Notes from the Underworld

‘Man must first descend in humility before he can raise himself to God’

The current production is an extension of the work we started with Yurodivy. It is an exploration of notions of the Underworld – pre-Christian and Christian – drawing on texts including Virgil’s The Aeneid, Homer’s The Odyssey, Dante’s The Inferno and Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Antony. We are working with traditional polyphonic Russian and Macedonian songs as the ‘motor’, or driving force, of the piece.

Our exploration focuses on the journey of the ‘Pilgrim’, who decides to descend to the Underworld on a quest, not just for knowledge, but to save humanity from itself; to rid the world of suffering by confronting it at the source and by bringing light to the world of darkness. However, he finds he is thwarted by his own arrogance and dogmatic absolutism and he is forced to question his perception of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and his particular construction of the world. The confrontation with his own darkness opens the way for a very personal transformation.

The performance poses questions about the assumptions we hold to be true, about the need to change the world to align with our own beliefs and about the responsibility for the consequences of our actions.