Merida, twenty years on stage

Author: admin
Filed in: News
Date: June 30.2009

The Theatre Festival of Mérida is a good occasion to visit the Roman past of the frontier city and its archaeological World Heritage Site

If Ovid and Plautus awakened from his eternal slumber at the Teatro Romano de Mérida between now and August 30, would see their plays performed in one of the most important cities of the Empire. And is that a real breakthrough in time is what is produced in Merida with each new edition, and now they're 55 - Festival of classical drama. More than two months in which, like two thousand years ago, Greco-Roman classics are represented by those who have thought about it, laughed and cried hundreds of generations.

Moral dilemmas of Oedipus and Medea inside the tear are not far from issues that have been outdated. Instead, we identify them and their feelings show us that, apart from obvious changes, the human remains that, human nature with its passions, its fickleness and unreason. Just Medea and Oedipus are the protagonists of the works that close the Festival, and during the month of August. Before, have passed through the stages of the Roman theater The Rape of Proserpina, Phaedra (with music by Enrique Morente in a flamenco version of the classic Euripides), Ovidian Metamorphoses, The twins of Plautus, Titus Andronicus, one of the Greco-Roman titles of Shakespeare, and a creation of Rafael Alvarez "El Brujo" The Gospel of John.

The Festival program is completed with a series of parallel activities that combine street theater performances and film. A total of 55 performances (of which seven are new releases) that are a real trip into the past of a city.

And is that Merida is soaking step of the Roman imprint is still present in many of its corners. Founded by Augustus to discharged soldiers of two veteran legions of the Cantabrian Wars, Emerita Augusta was, until the fall of Western Roman Empire, one of the most flourishing towns of the empire. Neither more nor less than the brand-new capital of the province of Lusitania.

Some of the monuments of that era, including its impressive theater, slept buried for centuries. Today, restored and open to visit, speak of the magnificence of Emerita Augusta. It attest the capacity of thirty thousand of his circus, the fifteen thousand that fit in the amphitheater or the sophisticated engineering works still standing thousands of years after its construction, as the bridges over the Guadiana and Albarregas or Aqueduct of the Miracles.

Luxury living in some are shown Mitreo House and all the houses in the amphitheater. In these homes, mosaics, delicate interior gardens speak of a past of refinement that we can only guess, and that extended into the baths, toilets and meeting places at once.

Emerita Augusta was also living on the street, in the two forums for its range of provincial capital possessed. And, as in the argument of the works represented in the Festival will see, life has its cross in death, which is present in the construction of the columbarium burial, in which lie the remains of forever families of Voconios and Joules. The Roman route from Merida can not avoid a visit to the center that collects and preserves for future generations all that rich heritage: the Museum of Roman Art, designed by Rafael Moneo.

The life and death, which is gone and what remains. Life today as two thousand years ago, and its ambivalence. As in the best classical tragedy.

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