Callisto et Arcas

Arcas, a young orphan, celebrates his fifteenth birthday and tells us about his love for the forest, his safe haven, about how he misses this mother that he never knew. But what has become of her?

Fifteen years before that Jupiter falls in love with the sublime Calisto. But God that he may be, his reputation is known to all, and no woman, no nymph lets him get near her. So how shall he seduce the beautiful Calisto, how will he make her let down her guard?  By becoming a woman for example!

And that is indeed how he achieves his aim. But the story does not end there, and neither does the metamorphoses. A man changed into a woman, a woman changed into a bear, a bear changed into a constellation… This is what it’s about. In continuation of my work on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the text navigates between mythology and the contemporary world and offers three made to measure roles to Émilie Incerti Formentini, Vincent Dedienne and the young Anton Froehly.

Guillaume Vincent