Xynthia, the Water Odyssey

Xynthia, the Water Odyssey, is an ecological opera, freely inspired by Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, an avant-garde play written in 1883.

In Ibsen’s visionary work, a doctor reports the contamination of his town’s water supply. If he speaks publicly, a thermal resort will be economically ruined. From blackmail to pressure, from conspiracies to public humiliation, this man becomes the enemy the community must destroy. One is naturally struck by the modernity of Ibsen’s message and his foresight regarding ecological issues. At a time when the climate emergency is at the centre of political debates, the Collectif Io tackles this sensitive subject through a creation that resonates on multiple levels, where lyric art meets dance and theatre in a form of total art.

At the crossroads of languages, Xynthia unfolds a story about water, the cosmos, and ourselves. Its title directly refers both to the goddess of wild nature in Greek mythology and to the storm that struck several countries in 2010. The dramaturgy intertwines an adaptation of Ibsen’s play with an Odyssey of water from its cosmic origins, and a fragmented account of the disaster that followed storm Xynthia. Mikaël Serre’s staging and the performances of his eleven artists make it an engaged opera, as powerful as it is poetic.