Goodbye, Lindita

Theatre of memory, Goodbye, Lindita, takes the audience on a journey back to the memories of the young director Mario Banushi in the Balkans, in his Albanian homeland, where he was born in 1998 and left for Athens when he was only six years old. His training as a theatre and film actor and performance director has informed his work on Goodbye, Lindita, his first major production and the second in a trilogy that has been completed with Taverna Miresia Mario Bella Anastasia, which premiered last year at the Athens and Epidaurus Festival.

The opening of Banushi's trilogy, Ragada, showcases the defining elements of his theatre style. These include an Albanian evocation, exploration of family ties, a hyperrealist aesthetic, and a focus on the strange, pain, the everyday, and the display of popular tradition rituals. It was somewhat unexpected that Ragada (Estrías), which was inspired by his mother's biography, was premiered in the living room of a flat in Athens that had been lent to him by a friend. The young director was 23 years of age and had no prior experience in directing. Ragada's influence on Greek audiences and the Greek theatre scene resulted in an invitation from the National Theatre of Greece to create a new play, the second in his trilogy. This led to Banushi being identified as one of the most promising figures on the Greek stage.

Given to recent bereavements, Banushi has engaged in a project exploring pain. In this work, the artist returns to the Balkans, exploring the region's customs and traditions, particularly the rites of life and death. These rites revolve around the naked body of a deceased woman, surrounded by a group of people who bathe and dress her. This image, Goodbye, Lindita, sets the stage for a series of sequences associated with mourning and birth. The work is conceived as a modern fairy tale, a parable about life after the death of a loved one.

The production is a play without dialogue. It features a series of unusual events that reveal a hidden world comprising dreams and nightmares. This world allows the dead and the living to meet briefly before the final farewell. A Black Madonna acts as a witness to this process. She is a black woman, and images of trivial domestic chores alternate with poetic and ritual images belonging to Balkan traditions.

Banushi's inner journey, which incorporates metaphysical resonances, aims to address a question that has been posed by humanity since its earliest days: How can we come to terms with the inevitability of death? What must happen for the final farewell to take place? How can life go on? What is the meaning of (this) death?