The Wooster Group: La Didone June 11, 2009

In the Wooster Group’s production of La Didone, Francesco Cavalli’s opera (1641) collides with Mario Bava's 1965 sci-fi cult movie Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires) in a war-like symbiosis, dropping Aeneas' ships onto a forbidding planetary landscape and forming a synergy between early baroque opera and pre-moonlanding sci-fi. The elements of this cult movie--the sleek matching leather space uniforms, the forbidding planetary landscapes, the battles with the walking dead--come into unexpected synergy with the baroque textures of Cavalli's score and the classic themes of the Dido story: the loss of culture and family, the destructive (and redemptive) power of erotic passion, the imperial will to colonize, and the sheer tenacity of human nature in the face of annihilation.

June 11-June 21, 2009
Tuesdays – Saturdays at 8:30 PM
Sundays at 7pm
No performances Monday, June 15 and Thursday, June 18

Official Website: http://www.redcat.org