Images of Medea

And when a woman comes into the new customs and practices of her husband's house, she must somehow divine, since she has not learned it at home, how she shall best deal with her husband.
-Euripides: Medea

One of the downsides of the illusion created by the media is that we are always anxious in case we miss something essential. The media gives us the idea that by adopting mythical identity models we can succeed in our focussed battle. The fact that everything is simultaneously present, that all the information is available to us, has not reassured us. I am convinced that we are living at the turning point to a new way of thinking and a so-called evolution of the mind. The human mind can analyse and digest only a certain amount of information; its capacity to assimilate is limited. However, because of the illusion created by the media, this limited scope is not appreciated. The human psyche is changing. It is moving increasingly away from bilateral encounter towards so-called dispersed encounter, in which only a sort of an operative part of the persona, capable of efficiency, creates connections, or, as I claim, several simultaneous connections. It is easy to imagine that this kind of development might hamper precisely those forms of connections which make possible the meeting of fundamentally different personas.

Recently there have been heated debates in the media about child custody and international treaties on children's rights. Almost everything in these debates has irritated me, beginning with the fact that people have taken up man/woman or mother/father positions at the expense of the children involved. I have also been irritated by the fact that women, exclusively and pleading a feeling of belonging together, cannot distinguish when they are projecting their own insecurity through their children. And by the fact that a man begins using his power in society unscrupulously, in order to safeguard the striking force of his own status, or uses violence to ensure the continuity of his line. And that in order to fight in the same arenas as men, women have to employ weapons that make them become cold operators and therefore, paradoxically, incapable of being mothers.

For a few years now, I have had Euripides' Medea on my mind. In an intuitive way, it has been bothering me, but I have not, however, been able to find an approach that would please me. Custody battles and "best for the kids" in particular are present-day concepts, which well reveal the flimsiness of morals. Present day phenomena, such as satanism, paedophilia, and incest can be examined from two different viewpoints: they have always existed, we just have not been aware of them, or, these phenomena have become more common just because they are talked about. The increased publicity around violence emphasises the fact that children nowadays have to take a stand in very complex moral questions. How will the shifting truths and ethics, or families on the verge of exhaustion, indifferent and devoid of ideals, influence the creation of identity?

I have been pondering about how to pass on to my own children a view of the world that is free of confusion and idealistic in the good sense, if one's own identity is a series of attempts to break free from the traditional female model and mother myth in order to gain control of one's own life. Will the struggle from nursing-culture into independence inevitably produce a series of egocentric strategies and an imagery of masculine readiness for combat, in which motherhood becomes uncertain and is called into question altogether? Am I on my way to a practical operator identity, and will I act as an effective model for clear achievements, organised goal-orientedness, and context-bound identity? Am I about to move into Medea's terribly practical reality, in which emotion has gone beyond the point of dependence and love assumes meanings of obsession?

In my interpretation of Medea I want to see the juxtaposition of the view of man moulded by the media industry and the man who experiences to the extreme. In my interpretation the subject matter of Medea is the compulsion to become a myth. It is promoted by the illusion created by the media that an image discovered by changing roles and at the expense of identity, which I call "the operative me", would be a more flexible operative model, and the machinery of the psyche would be lighter in this oversupply of stimuli.

The ambitious challenge in the dramaturgy of my own Medea has been to discover, and to show in a recognisable form, the point at which we abandon "experiencing to the core" and move into mere practice. It is my claim about humanity today. Content vanishes and we begin to follow courses created by compositions of mere appearances. These constitute, then, new rituals.

Hanna Raulo

Together at last - Images of Medea
Kiasma Theatre, Premiere Mar 29, other performances Mar 30 - Apr 15.

The Medea of Antiquity
Medea was the daughter of Aeetes, the king of Colchis. She fell in love with Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, and with her magic helped him to obtain the Golden Fleece belonging to her father. The furious king sent his son after the fugitives, but Medea tore her brother to pieces and scattered the pieces to delay her father, who also had joined the chase. The couple ruled Thebes until Jason fell in love with Creusa and deserted Medea. The desperate Medea killed her rival and her own children, and fled to Athens. Later Medea married Aegeus, the king of Athens and father of Theseus. She tried to persuade her husband to kill his son, but failed and fled in her dragon chariot back to faraway Colchis. A sorceress even more famous than Medea in classical mythology is Medea's aunt Circe, who is known for her attempts to cast a spell over Ulysses.

In her interpretation of Medea, Hanna Raulo examines the juxtaposition of the view of man moulded by the media industry and the man who experiences to the full. The subject matter of the work is the compulsion to become a myth, promoted by the media with their illusion of an image discovered at the expense of identity. Images of Medea is experimental visual theatre, which makes statements about our time by using compositions of texts and images dealing with single parenting and the break-up of families. The first joint project of dramaturgy-director Hanna Raulo and multimedia artist Pauli Hurme, the performance says goodbye to the traditional laws of drama and welcomes image, special effects, and interpretation to the stage.