Director • Actor

Paige Rogers

Photos by Chase Ramsey

"When the company opened the story with a moaning, mysterious chant based on what is known of ancient Greek musical practice, accompanied by a precise occult vocabulary of emotionally evocative movements, I literally felt a chill run up and down my spine. This sensation occurred repeatedly in the course of the play, an experience as rare and memorable as a full eclipse of the moon, a meteor shower seen from a rural mountaintop, or a great opera tenor singing bel canto.

Jerzy Grotowski (whose theatrical vision inspired this company) once proudly described his most successful production as “an elephant walking a tightrope”. This “Antigone” may not be an elephant on a tightrope, but it aims high, and gives the audience glimpses of that promised land of perfection.

-Charles Kruger

Theaterstorm

This “Antigone,” which unfolds in a brisk 90 minutes, has a lot going for it. Mounted following the company’s two-week residency at Poland’s Grotowski Institute, it boasts a new translation by Daniel Sullivan and an often fluid staging directed by Paige Rogers.
Rogers employs a mix of dance, chant and ritualized movement to outline the play’s central dilemma: when Antigone vows to give her brother, Polyneices, a proper burial, she risks everything. King Kreon, having announced that Polyneices died a traitor, has decreed that anyone who buries him will be put to death. 
The production keeps the eight-member cast, draped in dark colors, in constant motion on Michael Locher’s spare set, with Heather Basarab’s lighting drawing the eye toward the action of the moment.

Featured in a two-article series in American Theatre Magazine!

INTO THE POLISH WOODS WITH CUTTING BALL AND TEATR ZAR

8 BAY AREA PERFORMERS WHO JOURNEYED INTO GROTOWSKI'S WOODS

ANTIGONE

by Sophocles

in a new translation by Daniel Sullivan

The Cutting Ball Theater

Rob Melrose, Artistic Director

February 19 - March 29, 2015

Directed by Paige Rogers

Set Design by Michael Locher

Costume Design by Jason Wong

Lighting Design by Heather Basarab

Sound Design by Cliff Caruthers

Movement by Matej Matejka & Przemyslaw Blaszszak

Cast

Antigone

Ismene

Messenger
Eurydice
Tiresias

Chorus Lead
Haemon
Kreon

ANTIGone - The cutting Ball Theater

"A thorough, often seamless integration of music and choreography that can be deeply effective" 
-Robert Hurwitt
The San Francisco Chronicle