Pilade

In the frames of the celebrations for the centenary of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s birth, ERT dedicates to him the project How you should imagine me. The entire corpus of his theatrical texts written in a very short period, the spring of 1966, will be presented on stage.

Pier Paolo Pasolini invented a theatrical continuation of Aeschylus’s trilogy: Pylades. He imagines what happens after Orestes, having being absolved by the Aeropagos in Athens, goes back to Argos. Yet another way of dealing with the myth for Giorgina Pi and Bluemotion, this time starting from the writing of a great poet.  All the characters together are on stage, in a kind of large parking, at the end of a rave at the end of the 90s they experience this imminent end of an era. Eumenides by Aeschylus become transsexual bodies, the choir is a melting pot of cultures and origins, and the peasants become exploited black laborers. The queer theory will be the interpretative guide of this text. Pylades’ ending up in a position of radical otherness, embracing a form of social death that may be related to the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive and to the controversially discussed antisocial thesis within queer theory. The multiple aspect shifts performed throughout the play destabilize a linear, progressive temporality; rather than leading to an irreversible progress, they suggest a circular temporality of eternal recurrence with transformations and transfigurations layered upon each other.

We can understand Pylades as experiencing, and the play as making experienceable through poetic means, a radical otherness that seems necessarily unintelligible insofar as it is a radical novelty that paradoxically consists in the restoration of a mythical, non-progressive temporality, according to the idea of time and space queer theory.