The author speaks about her relationship with theater, her references for the new show—Sophocles, Euripides, Hofmannsthal, Yourcenar—and her personal reinterpretation of the classical figures of Clytemnestra and Electra.
Luanda Casella calls herself “a Brazilian author, storyteller, and performer, who has been living and working in Belgium since 2006”. A resident artist at NTGent, her work aims at making us reflect on society and the way we live in it. Back in 2020, her Killjoy Quiz satirized talent shows, from X Factor to Got Talent – an investigation on the western obsession for success and the happiness purportedly coming from it. Following Shoshana Zuboff, Luanda Casella seems to think that the object of exchange is not only information, but people and their life experiences themselves, and that the social control system is not based on repression anymore, rather on seduction. A tragic comedy, Elektra Unbound is back on the theme of show business: a jury must pick, from a shortlist of three, the actress to play Elektra. While Sophocles’ character was that of a strong-willed woman, the three actresses reveal the failure and the disillusionment in their lives.
Electra: Sophocles, Euripides, Hofmannsthal, Yourcenar – which source inspired you the most in your work?
Our reference was Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra, but because we were making comedy, there were lots of references to how Euripides portrays the character of Electra, her hyperbolic drive, the exaggeration…
Clytemnestra, after centuries of scorn, is now being re-evaluated, as in Bob Wilson’s latest work. What role for her character in your play?
Elektra Unbound takes the format of an audition, so Clytemnestra wasn’t directly a character in the play, except for the moments when the actors ‘rehearse’ the scene where she meets Elektra on the threshold of the palace and they have an argument. Clytemnestra is though present in the characters of the three actors’ mothers, with whom they all seem to have a very problematic relationship. My character also represents a sort of mother figure, who many read as caring for the spirit of Clytemnestra. However, my inspiration was Cassandra. I play a bitter theatre director who sees herself as a visionary, and lives in fear that her own prophecy, to die a very tragic death on stage, won’t come true.
The set designed by Shizuka Hariu is a perfect blend of classical Greek mythology and trash TV. What do these worlds have in common, in your view?
In the process of creation of the set, Shizuka and I had several conversations about how to bring this very dramatic set of television talent shows to the realm of theatre. We were very inspired by Camp theory, the art of exaggeration, and together with costume designer Jo De Visscher, we wanted to give otherworldly aesthetics to the piece. Monochrome outfits, cold blue light, hanging mountains and a ‘ramp to success’ leading nowhere.
Abigail, Emma, Bavo are the three contestants. What psychological profile did you assign each of them?
Each of the ‘actors’ in the piece were inspired by tragic contemporary figures found on social media: the child celebrity who self-harms for attention, the beauty-obsessed who incessantly undergoes cosmetic procedures, and the filthy rich who’s lost touch with reality. Each of them also portrayed a different aspect of the character of Elektra; the loud, the male-dependant, and the privileged.
Throughout your production, there seems to be harsh criticism of human communication ability, not only in TV and new media, but also in literature and conversation. A new Society of the Spectacle from Guy Debord to Luanda Casella…
I guess all my theatre pieces are about the failure of human communication. I purposefully choose to work with popular communication channels and subvert them to generate a conversation about how precarious the media can be. In Elektra Unbound, Tik Tok mechanics influenced the way the stories were written, with no beginning, no end, an endless swiping through emotions, the society of ‘affect’. Guy Debord was definitely a reference, his work stays relevant after so many years, but also the book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power by Byung-Chul Han was a great inspiration.
