A specially designed walking performance based on the short story The Oval Lady by the important surrealist painter and prose writer Leonora Carrington. This work, which concerns both the story of a teenage girl’s desire to be a horse and her father’s repression of that desire, is directly linked to the third thematic strand of the exhibition, ‘Rebellion’ and ‘Insurrection’. It also communicates with the gendered dimensions of the struggle for social emancipation through protest and resistance.

After all, are we all horses? How and how much do we celebrate with our bodies and voices the spring of emancipation and deep desire? The show tells the story of a young woman, Lucretia, who longs to exist as a horse and it is precisely this wondrous horse nature that is violently suppressed by paternal authority. The play’s dramaturgy is based on its attempted conversation with the great works of resistance and protest from Greece, Spain and Portugal – during their transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic constitution – as hosted in the exhibition DEMOCRACY. The performance attempts to explore, with the help of tools from the field of physical theatre and the encounter between music and the theatre of invention, to what extent assertive femininity can contribute to the recovery of the lost voice and the formation of emancipatory practices that seek visibility and democratisation. With two actors and four musicians on stage, in this version of the story, a courageous, unknown visitor crosses the threshold of the inaccessible house and with her openness to the paradoxical and astonished world of Lucretia as her only vehicle, she gains her trust and becomes a witness to the unprecedented events that are conveyed to us through her own dazzling gaze. The heroine’s home is none other than the thwarted democracy of today, a world that promises things different from those it fulfills. Will the Oval Lady succeed in turning thwarted agitation into rebellion?

The central directorial idea draws methodologically from the field of meta-dramatic theatre and theatre of invention. The group that will tell the story on stage consists exclusively of women, two actresses, Olympia Boulogeorgou and Marianna Devetzi, and four choristers from the women’s polyphonic group Pleiades. The latter will perform songs in three languages directly related to the exhibits (Catalan, Portuguese, Greek). With the support of the distinguished lighting designer Tasos Paleoroutas, each scene of the play will take place among specific works of the exhibition that have been specially studied to be properly lit, creating a stage space. The performance aims to narrate the obstacle-filled path to democratization through imagination, song and play, raising questions about the international context that undermines the healing of the collective wounds of the shared authoritarian experience in the artistic milieu of the three countries explored in the exhibition.