Loré Lixenberg writes:

The film LETHE ends in Tartarus as represented by a misty London with the words of the poet Friedrich Schiller, in his poem Die Götter Griechenlands – set to music by Franz Schubert – that lamented the loss of the divine in his world. He writes:
“Fair world, where are you? Return again,
Sweet springtime of nature!
Alas, only in the magic land of song
Does your fabled memory live on.”

Schiller’s longing is clear as he reflects on a vanished ideal, a world where gods and nature lived in harmony, and where human life was soaked with divine presence. His text reflects the growing disenchantment of his time that has resonances now, as the natural world became increasingly understood through the lens of science, rather than myth and art. Schiller was not alone in this; he was part of a broader cultural passion for Ancient Greece that flourished in Germany during the 18th and 19th centuries, especially after Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his studies on the art of antiquity.

Winckelmann, who never set foot in Greece, nevertheless became the foremost champion of Greek art based on his studies of Roman copies and engravings. His writings ignited a fascination with the classical world across Europe, particularly in Germany, where philosophers, artists, and scholars idealised Greek culture. For them, Greek art was not simply beautiful; it was the embodiment of artistic perfection, the pinnacle of harmony between form and content.

Schiller’s longing for a divine, harmonious world is echoed in this production. For him, art was essential, and he recognised the deep loss of its significance in his own society. As he famously wrote: “Utility is the great idol of our age, to which all powers are in thrall and to which all talent must pay homage.” He laments the diminishing role of art, warning that it has become subservient to the demands of utility, rather than being a daughter of freedom. Art, in Schiller’s view, takes its orders from the necessity inherent in minds, not from the exigencies of matter. In the idealised world of ancient Greece, gods and nature blended together in perfect harmony: the sun was not merely a star but a beautiful and glowing god, driving his chariot across the sky from east to west.

Pantheism – the belief that the divine is present in all of nature – was, as Heinrich Heine noted, “the secret religion of Germany” and a foundational concept in Romanticism. In this worldview, nature and the divine are inseparable, and humans, in their natural state, live in harmony with both. Schiller’s verses, “When the gods were more human, the humans were more divine,” reflect a belief in the closeness between humanity and the gods in the classical world.

These ideas greatly influenced German philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer admired the Greeks for their tragic view of life, seeing in their myths an honest confrontation with suffering. In his work The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer argued that Greek art, particularly tragedy, expressed a deep understanding of the human condition, revealing the futility of human desires in the face of an indifferent world.

Nietzsche, who studied Greek philosophy and mythology extensively, believed that the Greeks understood life as a balance between the Apollonian (order, beauty, reason) and the Dionysian (chaos, passion, the primal forces of nature). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche praised the Greeks for embracing both the joyful and the tragic aspects of existence. He saw in their myths a model for how modern people could live authentically, fully accepting the struggles of life while celebrating its beauty.

The English, too, were captivated by Greek art and philosophy, though their engagement with the classical world extended beyond intellectual admiration. They imported not only Greek thought but also physical artifacts—massive chunks of statues, temples, and monuments, hoping to possess a piece of what they viewed as the cradle of Western civilisation. This reverence for Greek art and culture shaped the English landscape, both in philosophy and literature, and in the literal transportation of Greek antiquities to institutions like the British Museum.

These are some of the inspirations behind the project LETHE, an experimental opera/film that follows the process of a group of creative seekers, mainly English, who ventured to the beautiful island of Kythira, following in the footsteps of non-Greeks who, for millennia, have sought to access the glamour of the ancient Greek deities. These seekers were tasked with immersing themselves in the qualities that Greek gods have come to represent in Western art and philosophy.

LETHE seeks to merge the worlds of film, experimental music theatre, and goats, in an attempt to communicate this project or experiment to those who were not there. Structured as a set of theatre exercises that utilise many techniques such as Live Action Role-Playing (LARP), sonic or vocal Laban technique, and the ancient theatrical Vedic RAS box, the performance invites participants to actively engage with the often convoluted narratives of ancient Greek myth. Embodying characters, they echo the myth’s themes of memory loss and rebirth in order to access their own creativity.

The overall arc of the project is from the myth of the River Lethe, which in ancient Greece served as a gateway to transformation by the shedding and forgetting of a previous existence in order to step into a new incarnation. This is echoed by what each performer has to do each time they embody a new character and navigate the space between forgetting and becoming. Just as drinking the waters of Lethe caused extreme forgetfulness and symbolised rebirth, so too does the performance invite its participants to shed their previous identities and step into new ones.

In LETHE, we return to these ancient inspirations, seeking not only to understand the gods and myths of the Greeks but to embody them, to live through their stories once more. As the participants lose themselves in their roles, they engage in a form of ritual transformation.