cassandra reclaims her voice – not to be believed, but to be heard – and invites us to inhabit a world reborn through the prophetic force of poetry, movement, and desire.