La MaMa
The Club & Community Arts Space
74A East 4th Street
New York, NY 10003
April 11–28, 2024
Thursday–Saturday at 7:30pm ET
Sunday at 3pm ET*
In-Person: $30 / $25
Online: Sliding Scale Starting at $10
Medea is a borderless Tekhne Epic for live audiences in person and online conceived by La MaMa's Great Jones Repertory Company, CultureHub, and Zishan Ugurlu. The epic tells the story of Medea, a refugee whose reality is shattered when she learns of her and her children's looming exile, investigating parallels between the myth and the current refugee crisis by collaging real stories, ancient tongues, and hackable audiovisual systems.
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. The work is experienced in three parts, and the stark, embodied performance is counterpoint to the rich media and technology landscape.
Presented in La MaMa’s recently-renovated 74A E. 4 St. building, Medea 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.
Medea has been developed within CultureHub’s EXPERIMENTS IN DIGITAL STORYTELLING Program and is presented by La MaMa 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.
If you are experiencing financial hardship and and are in need of a free ticket to the livestream, email info@culturehub.org.
*Performances have been added: April 21 at 7:30pm, April 26-27 at 7:30pm, and April 28 at 3pm.
