Medea and the reformation of the tragic polis (original) (raw)
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In this chapter I argue that the ‘socio-political dimension’ of fifth-century Greek tragedy amounts to its engagement with the collective ideology and competitive ethos of the democratized classical polis on the one hand, and more traditional Homeric and mythic conceptions of religion and heroic self-assertion on the other. In addition, I consider the Greek tragedians’ interest in framing dilemmas of action with debates over the merits and meanings of certain key fifth-century socio-political concepts. I address the pressing question of how far Greek tragedy’s ‘socio-politics’ speak to watching Athenians and their guests from other Greek states as polis-dwellers in general as opposed to singling out the democratic aspects of the Athenian civic experience. We see that while Greek tragedy sometimes used tales of monstrous royal goings-on and heroic extremism to highlight the civilized values of Athens, this city’s democratic citizenry rarely watched a play which would not have unsettled their senses of social and political well-being. However, any claim to the effect that Greek tragedy had real socio-political ‘bite’ for its audience has to be tempered with a recognition that Greek tragedy’s overarching mythical idiom should preclude any reading of it as a vehicle for specific messages or manifestos. Having dealt with the case of classical Athens, I briefly argue that the social and political force of tragedy did not diminish after the classical period. Neither the facts of Hellenistic or Roman ‘appropriation’ nor the paucity of available evidence should prevent us from realizing that Roman Republican tragedy spoke provocatively and productively to its audience’s specific socio-political milieu. The politics of writing tragedy under the Roman emperors were a different matter again. I show briefly that Seneca’s distinctively baroque, bloody and highly rhetorical mode of tragic presentation reflects the socio-politics of Nero’s Rome through its very eschewal of direct political ‘comment’ or allusion.
The Transformation of Athenian Theatre Culture around 400 BC (2010)
The Pronomos Vase and Its Context, 2010
The Pronomos krater undoubtedly marks the high point of the production of Greek 'theatre vases'. However, it is perhaps not exaggerated to maintain that this splendid show piece can at the same time be seen as testimony to and a symptom of a great change or – depending on one's point of view – even a crisis in Athenian theatre culture. With regard to its actual imagery, three aspects are particularly noteworthy. First: in not reproducing a scene from the play, the emphasis is transferred from the impact of the actual theatrical performance to the theatre as an institution; second: the disposition of the protagonists emphasises two sources of authority with Dionysos as the inspiring patron of the theatre and the citizens of the polis as the promoters of the performances; third: the emphasis on the satyr play is explained principally by their visual and semantic effectiveness. While it certainly cannot be said that the Pronomos vase 'has nothing to do with drama', it has, I believe, quite a lot to do with a general development in Classical Athens, one that changed dramatic performances into a stage upon which social distinction and advancement could be acquired. My brief survey of the relevant monuments, choregic and otherwise, is intended to give an idea of the enormous dynamics of this process. In retrospect, the festive gathering on the Pronomos krater represents both the farewell gathering for the theatre as a forum where polis citizens engaged in intellectual exchange, and a welcome party for the theatre as a means of individual self-praise and promotion in the public arena of the city of Athens.
Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy
2013
"Taking as its starting point Nancy’s and Barthes’ concepts of myth, this book investigates discourses around community, democracy, ‘origin’ and ‘Western identity’ in stage adaptations of ‘classical’ Greek tragedy on contemporary European stages. It addresses the ways in which the theatre produces and perpetuates the myth of ‘classical’ Greece as the ‘origin’ of Europe and how this narrative raises issues concerning the possibility of a transnational European community. Each chapter explores a pivotal problem around community in modern appropriations of Greek tragedy: Chapter 1 analyses the notion of collective identity as produced by approaches to the Greek chorus. It investigates shifting paradigms from Schiller to twentieth-century avant-garde experiments and focuses on case studies by Olivier Py, Katie Mitchell, Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio, Michel Vinaver and Mark Ravenhill. Chapter 2 explores the significance of and the discourses produced by the popular but false etymology of the word 'obscene', allegedly meaning 'offstage'. It discusses representations of violence and sex, assessing the ‘obscene’ as a historically-constructed notion, comprising those segments of reality that are deemed unsuitable for public consumption in a given cultural context, establishing a given visibility regime, linked to what Rancière would call a 'distribution of the sensible'. Through a comparative analysis of five adaptations of the myth of Phaedra – Euripides, Seneca, Racine, Edmund Smith and Sarah Kane – the chapter assesses changing attitudes towards ‘obscenity’, touching upon legal, aesthetic and moral issues. It concludes with a discussion of the limits of representation in relation to works by Romeo Castellucci and Krzysztof Warlikowski. Chapter 3 explores the myth of the simultaneous birth of theatre and democracy in ‘classical’ Athens and investigates the ideological assumptions implied by imagining the audience as the 'demos' of democracy. It argues that adaptations of Greek tragedy have been used in the ‘democratic’ West to achieve self-definition in the context of global capitalism and European ‘transnationalisation’. This idea is explored through adaptations of Aeschylus’s The Persians, which defined ‘democratic’ Athens in opposition to the ‘barbarians’. Works by Peter Sellars, Calixto Bieito, Dimiter Gotscheff and Rimini Protokoll are discussed in this context. The book concludes with an analysis of Rimini Protokoll’s Prometheus in Athens and an appendix entitled ‘How Not to Stage Greek Tragedy Today’. The main question that this book asks is: 'why do revivals and adaptations of Greek tragedy still abound in twenty-first-century European national theatres, fringe stages and international festivals?' Attempts to answer this question in recent scholarship have too often emphasised the ‘universality’ of Athenian drama and its ‘ability’ to survive and be 'relevant' through the ages, with particular attention to its ‘democratic’ credentials. While the influence and legacy of ‘classical’ theatre over the West’s cultural history clearly bears witness to its value (and this study does not want to argue otherwise), I believe a more appropriate answer lies elsewhere. The reasons, I suggest, why Greek tragedies are still widely staged in Western theatres, attracting large numbers of spectators, are to be fond in the pervasiveness of the mythologies that have been disseminated around ‘classical’ Athens and Greece as a whole, and in our continuous reproduction of them through discursive practices in the public domain. As Page duBois puts it, “I believe that reading ancient Greek art and culture can illuminate and enrich our present circumstances, but also that the Greeks were far stranger, more complicated, and more ambiguous than they might appear in much that circulates about them in the current climate”. The present study sets out to investigate these mythologies from a Performance Studies perspective and assess what they might mean for theatre-makers and audiences alike."
The sociology of Athenian tragedy
The Cambridge Companion to Greek …, 1997
The sociology of Athenian tragedy and resolution of a crisis caused by imminent or actual death, adultery, exile, pleas for asylum, war, or the infringement of what Antigone calls the 'unwritten and unshakeable laws' of the gods (Ant. 454-5); these were traditional taboos proscribing kin-killing, incest, violation of oaths or the host-guest relationship, and disrespect towards parents, suppliants, and the dead. 7 Within this framework crises caused by the Athenian male's 'others', especially women and non-Athenian agents, insistently recur. Indeed, the world represented in the tragic theatre of Athens is marked by extreme social heterogeneity and conflict. Some scholars now argue that it is the encounter with difference, with 'otherness', which constituted the Dionysiac dimension of the genre. 8 Tragedy offers a range of characters of all statuses from gods and kings to citizens and to slaves, all ethnicities from Athenian, Theban, and Argive Greeks to 'barbarians' (the generic term for non-Greeks) such as Persians and Egyptians, all age groups from babies to the very old, and an overwhelming insistence on the troubled relationships between women and men. Any sociological reading of an artwork must address the relationship between its maker and its consumers. The relationship between the Athenian tragic poet and his audience was, formally, that of political equals. Tragedy is not the production of a hired poet for social superiors, like the songs of the bard Demodocus in the Homeric Odyssey; nor, however, is it the composition of an aristocratic leader talking down to his populace, like Solon's Athenian elegies. The three great Athenian tragedians were all Athenian citizens, albeit well-born ones (and in Sophocles' case prominent in political life); they composed their plays for an audience largely consisting of citizens, and the plays were performed at festivals defined by their nature as celebrations of Athenian citizenship (see Ch. 1). The texts were mediated through performance by agents likewise sharing Athenian citizenship: the chorus-members, actors, and sponsors. 9 Tragedy consequently defines the male citizen self, 10 and both produces and reproduces the ideology of the civic community. 11 Aristophanes' Women Celebrating the Thesmophoria features an instructive central relationship between a maker and a consumer of tragedy. The heroes, both citizens, are Euripides and his kinsman by marriage. During their burlesques of Euripides' own tragedies they outwit both the women of 12 Hall (1989b) 38-54.
2014
Ancient Drama constitutes a unique cultural synthesis of elements focusing on the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BC. Its recipient, the Citizen-Spectator of the City-State, was receiving and interpreting the stage spectacle against a background of relatively homogeneous state narratives. Today, however, this relative consensus is very much weakened. The contemporary recipient is more of a Spectator-Consumer, rather than a traditional "spectator." S/he is a consumer with totally different world philosophy and sociopolitical background and certainly a different memory bank, a bank now enriched by numerous spectacles of ancient drama throughout the world, which, altogether have created dissimilar expectations and demands. And it is at this point that the role of the director gains additional importance and becomes an indispensable mediator between the contemporary spectator and the revisited classical text.
Theatricality Beyond the Theater: Staging Public Life in the Hellenistic World
B. Le Guen (ed.), De la scène aux gradins. Thêatre et représentations dramatiques après Alexandre le Grand dans les cités hellénstiques. Actes du Colloque, Toulouse 1997 (Pallas, 47), Toulouse 1997, 219-259
TpaycpSlav 5vra Ka\ OKr|Voypc«plav Angelos CHANIOTIS learns to perform or recognize 4 . Hellenistic thought, on the other hand, recognized the directors of the 'play of life' in superhuman forces, the gods or Tyche. Already as early as the 3rd century the Cynic Teles (quoting Bion) described Tyche as a tragic poet who designs different (social) roles for humans -the poor man and the king, the exile and the beggar, etc.; the good man has to play the part assigned to him by Tyche (8ET coaiTEp T6V aya86v OfTOKpiTfiv 8 TI av 6 Troir)T^s TrEpiSfj -rrpdacoTrov TOUTO diycovi^EaSai KaAc6s)5. This idea was anything but confined to the Cynics. The Stoics {e.g., Epiktetos) regarded the divinity as poet and director of the play of life 6 . The dramatic simile of life was applied by Hellenistic historians as well. Polybios presented the conflict between the two sons of king Philip V in the last years of his life as a drama staged by Tyche 7 ; and Diodoros -quoting what Demades purportedly had said to Philip IIdeclared Tyche a play-producer who had assigned Philip to play the part of Agamemnon in the drama of his life 8 .