Alpheus & Arethusa — New version 2027
Alpheus & Arethusa — New version 2027
The piece
Alpheus & Arethusa was born in 2014 out of research into the mythical figure of Arethusa, pursued through tales, testimonies, iconographic representations and differing interpretations. From this plurality a version of the myth of Alpheus and Arethusa took shape, conceived and realised through the living languages of the stage.
In the poetic perspective of the project, the spring comes before the nymph. The metamorphosis told by Ovid (Metamorphoses, V, c. 8 AD) is read in the opposite direction: it is the water that takes on a body, becomes a nymph and a huntress in Artemis's train, and finally returns to its own nature. The transformation into water is a return to the condition that precedes Arethusa's personification.
One reading does not rule out the others, and none leads to a single conclusion. Myth is polysemic by nature: one and the same tale carries different interpretive threads, and myths far apart in time return to kindred events, places and figures. The composition works within this condition, layering threads that sometimes quote existing tales and sometimes are of our own making. Alpheus's embrace is at once the failure of the encounter and the finding of himself; Arethusa's liquefaction is at once the end of her body and the return to her nature; the final dance is at once a union and the persistence of two bodies that do not touch. None of these readings cancels the others. The figure takes in both the narratives that precede her and those that invent her, and from this coexistence comes her force as an image.
The piece carries Alpheus and Arethusa from a shared original condition through separation, desire, flight and metamorphosis, to mutual recognition and a final dance in which the two remain distinct while building a common dynamic.
From the original unity to recognition
The composition follows the two protagonists through scores that run in parallel: the actions of the two performers may meet, diverge or influence one another, while images, voices and different mythical traditions are woven into the stage composition.
The piece opens on two bodies joined by continuous contact between their heads, in an original condition out of which two distinct presences gradually emerge: Alpheus as a river, a watery world inhabited by other presences, and Arethusa taking on a body as she emerges from the mud. Mud is matter on the border between earth and water, water beginning to hold a form, and at the same time that which soils. For the river it is the matter against which it defends its own form, the matter in which a river ceases to be a river; and it belongs to another episode of the cycle, in which Artemis escapes Alpheus's courtship by covering her own face and those of the nymphs with mud, making them indistinguishable.
Freeing herself of the mud, Arethusa leaves behind the negative of her own face. A mask of mud settles on the riverbed. For the first time that matter carries the trace of a beauty Alpheus had not known. On contact with his waters the form dissolves inexorably. The performer's hand follows the mask and at the same time embodies it, accompanying its disappearance. The river, which until then reflected whatever passed through it, begins to imagine and to desire.
In Alpheus's waters, Arethusa meanwhile builds her beauty through dance, passing through configurations drawn from the iconographic history of her figure. She takes pleasure in her relation to beauty, yet is also embarrassed by the admiration it arouses.
Alpheus twists inside his own cloak, and the contortion carries several meanings at once: the winding of a body making its way upstream, the thought that returns obsessively to the lost face, which he pictures so as not to forget it, the arousal at Arethusa's presence in his waters. The cloak becomes a rope that binds him, a sword that runs him through and finally a limit to be crossed, one that coincides with his own spring. Alpheus throws himself beyond it, takes on a body and passes into Arethusa's dimension. Finding himself on the ground, he runs, laughs and sings like a child.
He then searches for the presence that seduced him inside the cloth that stands for his own waters: he seizes it, throws it to the ground and finds nothing there, while Arethusa, who had tried to protect it, senses a threat in him.
The two paths unfold for a long time without meeting. The protagonists share the space without seeing one another, affect one another without recognition, and speak to one another holding different versions of the same events before they have even looked at each other. The pursuit leads Arethusa to Diana's cloud, while Alpheus advances in successive impulses, as though he had to overcome an inhibition of movement. Emerging from the cloud, she calls upon Artemis in song and with a movement that pushes her repeatedly upwards, like a puppy reaching for its master's arms or a child for its mother's.
The metamorphosis then takes place in increasingly disjointed movements until she liquefies on the floor; he tries to embrace her and ends by embracing himself. He then crawls along the ground like a snake until he reaches her beside the spring, where at last they recognise one another, and an enveloping dance turns them around each other without ever touching, while the lights go down and the movement continues.
The cloth accompanies Arethusa's emergence, becomes the waters of the river and then the object of the conflict. The gramophone horns recall the vessels of the iconographic representations of springs and river gods, bringing with them a reference to sound. The composition also involves dialogue, song, sighs and a live voice of indefinite origin, which may take up the position of Alpheus, that of Artemis, or remain distinct from both.
Contemporary resonances
The piece carries no message and does not bring the myth up to date: it contemplates the figures and the representations that have passed through them. But a myth is a language that invites personal readings, and these are some of the readings its material makes possible for those who watch today.
Water. The two protagonists are made of the same matter and pass through different conditions: spring, body, river, liquefaction, return. Water is not an environment surrounding the characters here, it is what they are made of. Alpheus does not possess his waters: he is them, and when he seizes the cloth that stands for them he finds nothing inside. At a time when water is a matter of contention, extraction and scarcity, the condition of the two protagonists can be read as a different relation to the elements, one of belonging rather than availability — the same relation that ancient cultures granted the spring in giving it a sacred dimension.
Journey and transformation. Neither can move while remaining what they are. Alpheus abandons his river condition to take on a body and reach Arethusa; she leaves the body in which she had built her beauty and returns to the nature that preceded it. Her flight does not arise from fear alone: in Artemis's train the nymph cannot join with the river, and the fate the goddess assigns her is also what undoes that prohibition. Both reach Ortygia in the form of water, one by becoming it, the other by returning to it. The transformation that seemed to break off the encounter is what makes it possible.
Duality. Alpheus and Arethusa are made of the same matter and live the same events in two ways that do not coincide. He pursues, she flees; when at last they speak, each tells a different story. Both versions are true without being absolute: they share the truth with the other possible interpretations, and both contribute to a fate the protagonists together undergo and will.
Touch. Those who watch today bring with them an experience of touch that has changed: shared space has thinned, and the closeness of bodies has become less frequent and less certain. The piece passes through every form of contact and its absence. At the outset the two bodies exist only through a continuous physical bond. Then they separate: they share the space without seeing one another, they affect one another without recognition, and Alpheus's embrace closes on his own body. The final dance offers a different relation, in which the two are close and interdependent yet never touch: the bond that constrains, the nearness that does not see, the embrace that falls back on itself, the closeness that asks for no fusion.
Knowing the other, finding oneself. Alpheus was not someone who desires: he becomes one when a form coming from Arethusa falls into his waters. Without that mask he would remain a mirror. Arethusa, in turn, builds her beauty by dancing inside the river, and returns to her own nature because it is he who pursues her. Each is the place where the other is transformed, and neither recovers a self that existed before the encounter. The embrace that closes on his own body states this condition in a single gesture: Alpheus reaches out towards Arethusa and finds himself, and there is no telling whether he has missed her or reached her in the only way he could. Two questions follow, bearing on love and on every experience of otherness: how much of what we seek in another belongs to that person, and how much comes from the images, desires and memories through which we look at them? And how much of what we become in meeting them could we never have found otherwise?
The 2027 revival
Nine years after its last performance, the piece enters a new phase of work. The overall structure will be kept, while some scenes will be reorganised and reworked.
The choreographic work will develop the individual paths of the two performers, the dynamics, the fluidity and the relation to the floor, and in particular the breadth and legibility of gestures built on detail. The theatrical and vocal interpretation will be developed in the relation between body, word, song and breath, in connection with the original score performed live. The final dance will be elaborated through the interdependence of the two movements: two distinct yet solidary presences building a common dynamic out of their differences.
Costumes, props and set will be revised towards greater visual economy and a more contemporary aesthetic. A lighter stage device will make the piece easier to transport, to set up and to adapt to different spaces, including unconventional venues and those with limited technical resources.
Lines of research
The revival unfolds in dialogue with a reflection on the figures of collective representation, which deepens the trans-narrative approach already present in the original creation. Arethusa passes through different tales, images, bodies, objects and forms of representation, holding a continuity across manifestations that change over time. In the course of her history the figure has adapted to contexts and media far from her origin, changing function without losing her recognisability.
The work of 2027 will make it possible to ask what the stage can bring to this continuity: how a tale or an iconographic configuration becomes movement, how a figure passes through a body, a gesture, an object or a voice, what transformations arise from the encounter between earlier representations and new choreographic, theatrical and visual choices. The revival will also ask what this version adds to the history of Arethusa's representations.
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