Greek Tragedy Upside Down: Electra and Medea Through the Lenses of Contemporary Queer and Feminist Theory (Workshop)

Join award winning director, choreographer, performer and dramatist Mayra Stergiou and multi-award-winning, published artist, writer and researcher Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh as they delve into how approaching tragedy through the queer and feminist lenses disrupts inherited hierarchies of gender, power, time, and authorship embedded within the classical canon. The workshop will present the process of creating two performances: ‘Medea on the Mic’ and ‘Electra Untitled,’ drawing from figures such as Electra and Medea, not as psychological characters but as queer archetypes: figures who exist outside social legibility and the normative time. Participants will explore them as sites of instability, excess, and contradiction: a form already haunted by ambiguous bodies and desires, and voices that refuse containment. By turning tragedy upside down, we will explore its latent queerness as a critical and sensorial approach for contemporary performance of Greek Tragedy. This event is followed by a talk which workshop participants are welcome to join.