Strange land

'medEia' mixes ancient story with new method to create unique experience each night

When working with a director became "complicated" for the experimental theater group Dood Paard, the young actors, fresh out of theater school in the Netherlands, decided they could do without one.

Fourteen years later, it looks like that direction — or lack thereof — was a good one to take.

The avant-garde collective will make its U.S. debut tonight when it presents "medEia," its original postmodern version of the harrowing mythological tale of Jason and Medea, during a Spoleto Festival performance at the Emmett Robinson Theatre.

Oscar van Woensel, a founding member of Dood Paard and a co-creator of "medEia" with fellow collective members Kuno Bakker and Manja Topper, says the three actors, who met in school, wanted to be their own bosses.

"The first performances we did with a kind of director, but the plays were our ideas and we were looking for our personal way of acting, performing and creating. Soon we discovered that working with a director made things more complicated because he or she had to come along with our plans and ideas and had to put her or his own ideas on the side or in a drawer."

As a collective, "everybody's voice or opinion is equal to another's," he says. (In fact, Dood Paard even collaborated on the answers to questions from The Post and Courier, leaving it ultimately

up to van Woensel to put their responses into words.)

The distinctive approach to their work gives each actor a feeling of responsibility for all aspects of the performance.

"It's far more than when you are just an actor with the responsibility for your own part or character," van Woensel says. "In the process of rehearsals, the difference is immense. Because there is nobody to view (the rehearsal) from the outside — an instant audience — it's very hard to rehearse in the common way, so we don't do that. Our rehearsals mainly (take place) around a table. We read the text, learn it by heart there. And there we talk about interpretation, stage design, mise-en-scene, costumes and so on."

The actors' communication with the audience is a critical part of each performance. "Every evening, every performance is unique for that moment. This is a law of theater that we cultivate in our method," van Woensel says. "The structure is the same every night, but the communication between us (as actors) and between us and the audience has to be invented every night. Otherwise, you make a circus act, and that's something we don't want to do."

In "medEia," van Woensel, Bakker and Topper play multiple roles and also serve as a chorus. Van Woensel says the work draws from many sources and influences, including past interpretations of the Medea story by Euripides, Seneca and Muller, as well as pop music, current events and literature.

The language is what Dood Paard calls "Euro-English" — the kind of English spoken by those who aren't native speakers but find it the best one in which to communicate.

"We try to express thoughts about big and small issues, about human beings and their emotions and thoughts, and about the world and society," van Woensel says. "'medEia' is a story about love, and it's a story about a stranger in a strange land, about racism, and in America the story will turn out to be also about terrorism. It's about revenge and about murder.

"Medea is a story more than 2,000 years old. It's a story of all times. ... It is and always will be about love, and the deadly consequences of this love."

Reach Ann Mitchell at 937-5557 or amitchell@postandcourier.com.