A story for EURYDICE – August 25th

Luisa Guarro – Italy

Eurydice, in love with Orpheus, is dead. She ended up under a car because she didn’t pay attention to the road and she didn’t pay attention because she was trying to escape from her ex-boyfriend Aristeo, who was armed with a knife. Her entire life passes before her and in this dilated time she reconstructs her story through fragments of memory.

The fragments of her memory tell of a young woman from a provincial town
in southern Italy, a beautiful and lively “nymph” who loved to dance, but she was repressed by her community. Only at the end of her telling does Eurydice realize that she is the spirit of a dead body, lying on a morgue table and she crosses the threshold of the afterlife. But Orpheus does not give up on the idea of his lover’s death and goes to look for her in the hell of his pain.

Orpheus is unable to overcome the mourning, as the myth tells us, he is unable to move forward and loses his head: the Maenads of Dionysius behead him. Meanwhile Eurydice reveals to us her experience of that meeting with Orpheus in the afterlife and she tells us of the extreme freedom of a spirit now foreign to the passions of life.