THYESTES

Dance traverses the dark heart of Seneca’s Thyestes, retracing through gestures, whispers, emptiness and silence the full force of its tragic power.

It is myth distilled to its rawest essence: revenge, fratricidal impulse, flesh, the cannibalistic banquet — at whose centre stands the thirst for power of a heart at war with itself, a corrosive force contaminating every affection and dissolving every bond.

Dance becomes an act of domination and oppression; the body is deformed and consumed by it.

Every movement is a wound, every pause a restrained scream.

The stage, bare and essential, becomes the site of an interior and political struggle in which ambition and humiliation chase one another toward annihilation.

The tragedy is not narrated: it is enacted.

Dance gives form to a divided and lacerated soul in which victim and executioner coexist, clash and ultimately recognize themselves within one another.

The disintegration of identity, the struggle for recognition, the body as the site of conflict.

Seneca’s work is an abyss: Thyestes is not merely the tale of an inhuman revenge, but a tragic mechanism exposing the most perverse nature of power itself.

Within this choreographic study, the ancient text becomes living matter for a visceral and contemporary physical investigation into power as destructive impulse, inseparable from abuse, manipulation and humiliation.

Atreus and Thyestes coexist and overlap within the same body, like opposing forces colliding, contaminating and destroying one another upon a stripped and almost sacrificial stage.

Power is not represented but enacted: revealed through muscular tension, obsessive repetition, the imposition of gesture, control and collapse.

Abuse is not narrated as an event, but embodied as choreographic dynamic.

Movement becomes domination, silence becomes oppression, the body transforms into a battlefield.

The references to myth do not seek reconstruction but detonation: brothers betraying one another, children sacrificed, kingdoms conquered upon the ruins of intimacy.

Dance crosses these themes the way one crosses a wound — without illustration, without resolution — listening instead to the deep noise of its protagonist, to its fury, still frighteningly close to our own.

With Thyestes, Zerogrammi inaugurates the project Past Forward: a process of rewriting that journeys backward through the company’s artistic archive, redesigning the urgencies that have driven its creative trajectory across twenty-five years of activity.