The Wooster Group returns to St. Ann’s Warehouse with Cavalli / Busenello’s baroque opera La Didone (1641), in which Aeneas, prince of Troy, lands on the shores of Africa after a violent sea storm. There he falls in love with Dido, queen of Carthage, and becomes entangled in a web of love, deception, power and madness. In Mario Bava’s 1965 cult movie Terrore nello spazio, the spaceship Argos crashes on the planet Aura, and its crew becomes locked in a desperate battle with zombies over the all-important “meteor rejector.”

The Wooster Group stirs these two Italian cultural artifacts together, dropping Aeneas’ ships onto a forbidding planetary landscape, setting the lute alongside live electric guitar, blending acoustic and electronic space, and finding an unexpected synergy between early baroque opera and pre-moon landing sci-fi: A 21st-century retelling of an ancient tale about the destructive (and redemptive) power of erotic ­passion and the sheer tenacity of human nature in the face of annihilation.
Running Time Approximately 90 Min­utes

Production: The Wooster Group, KunstenFESTIVALdesArts
Coproduction: Edinburgh International Festival, Productiehuis Rotterdam (Rotterdamse Schouwburg), Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg, CC Belém (Lisboa)
Presented by St. Ann’s Warehouse­