R e c e n t   P r o j e c t s                                                                                    

Performance in the Glasgow International Festival as part of the Circus Between Worlds, in the New Caledonia Road Free Church, Glasgow, Scotland

“These rites are not for you to hear, but they are worth knowing”
- Dionysus, The Bacchae, Euripides

Dionysus: Rites to Rave is a 10-person performance which combines dance, tribal music, poetry and audience-interaction and ends in a rave party that lasts all night.

It is inspired by Euripides’s The Bacchae. The Bacchae tells the story of Pentheus, king of Thebes, who refuses to celebrate the god Dionysus. This is a heresy that Pentheus will pay for with his life. Dionyus: Rites to Rave shows the danger of relying solely on rational faculties and categorization, of denying an element of our identity that is fundamentally fluid, non-binary, wild. Those, who by an excess of hubris and cold intellect, refuse the part of themselves that is animal succumb to Dionysus in the very chaos their civilizing effect wreak. Dionysus brings sacredness to art, savagery and partying. He joins humans and animals, women and men, rich and poor. He is a god of carnival and liberation, a god of earth and theatre.

How can we celebrate Dionysus in 2016? How is our neglect of the wild within ourselves mirrored in our treatment of our environment? How can we rediscover the ancient mysticism of partying? This celebration aims to shatter frontiers. Animals, long-extinct, make their re-appearances. These rites embody a research into diverse dance forms, sacred music, oral tradition, and rave-culture. Anya Gleizer seeks, not only to discover the wild where we are, but to help her audience find the wildness within themselves - an ancient connection to the land, to music, wine and dance that constitutes the contemporary Dionysian celebration!