Minotaur or The King’s Bull. By Jonathon Ward. Urban Youth Theater, Henry Street Settlement Abrons Arts Center, New York. 23 July 1999 (performance review) (original) (raw)

Theatre Journal, 2000

Bulls and Bull-leaping in the Minoan World

Above, this Late Bronze Age sarcophagus was found in a funerary chamber at Hagia Triada in Crete. It was made of limestone, covered with a thin layer of lime plaster, and then painted. On one side of the sarcophagus (left), we see the sacrifice of a bull, accompanied by music and a procession of women. On the reverse side (above) another procession is depicted including women carrying buckets of blood to an altar and men presenting animals and a boat model to what may be a deceased man.

Theodore Ziolkowski, Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art , ser. Classical Presences

International Journal of The Classical Tradition, 2010

to Birtwistle's The Minotaur (with a libretto by D. Harsent) premiered in London in the year in which the volume under review was published. Ziolkowski's Minos and the Moderns is an accomplished and erudite study of the modern reception of these Cretan myths, focussing on the literature and arts of the first half of the twentieth century, but with many forays in earlier and later periods. The basic structure of this slim, but packed, volume is as follows: the first introductory chapter presents an overview of the occurrence of Cretan myths in Western history and culture, and explains their particular resurgence in twentieth-century Europe; chapters 2-4 serve as illustrations of this resurgence, and deal, respectively, with the main themes of Europa and the Bull, the Minotaur and his labyrinth, and other Cretan characters (Minos, Pasiphae, Ariadne, Phaedra, Daedalus, and Icarus); chapter 5 presents a short summary and conclusion. In his first chapter ("Introduction: The Modernization of Myth" [pp. 3-25]) Ziolkowski discusses the changing popularity of the Cretan myths at different times in history. The relative neglect in classical Greece (especially in the extant corpus of fifth-century Greek tragedy) is attributed to a number of plau

THE MINOTAUR

The Exhibition in Tonal Cinema, 2000

"THE MINOTAUR" is the conclusion to and final section of the "Exhibition in Tonal Cinema". "Exhibition in Tonal Cinema" is a series of sixteen novellas that employ a unique poetic methodology characterized by the fusion of cut-up texts, surrealist automatism, and a richly imagistic prose style. This series, developed over several years of successive creative flashes, embodies an integral vision that intertwines elements of mysticism, existential philosophy, and cinematic theory. The prose technique is marked by dynamic lines and paragraphs that evoke rapid, explosive imagery, akin to volcanic eruptions, reflecting the author's fascination with the interplay of light and darkness, consciousness and perception. These novellas serve as a database of images and concepts, intended to transcend conventional narrative boundaries and immerse the reader in a deeply immersive, visionary experience. Through this intricate tapestry of poetic and narrative experimentation, the series aspires to encapsulate the complexity of human thought and emotion, positioning itself as a modern exploration of the profound and the absurd.

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."

Jumping to Conclusions: Bull-Leaping in Minoan Crete

Society and Animals, 2013

Bull-leaping has become one of the most emblematic activities of Minoan Crete and has recently received renewed attention with the BBC/British Museum radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects. One of the featured objects, a Minoan bronze group of a bull and acrobat, was brought to life in a television advertisement using a modern bull and leaper. This act of translation is at the heart of the dialogue this paper seeks to address: the interaction between current human attitudes toward nonhuman animals and their depictions, and those of the Bronze Age. It suggests that the animal practices of the past were shaped by material and social circumstances far removed from those of modernity. The mutual affordances of bulls and humans have resulted in similar interactions, or bull games, in different societies, but modern archaeologists have tended to downplay the relationship between bull and leaper in Bronze Age Crete by regarding bull-leaping in purely symbolic terms. An archaeological account informed by Human-Animal Studies can instead bring to the foreground both the familiarity and distinctiveness of past human-animal relationships.

Divine Figures in Crete: A Re-examination of the Minoan Bull-leaping Fresco at Knossos

2022

For thousands of years an ancient society lay in ruins beneath a Greek civilization, only to be uncovered at the turn of the 20 th century by a man looking for something else. When the pottery and paintings of ancient Crete were discovered, they were catalogued, reconstructed, and interpreted by the British archaeologist, Arthur Evans. He applied his knowledge of Greek mythology to his assessment of the remains thusly building a narrative regarding the meaning of the symbols that only recently have been challenged by modern scholars. One such piece of art is the Taureador Fresco found in the Court of the Spout at the Palace of Knossos. This bull-leaping fresco has been one of the cornerstones for religious interpretation of the Minoan people while simultaneously shrouded in mystery about its true meaning. With no translation of their writing or language, scholars continue to speculate about the lifestyle, culture, and mythical beliefs of the ancient people of Crete. Re-examination of the Taureador Fresco in this thesis presents an alternative analysis of the figures depicted and the possibility of revealing the true nature of Minoan leadership.

Minotaur or The King’s Bull. By Jonathon Ward. Urban Youth Theater, Henry Street Settlement Abrons Arts Center, New York. 23 July 1999 (performance review) (original) (raw)

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