Hasta La Ideas

Rem Koolhaas led OMA’s recently completed scenography project for Teatro Greco, or the Syracuse Greek Theatre, a historical landmark in Italy that dates back to the 5th century BCE. Every summer the theatre stages three classic plays, and for this season’s cycle they commissioned OMA to design a temporary stage that will remain up for Aeschylus’s Prometheus Unbound (directed by Claudio Longhi), Euripides’ Bacchae (dir. Antonio Calenda) and Aristophane’s The Birds (dir. Roberta Torre).

The stage—aluminum scaffolding clad with multilayer marine plywood—was designed in three parts, the Ring, the Machine and the Raft. The Raft, the name for the circular stage, “reimagines the orchestra space as a modern thymele, the altar that in ancient times was dedicated to Dionysian rites.” The Ring is a suspended walkway that makes a half circle around the stage and backstage area, providing actors with different ways to enter a scene. The Machine is the backdrop, which can be altered to suit different productions. A sloping circular platform seven meters high, it’s the mirror image of the stage. It can rotate, “symbolizing the passage of thirteen centuries during Prometheus’s torture; Split down the middle, it can also be opened, allowing the entrance of the actors, and symbolizing dramatic events like the Prometheus being swallowed in the bowels of the earth.”

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