Stories from the Sands

In summer 2024, an Egyptian archaeological team made an extraordinary discovery. While excavating an ancient necropolis, they found written fragments of two lost plays by the great playwright Euripides. These fragments represent the most significant find in the study of Greek tragedy for a generation.

Containing around one hundred lines from two different plays linked by the death of children, one passage portrays a woman’s dreadful revenge over her scheming love-rival, while the other depicts a grieving father who cannot accept that death is permanent. Movingly, the fragments were found in a grave that appears to belong to a mother and child who were buried together some time around the 3rd century CE.

Since January, Classicist Professor Laura Swift and theatre company Potential Difference have been working with three outstanding artists whose practices span theatre, game design and visual arts, to explore the many questions posed by these exciting texts.

Join us for an afternoon sharing of new works-in-progress and a discussion of this unusual collaborative process between academic researchers and am multi disciplinary group of artists.

Grove Auditorium, Magdalen College. Access via the Longwall Street entrance

The venue is wheelchair accessible and is fitted with an induction loop for people with hearing aids. There is an accessible toilet. If you have any questions about access, please contact [email protected]

Doors open at 1:40 for a 2pm start.

The event will finish by 5:30pm and we invite you to join us afterwards for drinks and to meet the artists informally.

The ancient plays are on the topic of child death and bereavement. The commissioned works will contain references to death, funeral rituals and grieving. If you would like more information details about how these topics are presented, email [email protected]

Sindi Breshani is the founder of Episod, a game development studio pioneering the integration of true stories into commercial games. Their first title in development is co-created with climate scientists and indigenous peoples in the Arctic. Her vision is to transform the gaming landscape into a force for positive change. As part of their Play Lab, Episod experiments at the intersection of games with culture and education, having already collaborated with prominent institutions. Sindi's games have been shown at Tate Britain, Somerset House, Young V&A, and her paper 'Inside a Game' was published by SERRC in 2020.

Sindi will be presenting an interactive narrative experience that unfolds across three interconnected lives separated by centuries, each encountering the same surviving fragments in radically different contexts. One brings the story to life, one preserves and reshapes it, and one reconstructs meaning from what remains, as questions of death, justice, and power resurface each time. The player becomes the final interpreter, revealing how stories survive and are continually remade.

Richard Dufty is a theatre maker, producer and researcher. Since 2000 he has been co-artistic director of the theatre company Uninvited Guests with whom he has devised, co-written and performed in numerous projects, in person and online, touring nationally and internationally. Alongside this Richard worked at Battersea Arts Centre for 18 years where he was the Head of Producing, leading on the public performance and residency programme. He has also been a Relationship Manager in the Arts Council’s London theatre team. Richard is coming to the end of a PhD at Lancaster University looking at contemporary performance in which conversation involving audience members is a key feature.

Blending rites and rituals from the ancient world, the drama of Euripides, the yearning for immortality of human beings everywhere and a dash of magic and mysticism from online marketplaces, Richard Dufty – world-famous academic, theatre maker and conjuror – will attempt to bring the dead back to life in front of your very eyes! Watch him attempt the impossible! See him transcend the here and now! Witness him cast his spells! Be there as he speaks to the long-gone and appeals to the yet-to-be! For one-time only, on a stage in Oxford, the portal to the past and future will open! Be there to behold this unique event as Dr. Dufty raises bodies from their graves and tries to get answers to our questions, to fill in the gaps, to re-stage what is lost! And then marvel as he makes contact with your afterlife!

Eloise Moody is a multi–disciplinary artist/maker. Her work investigates time, memory, absence and belonging through socially engaged practice. Working with specific groups of people; from security guards and nuns to archaeologists and physicists, she helps to uncover and document moments of beauty, translating them into finely made artworks that often go back into the public realm. She has made work for and with BBC Radio 4, Kew Gardens, The Museum of London, Kettles Yard, Metal, the Art Lending Library, The London Wetland Centre, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UCL, University of York, Oxford University and Pitt Rivers amongst many others.

Eloise will present a large scale embroidery exploring the role of The Chorus in these lost plays.

She has created a contemporary Chorus, spending months talking to Undertakers and Archaeologists about their work at either side of a burial. Distanced by hundreds or thousands of years yet connected by care and obligation, she has explored how their work echoes and mirrors - how it agrees or disagrees. How we have buried our dead through time allows us a glimpse of love and care demonstrated in the distant past.

What will we tell the future?

Cover Art by Reeve Schutzenhofer

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