Satyagraha

The American composer Philip Glass created with Satyagraha – the power of truth – a portrait opera about Mahatma Gandhi. The focus is on his early years in South Africa, where he developed his ideas about non-violent civil disobedience. Biographical episodes are connected to a score of hypnotic minimal music with associative texts from the Hindu Bhagavad Gîtâ, in which crucial questions about spirituality and human action are asked. Glass' meditative masterpiece ends with the finding that the power of truth will be generated again and again as long as we want to hear our own deeply human outcry against injustice. Director and choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui places onstage, alongside the singers who depict the historical characters, a group of dancers from our ballet who, through his fluid movement language, intensely embody the idea of the eternal fight against injustice. This special production was highly acclaimed during an initial series of performances in 2018 in Ghent and can now be seen in Antwerp for the first time.