Performing Ancient Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Greece: Dimitris Rontiris and Karolos Koun

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaela Antoniou
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
Emotional Approach

In this article Michaela Antoniou gives an account of the two prevailing acting schools in ancient Greek tragedy in the twentieth century, as formed and developed by Dimitris Rontiris at the National Theatre and Karolos Koun at the Theatro Technis (Art Theatre). She discusses how these two great theatre masters directed, guided, and taught their actors to perform tragedy, arguing that Rontiris's approach stemmed from a text-based perspective that focused on reciting and pronunciation, while Koun's developed from a physical and emotional approach that prioritzed actors and their abilities. Her article summarizes each director's philosophy regarding the Greek tragedies, and discusses the position of the genre within modern Greek theatre, mapping the process employed by the actors, and analyzing their method in order to illustrate the different perspectives that the two great directors had with regards to approaching and performing a role. Michaela Antoniou completed her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently working as an external collaborator of the Department of Theatre Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also worked on the stage as an actress and playwright, and is a published author.

The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Edmund P. Cueva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Indiana University

Marianne McDonald's book provides a solid introduction to ancient tragedy and theatre. The author examines the works by the three major ancient Greek tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and supplies for each playwright biographies, synopses of their works, and modern and ancient translations and adaptations of their plays. The listing of the translations and adaptations is selective and spans from the classical period up to the twentieth century.

Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steve Wilmer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Professor Emeritus ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Political Controversy ◽  
Theatre Studies

In this article Steve Wilmer discusses adaptations of Greek tragedy that highlight the plight of the displaced and the dispossessed, including Janusz Glowacki's Antigone in New York, Marina Carr's Hecuba, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Schutzbefohlenen, which is notably emblematic among appropriations of ancient Greek plays in referencing the problems facing refugees in Europe. He considers how this latter play has been directed in a variety of ways in Germany and Austria since 2013, and how in turn it has been reappropriated for new dramatic performances to further investigate the conditions of refugees. Some of these productions have caused political controversy and one of them has even been physically attacked by a right-wing group. Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at Trinity College Dublin. He is the co-editor of ‘Theatre and Statelessness in Europe’ for Critical Stages (2016), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016), and Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He also edited a special issue of Nordic Theatre Studies in 2015 titled ‘Theatre and the Nomadic Subject’.

Varifocalism: a Perspective on the Discipline of Theatre Studies

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-273
Author(s):  
Graham Ley
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Emeritus Professor ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Present Discussion ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Peter Brook ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Comparative Theory ◽  
The University

What is the discipline in which ‘academic drama’ is engaged? Leaving aside debates about an emphasis on theatre or performance as the key term, who is included in the discipline, and how has it reshaped itself over the last decades? Is it right to say there have been major redefining changes, and if so, what are they? Graham Ley is Emeritus Professor of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on ancient Greek performance and comparative theory, and is currently preparing an essay on a theoretical history for Greek tragedy. He has previously published in New Theatre Quarterly on developments in Australian theatre (1986), the avant-garde (1991), Peter Brook (1993), Diderot (1995), Tara Arts (1997), and most recently diaspora theatre in the UK (2011). The present discussion is adapted from the conclusion to Ancient Greek and Contemporary Performance, a collection of essays to be published later in the year by the University of Exeter Press.

Ancient Greek Tragedy as Performance: the Literature–Performance Problematic

2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Performance Criticism ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
A Performance

In this article Mario Frendo engages with the idea of ancient Greek tragedy as a performance phenomenon, questioning critiques that approach it exclusively via literary–dramatic methodologies. Based on the premise that ancient Greek tragedy developed within the predominantly oral context of fifth-century BCE Greece, he draws on Hans-Thies Lehmann's study of tragedy and its relation to dramatic theatre, where it is argued that the genre is essentially ‘predramatic’. Considered as such, ancient Greek tragedy cannot be fully investigated using dramatic theories developed since early modernity. In view of this, Walter J. Ong's caution with respect to the rational processes produced by generations of literate culture will be acknowledged and alternative critiques sought, including performance criticism and performance-oriented frameworks such as orality, via which Frendo traces possible critical trajectories that would allow contemporary scholarship to deal with ancient tragedy as a performance rather than literary phenomenon. Reference will be made to Aristotle's use of the term ‘poetry’, and how performance criticism may provide new insight into how the Poetics deals with one of the earliest performance phenomena in the West. Mario Frendo is lecturer of theatre and performance and Head of the Department of Theatre Studies at the School of Performing Arts, University of Malta, where he is director of CaP, a research group focusing on links between culture and performance. His research interests include musicality in theatre, ancient tragedy, and relations between philosophical thought and performance.

Levantine Art in the “Orientalizing” Period

2019 ◽  
pp. 369-383
Author(s):  
Marian H. Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The West ◽  
False Dichotomy ◽  
First Millennium

The “Orientalizing period” represents a scholarly designation used to describe the eighth and seventh centuries bce when regions in Greece, Italy, and farther west witnessed a flourishing of arts and cultures attributed to contact with cultural areas to the east—in particular that of the Phoenicians. This chapter surveys Orientalizing as an intellectual and historiographic concept and reconsiders the role of purportedly Phoenician arts within the existing scholarly narratives. The Orientalizing period should be understood as a construct of nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship that was structured around a false dichotomy between the Orient (the East) and the West. The designation “Phoenician” has a similarly complex historiographic past rooted in ancient Greek stereotyping that has profoundly shaped modern scholarly interpretations. This chapter argues that the luxury arts most often credited as agents of Orientalization—most prominent among them being carved ivories, decorated metal bowls, and engraved tridacna shells—cannot be exclusively associated with a Phoenician cultural origin, thus calling into question the primacy of the Phoenicians in Orientalizing processes. Each of these types of objects appears to have a much broader production sphere than is indicated by the attribute as Phoenician. In addition, the notion of unidirectional influences flowing from east to west is challenged, and instead concepts of connectivity and networking are proposed as more useful frameworks for approaching the problem of cultural relations during the early part of the first millennium bce.

Some Ancient Greek and Twentieth-Century Theories of Value

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-385
Author(s):  
Richard Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Human Good ◽  
Good For ◽  
Definition Of

Abstract Plato puts goodness at the center of all practical thinking but offers no definition of it and implies that philosophy must find one. Aristotle demurs, arguing that there is no such thing as universal goodness. What we need, instead, is an understanding of the human good. Plato and Aristotle are alike in the attention they give to the category of the beneficial, and they agree that since some things are beneficial only as means, there must be others that are non-derivatively beneficial. When G. E. Moore proposed in the early twentieth century that goodness is, as Plato had said, the foundation of ethics, he rejected not only the assumption that goodness needs a definition, but also that goodness is beneficial – that is, good for someone. This article traces the development of this debate as it plays out in the writings of Prichard, Ross, Geach, Thomson, and Scanlon.

scholarly journals Bodies Out of Time: Sculpting Queer Poetics and Queering Classical Sculpture in the Poetry of C. P. Cavafy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. L. Watson
Keyword(s):  
Raw Material ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Greek Poetry ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Past ◽  
Greek World

AbstractTwo major themes dominate the poetry of the Alexandrian poet, C. P. Cavafy: homosexual desire and Greekness, broadly defined. This paper explores the interconnectivity of these motifs, showing how Cavafy’s poetic queerness is expressed through his relationship with the ancient Greek world, especially Hellenistic Alexandria. I focus on Cavafy’s incorporation of ancient sculpture into his poetry and the ways that sculpture, for Cavafy, is a vehicle for expressing forbidden desires in an acceptable way. In this, I draw on the works of Liana Giannakopoulou on statuary in modern Greek poetry and Dimitris Papanikolaou on Cavafy’s homosexuality and its presentation in the poetry. Sculpture features in around a third of Cavafy’s poems and pervades it in various ways: the inclusion of physical statues as focuses of ecphrastic description, the use of sculptural language and metaphor, and the likening of Cavafy’s beloveds to Greek marbles of the past, to name but three. This article argues that Cavafy utilizes the statuary of the ancient Greek world as raw material, from which he sculpts his modern Greek queerness, variously desiring the statuesque bodies of contemporary Alexandrian youths and constructing eroticized depictions of ancient Greek marbles. The very ontology of queerness is, for Cavafy, ‘created’ using explicitly sculptural metaphors (e.g. the repeated uses of the verb κάνω [‘to make’] in descriptions of ‘those made like me’) and he employs Hellenistic statues as a productive link between his desires and so-called ‘Greek desire’, placing himself within a continuum of queer, Greek men.

Imperatives, V-movement and logical mood

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Luisa Rivero ◽  
Arhonto Terzi
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Distinctive Morphology

Imperative Vs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish), or distribute like others Vs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root C. The first type has a strong Imperative V-feature in C, and under Chomsky's Greed Principle, Imperative Vs raise overtly to check this feature. The second type is the Wackernagel language, whose C hosts no features, but V-features are in I. If no phrase fronts, Vs move to C to support second position items. V-to-C affects all Vs, is last resort, follows Lasnik's Enlightened Self-Interest, and escapes Greed.

Spoken Greek

1944 ◽  
Vol 13 (38-39) ◽  
pp. 73-80
Author(s):  
W. R Loader
Keyword(s):  
Formal Language ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
Law Courts ◽  
Business Correspondence

It has been suggested that there is less difference between ancient Greek and modern Greek than between present-day English and Chaucer's language. The suggestion is somewhat questionable. Broadly speaking, apart from dialects and local variations, there are presently three languages in Greece, the Kathareuousa, the Demotiki, and the popular newspaper language, which is a blend of the two.The Kathareuousa is the official and formal language, used in Government publications and statements, business correspondence, non-fictional books and treatises, law courts, University lectures, and in formal conversation. And although its grammatical structure is analytic as opposed to the synthesis of ancient Greek (a change which constitutes the main difference between classical and modern Greek, as it does between other modern and ancient languages), in the Kathareuousa the most strenuous attempt has been made to maintain the accidence and vocabulary of the ancient language.Words are declined and verbs conjugated (without some of their more difficult and less used moods and tenses) as in Attic Greek, pronouns and prepositions and the cases governed by them are the same, and while, naturally, many terms which describe things known only to the modern world are not to be found in Liddell and Scott, they are generally legitimate and intelligible compounds of words which are to be found in Liddell and Scott. Ἀɛροπλἁνoν for aeroplane, ἀɛρòσTαtoν for balloon, are instances which come easily to mind.

‘Communal Hellenism’ and ancient tragedy performances in Greece (1975–95): The ritual quest

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthymios Kaltsounas ◽  
Tonia Karaoglou ◽  
Natalie Minioti ◽  
Eleni Papazoglou
Keyword(s):  
Audience Reception ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Modern Greek ◽  
The Press ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Folk Ritual ◽  
Ancient Drama ◽  
Of Greece

For the better part of the twentieth century, the quest for a ‘Greek’ continuity in the so-called revival of ancient drama in Greece was inextricably linked to what is termed and studied in this paper as a Ritual Quest. Rituality was understood in two forms: one was aesthetic and neoclassicist in its hermeneutic and performative codes, which were established and recycled – and as such: ritualized – in ancient tragedy productions of the National Theatre of Greece from the 1930s to the 1970s; the other, cultivated mainly during the 1980s, was cultural and centred around the idea that continuity can be traced and explored through the direct employment of Byzantine and folk ritual elements. Both aimed at eliciting the cohesive collective response of their spectators: their turning into a liminal ritual community. This was a community tied together under an ethnocentric identity, that of Greeks participating in a Greek (theatrical) phenomenon. At first through neoclassicism, then through folklore, this artistic phenomenon was seen as documenting a diachronic and essentially political modern Greek desideratum: continuity with the ancient past. Such developments were in tune with broader cultural movements in the period under study, which were reflected on the common imaginings of Antiquity in the modern Greek collective – consciousness – a sort of ‘Communal Hellenism’. The press reception of performances, apart from being a productive vehicle for the study of the productions as such, provides indispensable indexes to audience reception. Through the study of theatre reviews, we propose to explore the crucial shifts registered in the definition of Greekness and its dynamic connections to Antiquity.

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