Bacchae’s Voice (2024)

Ioannis Angelakis • Ergon Ensemble

Bacchae’s Voice, music theater for four performers (2024 rev. /2021)

Music Composition, Electronics, Sound Design, Texts: Ioannis Angelakis

Director: Giorgos Koutlis

Set & Costume Design: Artemis Flessa

Light Design: Giorgos Agiannitis

Performers: Christos Kechris (voice), Kostas Tzekos (bass clarinet), Spiros Laskaridis (trumpet), Andreas-Roland Theodorou (trombone)

Production: Ergon Ensemble

Premiere: Ancient Theater of Mieza, Greece, September 5 & 6, 2021 Next (Revised) Performances: Alternative Stage at the Greek National Opera, May 18-19, 2024

Duration: 60’ min

The performance has been funded by the Greek Ministry of Culture and the Greek National Opera.

Commissioned by the Greek Ministry of Culture, co-funded by the Greek National Opera

Bacchae’s Voice is an original devised performance that bridges music theater, contemporary experimental music, and electronics. The constant use of indeterminate phonemes and vocalizations of all four performers give prominence to the human voice as a primordial means of extra-linguistic communication, while the use of electronics shatters the borders between the human voice and the computer music that processes the sounds of the voices and creates the space for a mystic ritual in which the Voice, as an amalgamation between humans and computers, is the protagonist. The cruelty and brutality in the use of the human voices, the acoustic instruments, and electronics are symbols of violence as the latter is demarcated through Euripides’ original tragedy: between Pentheus and Dionysus (Apollonian-Dionysian), between the opposite sides of human nature, and between humans’ inherent desire to preserve their tradition and violently overturn it. Just like Euripides’ Bacchae reveals an ever-existing contradiction at the basis of the human soul, human societies, and human history overall, likewise, Bacchae’s Voice aims to penetrate the human voice and point out its unmediated, unexplored, and unsayable nature.

©2026 Ioannis Angelakis