“I wasn’t interested in creating another adaptation of Antigone” | Film buzz

Natalia Lasalle-Morillo’s En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy

The Caribbean is not unfamiliar with its artists adapting classical Greek literature to an Antillean context. St Lucian poet Derek Walcott’s Omeros, his island-epic version of Homer’s Odyssey, is an acclaimed example of this. In her recent film, En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, the Puerto Rican artist Natalia Lasalle-Morillo has also reached back into the classical canon for a cinematic reworking of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.

In the original play, Antigone seeks to defy the King of Thebes, her uncle Creon, and bury her dead brother in the aftermath of catastrophe. In her film — first shown in an art gallery on multiple screens, then modified for single-screen cinema exhibition — Lasalle-Morillo relocates the drama to modern-day Puerto Rico and its diasporic New York community.

In this thrillingly radical reimagining, Lasalle-Morillo (and her four female collaborators) turn the play inside out, making it a shared, open-ended space for rehearsal, discussion, digression, and — ultimately — catharsis. Natalia spoke with Jonathan Ali about their process.

How did the idea of adapting Antigone to a Puerto Rican context first come to you?

In September 2017, I had just moved to California to pursue a master’s degree in theatre directing. On 20 September, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico. I found myself living a very strange diasporic experience, watching the aftermath from a distance. I was feeling profound grief. My mother in Puerto Rico told me: “I think this is a good time for you to start reading Greek tragedies, because this feels like a Greek tragedy.” She mentioned this because in my journey studying theatre, I had focused on experimental and political theatre, and rejected the classics. But following her advice, I engaged with the Greeks. Antigone was the one that stuck with me. Despite being over 2,000 years old, this tragedy felt urgently familiar, and relevant.

What specifically resonated with you about the play?

The environment of the play reminded me of what was taking place in Puerto Rico at that moment in time. While Antigone is known for her civil disobedience, for me, this is a play about taking agency over who — and what — is remembered. In Puerto Rico, centuries of colonialism and geographical fragmentation have fractured our collective memory and our understanding of our own history. My intention for this process was to use theatrical rehearsal to collectively embody and create memory, and to defend it for generations to come.

The film is not a faithful rendering of Antigone, but rather a poetic document of the process of attempting to adapt it.

I wasn’t interested in creating another adaptation of Antigone. I wanted to de-canonise Antigone, poking holes in the play and opening it up for others to explore our relationship to grief, to our dead, and to our ideas around sovereignty and self-determination. I wanted us to envision a future for the characters of the play — and for ourselves as Puerto Rican women — beyond tragedy. And I desire to do this collectively because I struggle to view the future optimistically, and working alongside others who see and feel differently than I do brings me hope.

The film chronicles this intimate process of rehearsing and thinking together, and overlaps these instances with staged reenactments of the rescripted version of the myth. Naturally, the film results in this fragmented journey with many detours, where multiple perspectives converge. I refer to it as a “reassemblage”, and this feels honest to me, as it somehow mirrors how memory works, and how diasporic memory works — time is non-linear, and you are embodying different consciousnesses, simultaneously.

This is the first part of a multi-chapter project. What comes next?

I’ve envisioned the project in three parts: Part I, which chronicles the New York-based cast as they develop their reassemblage of this myth; Part II, which centres an archipelago-based cast as they develop their version; and then Part III, which is a theatrical performance co-devised by both casts, bringing their versions and perspectives in dialogue. Throughout the process of making Part I, I was fundraising and imagining the other parts of the project, so I knew that the work would continue. The questions we are asking in En Parábola are not limited to this project, however. These are questions I also engage with in my other works, and I think I’ll continue asking those same questions and reflecting on these same themes for years to come.

En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (2024)
Natalia Lasalle-Morillo
Puerto Rico • 63 minutes