Photos: La MaMa ETC's Great Jones Repertory Company Presents MEDEA

La MaMa ETC’s Great Jones Repertory Company joins forces with Director Zishan Ugurlu and experimental media and technology designers CultureHub to tell the story of MEDEA – a refugee whose reality is shattered when she learns of her and her children's looming exile. See photos from tge production here. Performances run through April 21. 

The Tekhne Epic, presented in La MaMa’s recently-renovated 74A E. 4 St. building, unfolds across 3 floors and leverages the building-wide data network to break past the walls of the theatre. Using custom-built interactive technologies, an online audience will affect audio, video, and lighting elements throughout the show.

The in-person and online versions follow the same story but are distinctly different iterations that allow audiences to attend both experiences for a deeper look into the world of the production.

A major part of the production is a reimagining of La MaMa’s Medea which was originally composed by the late Elizabeth Swados with direction by Andrei Serban for the company’s celebrated 1972 presentation. This April, the Great Jones Rep. delivers a raw and unfiltered experience of the Medea tragedy, sung, spoken, and chanted in ancient Greek and Latin. The work is experienced in three parts, and the stark, embodied performance is counterpoint to the rich media and technology landscape. Billy Clark, artistic director of CultureHub, states “We are experimenting with multi-channel projections, live processed surveillance footage, metahuman characters, and an array of internet data streams because these are the materials of our time. Medea is a refugee, whose plight is largely misunderstood –looking back at her story can give us a window into our current human condition.”

The 2024 expanded adaptation of MEDEA is conceived by the Great Jones Repertory Company, CultureHub, and Zishan Ugurlu, with direction by Zishan Ugurlu and media/technology design and development by CultureHub. Bill Ruyle is music director, with musicians  Heather Paauwe and Nick Swensen.  

The production has a cast of 24, with Mia Yoo in the title role, along with Arthur Adair, Mattie Barber-Bockelman, Buffy, Sheree V. Campbell, Billy Clark,  Katherine de la Cruz, maura donohue nguyen, George Drance, Bejunior Fallon, Sara Galassini, Cary Gant, John Maria Gutierrez, Onni Johnson, Valois Mickens, lim mui, eugene the poogene, Kiku Sakai, Kim Savarino, Evan Ray Suzuki, Nick Swensen, Juan Pablo Toro, and Morgan Medina-Wild with David Grimaldo, Marco Saavedra, Edafe Okporo. The dramaturgy is by Morgan Jenness, and Alexandro Délano Alonso worked with the company for Immigration Consultation.  

Medea has been developed within CultureHub’s EXPERIMENTS IN DIGITAL STORYTELLING Program and is as part of Great Jones Repertory Company’s HUMANISMO PROJECT: ANCIENT FUTURE SERIES, a series that examines our current era of uncertainty, isolation and public unrest, looking to ancient stories to imagine alternative futures for humanity.

The online iteration of the production will be produced using LiveLab Broadcaster, a browser based low-latency livestreaming platform that allows for real time interactions with online audiences. The open-source project is conceived by CultureHub and developed in collaboration with NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. It has been used by CultureHub and La MaMa in the following productions: Take 21 (2022), A Few Deep Breaths (2022), Fractals of Prometheus (2023) and Downtown Variety Ukraine Edition (2023)

Photo Credit: Maria Oriented

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