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.

Paracomedy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Jendza
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Prominent Feature ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
And Performance

Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy is the first book that examines how ancient Greek tragedy engages with the genre of comedy. While scholars frequently study paratragedy (how Greek comedians satirize tragedy), this book investigates the previously overlooked practice of paracomedy: how Greek tragedians regularly appropriate elements from comedy such as costumes, scenes, language, characters, or plots. Drawing upon a wide variety of complete and fragmentary tragedies and comedies (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Rhinthon), this monograph demonstrates that paracomedy was a prominent feature of Greek tragedy. Blending a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, including traditional philology, literary criticism, genre theory, and performance studies, this book offers innovative close readings and incisive interpretations of individual plays. The author presents paracomedy as a multivalent authorial strategy: some instances impart a sense of ugliness or discomfort; others provide a sense of lightheartedness or humor. While the book traces the development of paracomedy over several hundred years, it focuses on a handful of Euripidean tragedies at the end of the fifth century BCE. The author argues that Euripides was participating in a rivalry with the comedian Aristophanes and often used paracomedy to demonstrate the poetic supremacy of tragedy; indeed, some of Euripides’s most complex uses of paracomedy attempt to reappropriate Aristophanes’s mockery of his theatrical techniques. The book theorizes a new, groundbreaking relationship between Greek tragedy and comedy that not only redefines our understanding of the genre of tragedy but also reveals a dynamic theatrical world filled with mutual cross-generic influence.

A Conversation on Directing Opera

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-255
Author(s):  
Katie Mitchell ◽  
Mario Frendo
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Musical Score ◽  
Senior Lecturer ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Don Giovanni ◽  
National Opera ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Theatre Studies ◽  
And Performance

Katie Mitchell has been directing opera since 1996, when she debuted on the operatic stage with Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni at the Welsh National Opera. Since then, she has directed more than twenty-nine operas in major opera houses around the world. Mitchell here speaks of her directorial approach when working with the genre, addressing various aspects of interest for those who want a better grasp of the dynamics of opera-making in the twenty-first century. Ranging from the director’s imprint, or signature on the work they put on the stage, to the relationships forged with people running opera institutions, Mitchell reflects on her experiences when staging opera productions. She sheds light on some fundamental differences between theatre-making and opera production, including the issue of text – the libretto, the dramatic text, and the musical score – and the very basic fact that in opera a director is working with singers, that is, with musicians whose attitude and behaviour on stage is necessarily different from that of actors in the theatre. Running throughout the conversation is Mitchell’s commitment to ensure that young and contemporary audiences do not see opera as a museum artefact but as a living performative experience that resonates with the aesthetics and political imperatives of our contemporary world. She speaks of the uncompromising political imperatives that remain central to her work ethic, even if this means deserting a project before it starts, and reflects on her long-term working relations with opera institutions that are open to new and alternative approaches to opera-making strategies. Mitchell underlines her respect for the specific rules of an art form that, because of its collaborative nature, must allow more space for theatre-makers to venture within its complex performative paths if it wants to secure a place in the future. Mario Frendo is Senior 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 the director of CaP, a research group focusing on the links between culture and performance.

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’.

Shakespeare’s suppliants: the ‘rotten custom’ of ancient asylum seeking in Coriolanus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Wald
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Dionysius Of Halicarnassus ◽  
Looking Back

Abstract Looking back to the early modern period from the current immigration crisis, this article reads Shakespeare’s tragedy Coriolanus as a tragedy of displacement and asylum seeking. It argues that just like theatrical productions today, Shakespeare might have harked back to ancient Greek tragedy as a cultural resource for coming to terms with the challenges of immigration. It traces the possible migrations between the ritual of asylum seeking that was reflected in a number of Greek tragedies including Aeschylus’s Hiketides, the earliest surviving play about refugees from the fifth century BC, and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. In this respect, this article is part of the current critical re-evaluation of the relations between Shakespeare’s work and ancient Greek tragedy. It places Coriolanus into the intertextual and intermedial hiketeia rhizome, in which one transmission line from Greek tragedy via Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Amyot, and North to Shakespeare can be corroborated by evidence, while other lines are more uncertain. Asking whether hiketeia, the ancient verbal and gestural repertoire of a stranger pleading for protection and integration into the polis, is only present as ‘rotten custom’ in Shakespeare’s tragedy, as a trace of cultural history without any considerable force in the new context, the article explores the paradoxical negotiation of displacement in Coriolanus, where both the exiled and the exiler become suppliants. It proposes that Shakespeare’s transformative reactivation of hiketeia as a theatrically, affectively, and politically potent form created an opportunity to negotiate the immigration crisis in Jacobean England.

Emandulo: Process and Performance in a Changing South Africa

1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-261
Author(s):  
Thomas Riccio
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Performance

In the spring of 1992 the Natal Performing Arts Council (NAPAC) in Durban, South Africa, invited me to develop a performance based on Zulu traditions with their recently formed Kwasa Group and their long established Loft Theatre. ‘Kwasa’, Zulu for ‘it dawns’, was NAPAC's attempts to address the changing needs of South Africa. Two weeks after white South Africa voted in favour of a nationwide referendum to allow non-whites the ability to vote I began rehearsals for Emandulo.’

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.

Reflections on Crip Imitations as Cultural Space-Making

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 383-399
Author(s):  
Eliza Chandler ◽  
Megan Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Actor Training ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Complex Dynamic ◽  
Training Systems ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Disability Simulation ◽  
A Performance

The article reflects on the complexities of deploying imitation as a performance theme within disability arts. The authors are animated by disability arts curator Amanda Cachia’s 2019 exhibition, Automatisme Ambulatoire: Hysteria, Imitation, and Performance, which showcased disabled and nondisabled artists exploring the cultural dynamics of imitation through the performing arts. The article begins by considering how imitation enacts proximal familiarity with difference by discussing disability simulation activities, actor training systems, and forms of cultural appropriation. A disability studies framework is employed to consider how artists engage imitation as an element of disability aesthetics. The analysis is developed in conversation with four examples of disability performance—Helen Dowling’s Breaker, Claire Cunningham’s tributary, Sins Invalid’s performance An Unshamed Claim to Beauty, and Jess Thom’s rendition of Samuel Beckett’s Not I. The article posits that by enacting imitation as a performance theme, disabled artists resist notions that imitation is reserved for bodies read as “neutral,” and attend to how imitation brings disability artists into a complex dynamic of political relationality.

Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Fate of Tragedy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Billings
Keyword(s):  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Phenomenology Of Spirit ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
First Time ◽  
Historical Necessity ◽  
Insight Into

This chapter focuses on Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). The Phenomenology treats tragedy both as a model for historical processes in ancient Greek society, and, for the first time, as a literary genre in its own right, with a particular historical place and cultural role within the Athenian polis. In both contexts, tragedy is the process through which loss becomes constructive, furthering the development of consciousness in and beyond antiquity. Yet Greek tragedy is also importantly limited for Hegel: both its content and its form have been rendered irrevocably past by the very historical transformations it represents. Hegel's theory of tragedy encompasses moments of both loss and gain, and the power of his appropriation in the Phenomenology results from the tension between the insight into historical necessity that tragedy offers on one hand and the emotion of sorrow that it brings with it on the other.

Cross-cultural Theatre Education: Rehearsals and Performance English as Lingua Franca, rewriting process, and poly-glottal text in psycho-physical acting practice

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Lars Henning
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Theatre Education ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Text Language ◽  
English As Lingua Franca ◽  
Insight Into

At Copenhagen International School of Performing Arts, English is the Lingua Franca (ELF) of artistic exploration. With a non-conformist approach to the use of ELF, highlighting a body-mind insight into the language over correctness, a latent, expressive potential of ELF is explored through a psycho-physical training. The predominant technique is Movement Psychology (Laban/Malmgren), which examines the interdependence between, on the one hand, text, language, and narrative and, on the other, the embodiment of the Jungian unconscious.The paper analyses the process and the methods of staging the production entitled Re: ORESTES, based on Mee’s play Orestes 2.0, applying the described methodological exploration. The play was rewritten and remoulded by the performers throughout a rehearsal process, which focused on interlacing the performers’ highly diverse cultural horizons (Gadamer) in a common mega-text, in an attempt to fuse the familiar with the alien, the personal with the collective, and to channel, shape and articulate the material within ELF.The paper details two different examples of this transformative remoulding process. One actor wrote a completely new text, which was performed in the heightened style of "the Queen’s English". Another actor performed a part in a poly-glottal combination of Ancient and Modern Greek (her mother tongue) and ELF. In this process, both performers sought to transcend the preconceived limitations of their individual cultural horizons as well as of the English language.

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.

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