JOCASTA

Saturday, January 10
Admission: $10, $10 minimum
Showtime: 8pm
reservations are recommended

Jocasta is a 52 minute experimental narrative created by Elise Kermani in collaboration with visual artists, musicians, actors, dancers and filmmakers. It was inspired by Brian Swann and Peter Burian's English translation of Euripides' ancient Greek play "The Phoenician Women" (c. 400 B.C.) Jocasta was digitally filmed on location at the Great Stone Barn in a Shaker Village in New Lebanon, New York the summer of 2006.

THE STORY
In Sophocles' play Oedipus Rex Jocasta hangs herself shortly after finding out that Oedipus is both her husband and son. In Euripides' play The Phoenician Women, Jocasta stays alive a little bit longer to try and reconcile her sons but stabs herself shortly after they kill each other during the war at Thebes. But in Kermani's Jocasta, Jocasta stays alive after her sons' mutual murders to perform a ritual sacrifice in order to save Thebes, and to satiate Ares' ancient fury of Kadmos' slaying of the dragon. Jocasta chooses the creative act of writing over suicide. Her ritual act re-members that Body is Presence (Plato's 'ousia' and Heidegger's 'Ereignis') and Jocasta reminds us that she (aka Iocasta) is related to Io, the Great Cow goddess of Egypt. The origins of writing are sacred manifestations of ousia/hestia...esti/Being. She reverses the taboo of incest, and reestablishes the holy symbollic image of mother and son. Jocasta's sacrifice was inspired by an ancient Persian ritual of ingesting the holy word in order to cure illness.

Jocasta might take its genesis from an ancient Greek play, but it displays a contemporary condition of exile and also communicates how ancient wars resonate for modern America. Jocasta reflects a historical mirror on the tenuous present in which we are living.

On one level, the film is structured as a play within the play. With a voice-over, the actors Marty New (as Jocasta) and Michael Potts (as Oedipus) question their own characters motivations. The playwright, a modern Euripides (also portrayed by Potts), struggles to finish the play. The film shows the playwright in the midst of the creative act of writing and shows him finding an appropriate ending to the play that satisfies his own scholarship. The playwright decides that the traditional version of the Oedipus story must be reversed and that Oedipus, Jocasta and Antigone will be reunited in a dance. Eventually, the proscenium falls and the cast and crew are revealed for who they really are behind the scene: mothers, sisters, sons, friends.

Links:
http://www.elisekermani.com/jocasta.html
http://www.myspace.com/chiutom