Telling Tales with Machines

The connections between epic performances and technological innovation are longstanding, dating from the invention of the mechane in the fifth century BCE. In the early modern period they encompass Inigo Jones’ extraordinary scenic innovations, which he introduced in direct imitation of the Italians for the Court Masques in England from 1604 to 1640. With his complex machinery, Jones was able to effect movement across time and space and, especially, for the gods in his retellings. These scenic innovations, which were to endure for at least the next two-and-a-half centuries, were in many ways dictated by, and heavily dependent upon, epic’s divine machinery, its spectacular encounters and its multiple locations. Yet in 1781 the philosopher and critic James Harris praises Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus and George Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity (1737) because they both avoid ‘using Machines, Deities, Prodigies, Spectres or anything else incomprehensible, or incredible’. The ‘merveilleux’ of tragedy, and especially the machines used to usher it into the action, were now deemed deeply problematic in the theatre of bourgeois realism. Throughout the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century, the machinery associated with the gods was confined to ballet and opera. In recent years, however, in what is regularly dubbed the contemporary ‘posthuman’ world, where the boundaries between human and machine are increasingly blurred and artificial intelligences are not merely tools but potentially independent agencies, thinking about gods from machines has taken on new resonances.

Afterword

Theatre performances have always afforded a window on particular cultures at specific points in time, and this truism seems to be especially pertinent to any attempt to evaluate the extraordinary resurgence of epic performances in recent years around the world. For performing epic hasn’t simply been about an engagement with ancient oral traditions at a time when there is considerable appetite for ‘big’ stories, despite (or maybe because of) theoretical resistance to the ‘grand narratives’ of history. It has also been about turning to those stories because understanding of their original mode of composition—collective, improvisatory and so seemingly permanently ‘open’ to wider participation and change—has inspired artists to participate in this ongoing process of the remaking of epic performances....

Telling Other Tales

Chapter 6 examines the various ways in which the Bakhtinian heteroglossia of epic performances has been created: by the use of a participating bardic figure, who extends the Brechtian role of narrator/commentator to assume agency within both the fictional and actual worlds of the spectators; by their space-time settings; and by both their live-ness in, and their aliveness to, the immediate performance context. Since the time of the Modernists, led by Joyce and Woolf in Britain and Oswaldo de Andrade in Brazil, epic has begun to be re-envisioned; rather than a genre in which to retell the heroic narratives of a nation, it has become a place where the voices of those previously overshadowed and neglected are finally given space. Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version, Suzan-Lori Parks’ Father Comes Home from the Wars, and Lisa Petersen and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad each do this in different ways, giving voice to those whose narratives were occluded in the ancient epics.

Telling Tales with Words

Chapter 3 explores the twenty-first-century turn to orality exemplified in the works of poets such as Kate Tempest, Titilope Sonuga, and Alice Oswald. Engaging with Graeco-Roman epic in their work, these poets do so via a mode of performance that bears similarities with that of the Homeric bard. But this is not the composition-in-performance that Milman Parry and Albert Lord posited as the mode of Homeric performance; rather, these poets compose what John Miles Foley termed ‘Voiced Texts’. Such works hold the written and the spoken word in tension, denying primacy to the written even in our literacy-obsessed age, and making space for a new kind of orality that meets the demands of the contemporary era, while retaining the composite role of composer/performer that is a hallmark of oral traditions. Key to the popularity of this approach is the capacity of oral poetry to merge myth and history (as Jack Goody and Ian Watt argued), and to constantly rewrite its stories, even those that have been staunchly canonized, as the Graeco-Roman epics have been. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways that narrative podcasts, such as Serial and S-Town, evoke epic and mark another route along which the performance of epic is now being developed.

Telling Tales with the Body

Telling tales with the body was generally despised as a ‘lowbrow’ art form in the ballet world of the twentieth century—and there are still many practitioners and dance scholars who share this view. For most of the twentieth century, storytelling was not deemed to be something to which classical ballet should aspire. From the perspective of the new millennium, however, things look rather different. Stories are no longer eschewed by choreographers; indeed, it may well be possible to detect what one might term a ‘narrative’ turn in the classical ballet repertoire, where the ancient Greek and Roman epics are often providing the subject matter for these works. Chapter 4 explores the reasons behind twentieth-century ballet’s resistance to narrative and seeks to offer some thoughts on this early twenty-first-century narrative re-turn. This narrative eschewal in ballet matters because it has had profound repercussions beyond the world of dance, not least in the world of theatrical performance, where plotless dance is regularly invoked as a model for postdramatic theatre.

Telling Tales on Stage

While Hans-Thies Lehmann dated the postdramatic turn in performance to the 1970s, Christian Biet and Christophe Triau have argued that, on the contrary, it is a seventeenth-century construct. ‘Drama’, they argue, was fashioned in the rule books of neoclassical theorists, who sought to elevate French tragedy in order to distinguish it from both its forebears and from other (less ‘serious’) contemporary performance arts. Chapter 2 examines the divisions between theatre and narrative that have come to dominate performance thinking since the closing decades of the twentieth century. The longstanding theoretical interplay between narrative and theatre has often been agonistically cast as epic versus drama, but this is a false dichotomy, erected by neoclassical theory and practice and promulgated most successfully by Schiller and Goethe; it does not stem from Aristotle’s Poetics, where drama is pronounced to possess ‘epic’ qualities. But for Brecht, ‘dramatized epic’ is precisely what he strove to re-make in his ‘Epic Theatre’. This, in Peter Szondi’s view, was a result of a ‘crisis’ in dramatic form around 1900, when Aristotelean teleological form and its dialogic structure no longer sufficed—and it is Szondi’s privileging of Brechtian epic, and Brecht’s challenge to the perceived and longstanding opposition of epic and drama, that lies behind Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre. Yet theory, it seems, is out of step with practice because narrative and ‘stories’ appear to matter in the theatre in ways that Lehmann’s schema doesn’t allow, notwithstanding his often overlooked speculation that a ‘new narrative theatre’ may follow the postdramatic one.

Performing Epic Now

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, technological wizardry and the fragmentation or complete eschewal of narrative were rapidly becoming the staples of the commercial and the fringe stages respectively. In a postmodern world where ‘grand narratives’ were suspect, all narrative in the theatre was increasingly being viewed as no different from the artifice of the ‘well-made play’ and thus inadequate in the face of contemporary uncertainties. The decisive moment in this anti-narrative turn is often identified as the early 1950s, when the avant-garde in the visual arts, music, and theatre pioneered alternative modes of representation, seen in the works of Ad Reinhardt, John Cage, and Samuel Beckett. Hans-Thies Lehmann dates the turning point in performance to the 1970s and the ‘mediatization’ culture, when a split is perceptible between (text-based) drama and theatre that embraces performance in the broadest terms. Yet in recent decades there has also been plenty of resistance to any avowedly anti-narrative turn in performance and plenty of evidence that epic narratives have been making a comeback on the stage. Chapter 1 examines some of the reasons behind the return to narrative during this period, and the forms in which it can be seen, from storytelling to video games, podcasts to opera.