A project long in the making, Tiempo Libre: Medea Variations, will be produced by Theater Emory in cooperation with the Koré Dance-Theater from Barranquilla, Colombia. Tiempo Libre: Medea Variations premiered to critical acclaim at the Dance Theater Festival of the Americas in Colombia in May. The one-person performance by poet, dancer and actress Monica Gontovnik has been in development for two years with Theater Emory.
"Medea Variations has been with me for almost a decade," said Theater Emory artistic producing director Vincent Murphy. "In 1986 I was invited by Koré to come to Colombia to stage a version of Medea. Adapting the story from several texts with a company of women trained primarily as dancers, we created a vocabulary of movement and voice that conjured a Latin world of women left with few choices."
Over the following years, Gontovnik deconstructed the work to recreate a version of Medea with six women playing aspects of the character simultaneously in various rooms of the particular venue space. Gontovnik's creation helped inspire Murphy's Van Gogh Gallery produced at Emory in 1992. "Over the last year I have traveled twice to Colombia to work with Monica and her incisive co-director Obeida Benevides on this one-person version of the Medea story," said Murphy. Cuban choreographer Marianela Boan contributed to the production, as did Theater Emory designers Wm. Moore and Judy Zanotti, and playwright Wendy Hammond.
Koré Dance-Theater is an independent group founded in Colombia in 1982 by artistic director Gontov-nik. Dedicated to creating original pieces through experimentation and research, Koré employs the languages of dance, theater, poetry and music.
The production will be held Sept. 15 and 16 at 8 p.m. in the Mary Gray Munroe Theater, Dobbs Center. Tickets are $8.50 general admission and are available through the Emory Box Office at 727-6187.
-- Joyce Bell