La Didone

The Wooster Group goes opera

In Cavalli/Busenello’s baroque opera La Didone (1641), Aeneas, prince of Troy, lands on the shores of Africa after a violent seastorm.  There he falls in love with Dido, queen of Carthage, and becomes entangled in a web of love, deception, power and madness. In Mario Bava's 1965 cult movie Terrore nello spazio, the spaceship Argos crashes on the planet Aurora, and its crew becomes locked in a desperate battle with zombies over the all-important "meteor rejector."

The Wooster Group stirs these two Italian cultural artifacts together, dropping Aeneas' ships onto a forbidding planetary landscape, setting the lute alongside the electric guitar, blending acoustic and electronic space, and finding an unexpected synergy  between baroque romanticism and pre-moonlanding sci-fi. A 21st-century retelling of an ancient tale about the destructive (and redemptive) power of erotic passion and the sheer tenacity of human nature in the face of annihilation.