Is Dionysos still returning? Necropolitics and Terzopoulos’ stagings of dying democracies

Abstract This article examines how Theodoros Terzopoulos’s stagings of Greek tragedy expose and resist necropolitical power. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, it argues that Terzopoulos reimagines tragedy as an embodied politics of resistance, where the performer’s body becomes both the instrument and the battlefield of sovereign power. Through physical extremity, ritual abstraction, and fractured choral speech, his theatre transforms mourning into insurgency and the stage into a site of ethical confrontation. Focusing on the Trojan Women (2017) and the Oresteia (2024), the article demonstrates how Terzopoulos dismantles classical narratives to reveal the ongoing cycles of war, displacement, and political erasure. The Trojan Women, performed in multiple languages by actors from divided cities, resounds as a polyphonic lament for the stateless and ungrievable, while the Oresteia exposes the disintegration of justice and democracy as ritualized sovereign violence carved into the flesh of the living. Together they remake tragedy as an insurgent epistemology — one that confronts the governance of death and asserts the obstinate endurance of life.