Show supported by INAEM

National Institute of Arts and Music

for the 2023 and 2024 tour

SYNOPSIS

“Antigone, in truth, did not commit suicide in her tomb, according to Sophocles, making an inevitable mistake,” he tells us. With these words, María Zambrano begins her play The Tomb of Antigone (1967), a play that combines philosophy and literature. In these opening words, Zambrano’s sentiment unfolds in all its splendor: hope, time, delirium, love.

Hope as the ultimate lifeline, allowing knowledge to blossom; time for consciousness to awaken; delirium to find connections with reality when reality prevents existence from taking root in it; love as a dream, sacrifice, and promise.

These elements radically challenge the canon, for Antigone not only doesn't take her own life, but rather finds spaces of time in her delirium with which to be reborn. Aren't we yearning to be fully born? To find the heart's reasons for the tyrants' unreason? Don't each of us have an Antigone buried alive?

In Zambrano, delirium is a language and one of the most complex forms of her poetic reason, that reason that, ultimately, allows for the birth of the creative word, that is, a word with multiple meanings, a multivocal word, a germinating word, a revelatory word. A word that is never the last. It cannot be so when the agony of Europe—an essay she published in 1945—continues to leave unburied corpses, continues to leave girls without land, continues to leave anonymous dead, continues to rave between life and death.

There is Antigone. There we are beside her because we continue to hear her. And because as long as the story that devoured the girl Antigone continues, that story that demands sacrifice, Antigone will continue to rave. And it will not be surprising, then, if someone hears this delirium and transcribes it as faithfully as possible.

This is what María Zambrano did. This is what we will do, under Zambrano's guidance.