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Journal articles on the topic 'Ancient greek theatre'
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1
Griffith, R. Drew. "Corporality in the Ancient Greek Theatre." Phoenix 52, no. 3/4 (1998): 230. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1088669.
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Antoniou, Michaela. "Performing Ancient Greek Tragedy in Twentieth-Century Greece: Dimitris Rontiris and Karolos Koun." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 1 (January 10, 2017): 31–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x16000610.
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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.
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Barkas, Nikos. "The Contribution of the Stage Design to the Acoustics of Ancient Greek Theatres." Acoustics 1, no. 1 (March 23, 2019): 337–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/acoustics1010018.
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The famous acoustics of ancient Greek theatres rely on a successful combination of appropriate location and architectural design. The theatres of the ancient world effectively combine two contradictory requirements: large audience capacity and excellent aural and visual comfort. Despite serious alterations resulting from either Roman modifications or accumulated damage, most of these theatres are still theatrically and acoustically functional. Acoustic research has proven that ancient theatres are applications of a successful combination of the basic parameters governing the acoustic design of open-air venues: elimination of external noise, harmonious arrangement of the audience around the performing space, geometric functions among the various parts of the theatre, reinforcement of the direct sound through positive sound reflections, and suppression of the delayed sound reflections or reverberation. Specifically, regarding the acoustic contribution of the stage building, it is important to clarify the consecutive modifications of the skene in the various types of theatres, given the fact that stage buildings were almost destroyed in most ancient Greek theatres. This paper attempts to demonstrate the positive role of the scenery in contemporary performances of ancient drama to improve the acoustic comfort using data from a sample of twenty (20) ancient theatres in Greece.
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Lawrence, William. "Advice to a student of Classics." Journal of Classics Teaching 18, no. 36 (2017): 15–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s2058631017000162.
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Look at the secondary school timetable and you will see that almost all the subjects are ancient Greek words; so the Greeks studied these ideas first and are worth studying for their ideas in their own language (just like the Romans in Latin!). Greek: Biology, Physics, Zoology, Philosophy, Mathematics, Economics, Politics, Music, Drama, Geography, History, Technology, Theatre Studies. Latin: Greek, Latin, Art, Science, Information (Latin) Technology (Greek), Computer Science, Media Studies.
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Ley, Graham. "Towards a Theoretical History for Greek Tragedy." New Theatre Quarterly 31, no. 2 (April 28, 2015): 144–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x15000251.
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Greek tragedy and its theatre have regularly been drawn into modern theoretical formulas about the nature of theatre making, in proposals which have often had their own cause to plead, but which have still been influential on broadly formed views of the theatre in its history. In this essay, Graham Ley argues that much incidental misrepresentation can be found in this kind of writing alongside the occasional remarkable insight, and that the attention given in modern theory to the Greek theatre is generally inadequate. The theorists discussed are Isadora Duncan, Brecht, Boal, and Hans-Thies Lehmann, with examples also taken from performance theory. Ley then goes on to examine what kind of theoretical view of the ancient Greek theatre would be most appropriate today, and offers a vision of it as a dynamic and innovative environment, looking in this second part of the essay at what can be said of early choric tragedy, of the emergence of the actor, and of the innovation of the dramatic scene building. Graham Ley has written essays on various topics over the years for New Theatre Quarterly, but this is his first piece for the journal on his specialist subject, the performance of ancient Greek tragedy.
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Frendo, Mario. "Ancient Greek Tragedy as Performance: the Literature–Performance Problematic." New Theatre Quarterly 35, no. 1 (January 16, 2019): 19–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x18000581.
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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.
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Bellia, Angela, and Antonella Bevilacqua. "Rediscovering the Intangible Heritage of Past Performative Spaces: Interaction between Acoustics, Performance, and Architecture." Heritage 6, no. 1 (December 29, 2022): 319–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/heritage6010016.
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The relationship between the shape and social use of Greek and Roman theatres has always been overshadowed by the technical and acoustic analyses of these performance spaces. Relevant ruins illustrate the relationship between performance typology, acoustics, and construction development of ancient theatres, which were mainly determined by the requirements of artistic venues. The music in tragedies and comedies, the dances, and the public speeches performed in the same places helped to shape the constructions according to the requirements of the events. In addition to the need to satisfy social and political interactions, the functions of musical performances and public speeches in theatres were maintained across generations so that they organically coexisted in both Greek and Roman times. This paper presents new insights into the relationships between sound and architecture, focusing on the case study of the Greek–Roman theatre of Katane and its evolution through the centuries. Architectural features have been described in terms of the social functions of the theatre rather than as mere results of geometric rules. A brief comparison with the neighboring odeion of Katane and other Greek–Roman theatres has been made regarding destination use.
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Coldiron, Margaret. "Masks in the Ancient and Modern Theatre." New Theatre Quarterly 18, no. 4 (November 2002): 393–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x02220497.
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Ley, Graham. "Varifocalism: a Perspective on the Discipline of Theatre Studies." New Theatre Quarterly 30, no. 3 (August 2014): 268–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x14000505.
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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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Balaskas, Vasileios. "Local involvement in modern Greek revivals of ancient theatres: Delphi and Epidaurus in the inter-war period." Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 45, no. 1 (February 26, 2021): 75–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/byz.2020.25.
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Local community participation in the revival of ancient theatres as venues in Greece shaped the dynamics of the cultural reception of inter-war performances at Delphi and Epidaurus. Here I analyse local involvement within and beyond the theatrical context of the Delphic Festivals, as well as the long-standing identification of the village of Ligourio with the theatre of Epidaurus. These relationships reflect distinctive dimensions of the clash between community-led and institutional archaeology, which dominated national discourse on authenticity and identity. At the same time, the prospects of economic development through tourism in such remote areas encouraged local receptiveness to the revival of ancient theatres.
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Handley, Eric W. "2 - The Ancient Greek Theatre : Tradition, Image and Reality." Bulletin de la Classe des lettres et des sciences morales et politiques 11, no. 7 (2000): 269–301. http://dx.doi.org/10.3406/barb.2000.39071.
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Tsilfidis, Alexandros, Thanos Vovolis, Eleftheria Georganti, and John Mourjopoulos. "Function and Acoustic Properties of Ancient Greek Theatre Masks." Acta Acustica united with Acustica 99, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 82–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.3813/aaa.918591.
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Ley, Graham. "Sacred ‘Idiocy’ the Avant-Garde as Alternative Establishment." New Theatre Quarterly 7, no. 28 (November 1991): 348–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00006047.
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Is there a postmodernist theatre – and if so, what was the modernist theatre? What qualifies as avant-garde – and for how long? And why does the ‘established’ alternative theatre lean so heavily on appropriation, whether of ancient myths or contemporary ideologies – such as postmodernism? Graham Ley uses analogies from dance and design to explore our perceptions of and attitudes towards those contemporary theatre practitioners who may once have broken boundaries, but now often head the queue for lavish corporate finance. Graham Ley has taught in universities in England, Australia, and New Zealand, and his Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theatre will shortly appear from the University of Chicago Press.
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Hardwick, Lorna. "Translating Greek plays for the theatre today." Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 25, no. 3 (October 11, 2013): 321–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/target.25.3.02har.
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This essay discusses the relationship between form, language, rewriting and performance in the contemporary staging of ancient Greek drama, with special attention to the range of working practices of the translators, rewriters and theatre practitioners that are involved in the performance creation process. The discussion is framed by questions about the reciprocal influences of research in translation studies and in classics and about how both can best engage with the insights offered by performance praxis.
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Vovolis, Thanos. "Máscaras acústicas e dimensões sonoras do Teatro grego antigo." Classica - Revista Brasileira de Estudos Clássicos 25 (2012): 149–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2176-6436_25_9.
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Foley, Helene. "Classics and Contemporary Theatre." Theatre Survey 47, no. 2 (September 12, 2006): 239–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557406000214.
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Any discussion of ancient Greek and Roman drama on the contemporary stage must begin with a brief acknowledgment of both the radically increased worldwide interest in translating, (often radically) revising, and performing these plays in the past thirty-five years and the growing scholarly response to that development. Electronic resources are developing to record not only recent but many more past performances, from the Renaissance to the present.1 A group of scholars at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford—Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and their associates Pantelis Michelakis and Amanda Wrigley—are at the forefront, along with Lorna Hardwick and her associates at the U.K.'s Open University, in organizing conferences and lecture series; these have already resulted in several volumes that aim to understand the recent explosion of performances as well as to develop a more extensive picture of earlier reception of Greek and Roman drama (above all, Greek tragedy, to which this essay will be largely confined).2 These scholars, along with others, have also tried to confront conceptual issues involved in the theatrical reception of classical texts.3 Most earlier work has confined itself to studies of individual performances and adaptations or to significant directors and playwrights; an important and exemplary exception is Hall and Macintosh's recent Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914.4 This massive study profits from an unusually advantageous set of archival materials preserved in part due to official efforts to censor works presented on the British stage. Oedipus Rex, for example, was not licensed for a professional production until 1910 due to its scandalous incest theme. This study makes a particular effort to locate performances in their social and historical contexts, a goal shared by other recent studies of postcolonial reception discussed below.5 For example, British Medeas, which repeatedly responded to controversies over the legal and political status of women, always represented the heroine's choice to kill her children as forced on her from the outside rather than as an autonomous choice. Such connections between the performance of Greek tragedy and historical feminism have proved significant in many later contexts worldwide. Work on the aesthetic side of performances of Greek drama, including translation, is at an earlier stage, but has begun to take advantage of important recent work on ancient staging, acting, and performance space.6
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Casali, Giovanna. "Rievocare la musica greca antica." Greek and Roman Musical Studies 10, no. 1 (March 7, 2022): 217–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22129758-bja10038.
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Abstract When Ettore Romagnoli was invited in 1914 to stage classical dramas for the ancient Greek theatre of Syracuse, he attempted to re-create their ancient original characteristics, i.e. a combination of poetry, music, and dance. One of Romagnoli’s aims was to create music for contemporary plays, which recalled ancient Greek music, and he succeeded thanks to the collaboration with the composer Giuseppe Mulè. Indeed, for all the tragedies, Mulè and Romagnoli aimed at re-enacting ancient Greek music. This paper will highlight how both authors pursued their ambitious goal following different criteria: the re-elaboration of particular elements of Sicilian folk music; the re-creation of pieces inspired by both the description of Greek music in ancient sources and the musical fragments; the use of instruments which can reproduce specific sound effects.
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Biernat, Justyna. "O kulawym bogu Hefajstosie. W antycznej pracowni Jana Dormana." Pamiętnik Teatralny 68, no. 3-4 (December 18, 2019): 181–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.36744/pt.12.
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The paper is an analysis of Jan Dorman’s theatre practice in the context of the classical tradition. It examines the archival collections of The Theatre Institute documenting the collaboration of Jan Dorman with Anna Świrszczyńska on the staging of O kulawym bogu Hefajstosie (“The Lame God Hephaestus”), Świrszczyńska’s radio play. The extant correspondence between the creators of the production and the director’s copies permit us to explore and analyse the ways in which classical antiquity inspired Dorman’s work. Although Dorman never adapted any ancient Greek text to the stage, his practice indicates a strong presence of the classical tradition, in particular the Greek comedy, in his mode of theatre.
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Kaltsounas, Efthymios, Tonia Karaoglou, Natalie Minioti, and Eleni Papazoglou. "‘Communal Hellenism’ and ancient tragedy performances in Greece (1975‐95): The ritual quest." Journal of Greek Media & Culture 7, no. 1 (April 1, 2021): 69–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00028_1.
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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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Ley, Graham. "The Rhetoric of Theory: the Role of Metaphor in Brook's ‘The Empty Space’." New Theatre Quarterly 9, no. 35 (August 1993): 246–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00007971.
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In his discussion-piece for NTQ 28 (1991), Graham Ley raised questions about the self-determination of the avant-garde, drawing on analogies from dance and design to explore the problem of the post-modern in the theatre. He also outlined a critique of what he called an ‘alternative establishment in theatrical endeavour’: here, he extends that critique into an analysis of the techniques of persuasion to be found in one of the most influential texts in post-war theatrical theory, Peter Brook's The Empty Space, arguing for an enhanced attention to be given to the language and textuality of theory. Graham Ley is a writer and researcher who has taught in the Universities of London and Auckland. As Australian Studies Fellow in Theatre at the University of New South Wales in 1984, he compiled jointly with Peter Fitzpatrick of Monash University the survey of new developments in Australian theatre published in NTQ5 (1986). Among his numerous publications on ancient performance, A Short Introduction to the Ancient Greek Theater appeared from the University of Chicago Press in 1991. He is currently working on a book on theatrical theory.
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Ringer, Mark. "Stage by Stage: The Birth of Theatre. By Philip Freund. London: Peter Owen, 2003; pp. 811. $79.95 cloth; Women and Humor in Classical Greece. By Laurie O'Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. xviii + 262. $70 cloth." Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2005): 321–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405260209.
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Both Philip Freund's The Birth of Theatre and Laurie O'Higgins's Women and Humor in Classical Greece deal with Ancient Greek drama. Freund, a theatre historian, attempts a fairly comprehensive survey of both Greek and Roman drama as well as its influence on postclassical theatre, with particular emphasis on the past century. O'Higgins, a classicist, offers what at first glance appears a far narrower exploration that might only be of interest to other classicists. Of the two writers, it is O'Higgins who crafts a readable study that resonates well beyond its ostensibly narrow subject, whereas Freund's book, geared toward a more general readership, is hampered by serious problems of presentation and organization that compromise his more ambitious work's usefulness.
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Cueva, Edmund P. "The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. By Marianne McDonald. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003; pp. 224. $15.95 paper." Theatre Survey 46, no. 1 (May 2005): 167–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405390090.
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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.
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REVERMANN, MARTIN. "The ‘Cleveland Medea’ Calyx Crater and the Iconography of Ancient Greek Theatre." Theatre Research International 30, no. 1 (March 2005): 3–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883304000835.
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This article examines a spectacular example of Greek theatre-related vase iconography, the so-called ‘Cleveland Medea’, by studying the ways in which a painter appropriates iconography for his own narrative purposes. Of special interest are the interactions called for by the vessel from its prospective viewers in the symposium context. Throughout, the artefact is treated as an important document of the cultural history of Greek tragedy in the fourth century BCE.
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Andrushchenko, Elena A. "“...This plan was conceived by me...”: On the background of D. Merezhkovskiy’s forgotten letter to the editors of the “Mir Iskusstva”." Sibirskiy filologicheskiy zhurnal, no. 3 (2021): 87–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.17223/18137083/76/7.
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The paper clarifies the circumstances of the publication of a little-known letter by D. Merezhkovskiy in the “Mir Iskusstva” (“World of Art”) journal. The letter was published under the same rubric as a letter by Yu. Ozarovskiy, director of the Alexandrinsky Theatre, a person far from the journal’s editorial board, giving the impression of a public debate between like-minded people. Recreating the details of the struggle for setting ancient Greek tragedies in D. Merezhkovskiy’s translations on the stages of Russian theatres, based on forgotten publications of those years, indicates that the staging of “Hippolytus”, a tragedy by Euripides, was regarded by the “Mir Iskusstva” association as evidence of the effectiveness of their program in the struggle for new theatrical art. It was not D. Merezhkovskiy who played the leading role in this process, as he wrote in his letter, but D. Filosofov, who sought to stage the tragedy as a mystery play. Disagreements between D. Merezhkovskiy and the creative association of the “Mir Iskusstva” appeared later, when their aesthetic, religious, and philosophical views began to differ. However, during the production of “Hippolytus”, these differences did not prevent them from participating in joint projects as a new artistic force. It should be recognized that ancient Greek tragedies in D. Merezhkovskiy’s translations played a part in the history of the Russian theatre: the debate about the concept of performances, the specifics of L. Bakst’s sets, and musical accompaniments was an important step in the development of the theatre in expanding its expressive capabilities.
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Stiros, Stathis C. "Doric Foot and Metrological Implications of the Ancient Theatre of Makyneia, Western Greece." Metrology 2, no. 3 (August 19, 2022): 387–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/metrology2030023.
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Understanding the length and subdivisions of ancient length units is necessary for Archaeology, Architecture, and engineering, among other fields. These metrological units derive from anthropocentric concepts (fathom, cubit, foot, finger, etc.) and hence their metrological characteristics are variable and unknown for various ancient civilizations. The Roman length units are well determined, but the ancient Greek units are not. A rule sculpted in a metrological relief recently permitted the recognition of the Doric foot as having a length of 327 mm, but the broader use and divisions of this length unit remain unknown. In this article we present evidence of use of the Doric foot from the modeling of an ancient, atypical small theatre of the 4th–3rd century B.C., at Makyneia, on the western Greece mainland. It was found that this structure was designed using the Doric foot and its division in 24 (or even 12) digits. This result from a small provincial town indicates that the Doric foot was in broad use in architectural and engineering works of the ancient Greek World, and this result may be used to solve various problems of that era.
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Billing, Christian M. "Representations of Greek Tragedy in Ancient Pottery: a Theatrical Perspective." New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 3 (August 2008): 229–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x08000298.
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In this article, Christian M. Billing considers the relationship between representations of mythic narratives found on ancient pottery (primarily found at sites relating to the Greek colonies of south Italy in the fourth century BC, but also to certain vases found in Attica) and the tragic theatre of the fifth century BC. The author argues against the current resurgence in critical accounts that seek to connect such ceramics directly to performance of tragedies by the major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Using five significant examples of what he considers to be errors of method in recent philologically inspired accounts of ancient pottery, Billing argues for a more nuanced approach to the interpretation of such artefacts – one that moves beyond an understanding of literary texts and art history towards a more performance-conscious approach, while also acknowledging that a multiplicity of spheres of artistic influence, drawn from a variety of artistic media, operated in the production and reception of such artefacts. Christian M. Billing is an academic and theatre practitioner working in the fields of ancient Athenian and early modern English and European drama. He has extensive experience as a director, designer, and actor, and has taught at a number of universities in the UK and the USA. He is currently Lecturer in Drama at the University of Hull.
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Rocconi, Eleonora. "Before the Première: Recording the Performance of Ancient Greek Drama." Dramaturgias, no. 5 (October 27, 2017): 10–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.26512/dramaturgias.v0i5.8103.
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Ancient Greek theatre, a multimedia spectacle (originally conceived for a unique performance) which involved words, music, gestures, and dance, has always been a challenge for scholars investigating its original performance. This paper explores the possibilities of the performative elements of the plays to be recorded during their theatrical staging, that is, before their première. More in detail, it examines the probability that — given the rhythmic and melodic nature of ancient Greek language and the descriptive and/or perlocutionary character of the scenic information within the texts — the authors could inscribe music and gestural expressiveness into the linguistic code. The high level of ‘performativity’ implied in these ancient texts probably delayed the need for a technology that could record their different multimedia components.
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Wilmer, Steve. "Greek Tragedy as a Window on the Dispossessed." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 3 (July 10, 2017): 277–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x17000318.
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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’.
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Vervain, Chris. "Performing Ancient Drama in Mask: the Case of Greek New Comedy." New Theatre Quarterly 20, no. 3 (August 2004): 245–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x04000144.
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Chris Vervain is a mask maker who has for a number of years trained and directed in performing masked drama. On the basis of research she has undertaken, using her own masks, on how to perform the ancient Greek plays, in this article she questions some of the modern orthodoxies of masked theatre, drawing specifically on her experience with Menander's New Comedy. With David Wiles, she contributed ‘The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance’ to NTQ 67 (August 2001) and, with Richard Williams, ‘Masks for Menander: Imaging and Imagining Greek Comedy’ to Digital Creativity, X, No. 3 (1999). Some of her masks can be seen at www.chrisvervain.btinternet.com. She is currently working towards a doctorate on masks in Greek tragedy at Royal Holloway, University of London.
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Wagener, Isabell. "Performing Ploutos." ARYS. Antigüedad: Religiones y Sociedades, no. 19 (November 16, 2021): 439–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.20318/arys.2021.5251.
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The question of the relation of ritual and theatre has long been debated and may never come to a satisfying result. Nevertheless, certain features of theatrical performances, especially in the ancient Greek poleis, show a close connection of both performative acts. In particular, there is a strong interdependence of the dramatic agon and religious festivals, such as the Great Dionysia and the Lenaia. The aim of this article is to shed a new light not only on the relation of theatre and ritual, but also on the reception of theatre in the visual arts and the impact it had on religious developments of that time. I hereby focus on the heightened emergence of personifications in the middle of the 5th century BC which is reflected in a number of personifications who appear on stage in the Aristophanic comedies. One of them is Ploutos, the personified Wealth and one of the main characters in the homonymous play. By combining the representation of Ploutos in the visual arts with the literary sources on his person, a new image of this personification emerges. Through recapturing fragments and fractures of the multifaceted personification Ploutos, a process of transformation and adaption shows through that accommodates not only the relation of ritual and theatre, but also highlights the extraordinary standing of personification in the ancient Greek pantheon.
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Harrop, Stephe. "Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 34, no. 2 (April 19, 2018): 99–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x18000027.
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In this article Stephe Harrop combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy's contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. She focuses on Athenian tragedy's competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles's structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy's spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle – as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a recent case study, Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and the Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016–17, proposing that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. It is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe's terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics. Stephe Harrop is a Lecturer in Drama at Liverpool Hope University, where her research focuses primarily on performances and texts adapted from, or responding to, ancient tragedy and epic. She is co-author of Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
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Nicolau Jiménez, Adriana. "María José Ragué Arias, pionera en el estudio del teatro contemporáneo hispánico y catalán con perspectiva de género." Revista de Filología de la Universidad de La Laguna, no. 44 (2022): 29–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.25145/j.refiull.2022.44.02.
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María José Ragué Arias (Barcelona 1941-2019) was a Catalan scholar, theatre critic, playwright and feminist activist. This article focuses on a particular aspect of Ragué’s career: her contributions to the study of contemporary Hispanic and Catalan theatre from a feminist perspective. Following an overview of her intellectual career, this article explores the different aspects of this part of her work: the study of the contemporary rewritings of ancient Greek theatre female characters, the reception of feminist anglophone theatre studies, the analysis of the theatre field from a gender perspective and the understanding of female authorship as a differential value. The ensemble of these contributions represents a pioneer approach to contemporary theatre within the late 20th century Spanish academia and is still current at multiple levels, standing as a referent to claim for the study of the relationships among gender, feminisms, women and theatre in the 21st Century.
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Harrop, Stephe, and David Wiles. "Poetic Language and Corporeality in Translations of Greek Tragedy." New Theatre Quarterly 24, no. 1 (January 30, 2008): 51–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x08000055.
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The translation of ancient tragedy is often considered at a linguistic level, as if the drama consisted simply of words being written, spoken, and heard. This article contends that translation for the stage is a process in which literary decisions have physical, as well as verbal, outcomes. It traces existing formulations concerning the links between vocal and bodily expression, and explores the ways in which printed texts might be capable of suggesting modes of corporeality or systems of movement to the embodied performer; and sketches some of the ways in which the range of possible relationships between language and physicality might be explored and understood, drawing upon recent practice-based research into the work of three modern poetic translators of Greek tragedy. Stephe Harrop is a theatre practitioner and academic whose work explores the links between text and physical performance. She originally trained as a dancer, and currently teaches at Royal Holloway, University of London. David Wiles is Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway. His research interests include Greek theatre, masked performance, and drama in translation. His most recent publications include A Short History of Western Performance Space (2003) and Mask and Performance in Greek Tragedy (2007).
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Nikiforaki, Despoina. "L’écran comme vecteur de la mémoire du théâtre." Symbolon 22, no. 1 (2021): 161–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.46522/s.2021.01.14.
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This article shows how Ivo van Hove’s performance Les Damnés, based on Visconti’s film, reuses material from ancient Greek theatre. The stage director introduces the cinematographic idiom with the use of the camera in order to keep the continuity with Visconti’s film. Members of the Von Essenbeck family are characters bearing resemblance to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Orestes, Aegisthus and Creusa, Jason’s new wife. Their actions can be understood and magnified by the simultaneous reading of the Greek tragedies (Oresteia, Orestes, Electra, Medea). Thus, we establish the characters’ ancient nature, which gives them an archetypal consistency, while, by the use of the camera, the stage deepens its insight on them, focusing on the details of their faces and the actors’ work.
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Rogers, Megan. "Actors of Dionysus." Journal of Classics Teaching 20, no. 40 (2019): 35–36. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s205863101900031x.
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Actors of Dionysus (aod) is a charity and theatre company with 26 years of experience of creating radical adaptations of Ancient Greek drama and new writing productions inspired by myth. Since 1993 we have toured over 50 productions nationally and internationally, performed to over 750,000 people and become the UK's leading interpreters in this field.
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Dreyer, Matthias. "Caesura of History: Performing Greek Tragedy after Brecht." Performance Philosophy 2, no. 2 (January 31, 2017): 241. http://dx.doi.org/10.21476/pp.2017.22107.
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Taking into account the intertwining of the theory of tragedy on the one hand and theatrical work on ancient tragic texts on the other, the paper explores the way in which tragedy poses the question of history. This is especially the case in conceptions of tragedy as an interruption in a continuum. Hölderlin’s idea of caesura, its reflection in Benjamin’s understanding of tragedy as a revision of myth are in the center of a critical dramaturgy of this kind. By analysing Brecht’s work on Antigone as well as the stagings of critical theatre makers that came after Brecht (Einar Schleef, Dimiter Gotscheff), the paper shows the consequences of the concept ‘tragedy as caesura‘ on the level of the aesthetics of the theatre, unclosing in a radical way the temporality of the tragic process. From this point of view, tragedy is understood as a site of encounter with the persisting powers of the past; as reflexive rupture in the transition between times, that undermines the established order, but without, however, arriving at a new one. Although in the history of theatre and thought tragedy has been too often associated with the universal and timeless, how is it possible to think of historicity in a way negating submission under the universal without losing the genre of tragedy itself?
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Stourna, Athéna-Hélène. "Nouvelles formes performatives dans les pratiques anciennes : Le symposion grec en tant que « mise en perf » . Synesthésie, espace sympotique et performance." Symbolon 22, no. 1 (2021): 39–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.46522/s.2021.01.04.
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The Greek symposion was an all-male drinking celebration that included wine consumption, love, games, philosophical conversation, and live performance by both the symposiasts and by professional artists. Using the terms “performise” and “mise en perf,” coined by Patrice Pavis, this article explores how new performative forms can be found in ancient practices and, more specifically, within the cultural performance that was the Greek symposion. These two terms encompass both the performative and the theatrical character of the symposion that can both be traced through the study of its specific ritual and of sympotic space (the dining room dedicated exclusively to the symposion). In this way, a reinterpretation of this ancient social and cultural event will be provided through the lens of Theatre Studies and Performance Theory.
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O'Sullivan, Patrick, and Judith Maitland. "Greek and Latin Teaching in Australian and New Zealand Universities: A 2005 Survey." Antichthon 41 (2007): 109–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0066477400001787.
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The study of Latin and Ancient Greek at tertiary level is crucial for the survival of Classics within the university sector. And it is not too much to say that the serious study of Greco-Roman antiquity in most, if not all, areas is simply impossible without the ancient languages. They are essential not just for the broad cross-section of philological and literary studies in poetry and prose (ranging at least from Homer to the works of the Church Fathers to Byzantine Chroniclers) but also for ancient history and historiography, philosophy, art history and aesthetics, epigraphy, and many branches of archaeology. In many Classics departments in Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, enrolments in non-language subjects such as myth, ancient theatre or epic, or history remain healthy and cater to a broad public interest in the ancient Greco-Roman world. This is, of course, to be lauded. But the status of the ancient languages, at least in terms of enrolments, may often seem precarious compared to the more overtly popular courses taught in translation. Given the centrality of the ancient languages to our discipline as a whole, it is worth keeping an eye on how they are faring to ensure their prosperity and longevity.
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Bosher, †Kathryn. "Problems in Non-Athenian Drama: Some Questions about South Italy and Sicily." Ramus 42, no. 1-2 (2013): 89–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00000084.
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As Martin Revermann forecast in 1999, the reception history of Greek drama has become ‘big business’ and, as the present volume demonstrates, we are indeed trying to move beyond the ‘Atheno-centric civic ideology approach to Greek drama, which has, fruitfully, been dominating our mode of thinking for quite some time now'. Nevertheless, like Revermann, I believe that work on the reciprocity between social context and theatre that Nothing to do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990) so well exemplifies has been and continues to be an important approach to the field. Examining plays not simply as literary works, but as integral parts of social and political systems, remains a useful method of inquiry. Indeed, one strand of useful research may build on the work that has been done to situate Greek drama in Athens to ask similar questions about theatre outside Athens.In the case of South Italy and Sicily, the problem is particularly pressing. This is not only because of the traditional separation between the fields of philology, epigraphy, history, archaeology, art history and political science, which made comprehensive examination of theatre as a social and political phenomenon difficult in Athens, but also because of competing histories of the development of theatre in the ancient Greek world. In particular, the history of Athenian theatre, both from the literary perspective and now from the socio-political perspective, is so dominant that it often incorporates into its own narrative what evidence there is for theatre outside Attica. Likewise, from the later period, Roman theatre includes the evidence from Sicily and South Italy into its own history, though to a lesser extent. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? may nevertheless serve as a model for the development of a vital, and still missing, perspective on the theatrical evidence that remains from the West. How did drama and the theatre fit into the socio-political contexts of Greek cities outside Attica? Is it possible to write the history of Sicilian and South Italian theatre, or were these new world cities only recipients of the Attic theatre and stepping stones to that of Rome?I attempt below to set out a few of the questions that, I think, frame the debate. This is a preliminary, tentative examination of some of the problems that arise in this field, and it is not in any way exhaustive.
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Vervain, Chris, and David Wiles. "The Masks of Greek Tragedy as Point of Departure for Modern Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 17, no. 3 (August 2001): 254–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00014767.
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In this article, David Wiles and Chris Vervain stake out the ground for a substantial programme of continuing research. Chris Vervain, coming from a background in visual and performance art, is in the first instance a maker of masks. She is also now writing a thesis on the masks of classical tragedy and their possibilities in modern performance, and, in association with the University of Glasgow, working on an AHRB research programme that involves testing the effect of Greek New Comedy masks in performance. David Wiles, Professor of Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London, has published books on the masks of Greek New Comedy and on Greek performance space, and lectured on Greek masks. Most recently, his Greek Theatre Performance: an Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2000) included an investigation of the classical mask and insights provided by the work of Lecoq. He is now planning a book on the classical Greek mask. Wiles and Vervain are both committed to the idea that the mask was the determining convention which gave Greek tragedy its identity in the ancient world, and is a valuable point of departure for modern practitioners engaging with the form. They anticipate that their research will in the near future incorporate a symposium and a further report on work-in-progress.
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Laird, Andrew. "Roman Epic Theatre? Reception, performance, and the poet in Virgil'sAeneid." Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 49 (2003): 19–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0068673500000936.
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Past responses to ancient literature and the reading practices of previous centuries are of central relevance to the contemporary exegesis of Greek and Roman authors. Professional classicists have at last come to recognise this. However, accounts of reception still tend to engage in a traditional form ofNachleben, as they unselfconsciously describe the extent of classical influences on later literary production. This process of influence is not as straightforward as it may first seem. It is often taken for granted in practice, if not in theory, that the movement is in one direction only – from antiquity to some later point - and also that the ancient text which ‘impacts on’ on the culture of a later period is the same ancient text that we apprehend today. Of course it isneverthe same text, even leaving aside the problems of transmission. The interaction between a text and its reception in another place, in another time, in another text, is really a dynamic two-way process. That interaction (which has much in common with intertextuality) involves, or is rather constituted by, our own interpretation of it.
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Trubotchkin, Dmitry. "The Iliad in Theatre: Ancient and Modern Modes of Epic Performance." New Theatre Quarterly 30, no. 4 (October 21, 2014): 379–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x14000712.
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In this article Dmitry Trubotchkin focuses on Homer's Iliad as directed by Stathis Livathinos and premiered in Athens on 4 July 2013 as part of the Athens and Epidaurus Summer Festival – as far as is known, the first production of the complete Iliad in world theatre. It was performed by fifteen actors, each of whom played several roles and also acted the role of the ancient rhapsode, or narrator of epics. Livathinos's Iliad restored the original understanding of ‘epic theatre’, which differs from what is usually meant by this term in the light of Brechtian theory and practice with its didactic and distancing emphases. In the Greek performance, the transformation of an actor from one role to another and from acting to narration is constant, and the voice of Homer as a ‘collective author’ can be heard through all these transformations. Livathinos's Iliad may well be a landmark, indicating a new way of presenting epics on the stage. Dmitry Trubotchkin is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Russian University of Theatre Arts (GITIS) and an invited Professor at the Faculty of Arts of the Moscow State University. He heads the Department of Ancient and Medieval Art at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow. His publications include ‘All is Well, the Old Man is Still Dancing’: Roman Palliata in Action (2005), Ancient Literature and Dramaturgy (2010), and Rimas Tuminas: the Moscow Productions (forthcoming).
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Keeney, Patricia, and Don Rubin. "Canada's Stratford Festival: Adventures Onstage and Off." New Theatre Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 2009): 187–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x09000281.
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The festival season in Stratford, Ontario, was fraught with an offstage drama which seemed to reprise that of thirty years ago, when an experiment with a triumviral directorate ended in dissension and near disaster. However, once the dust had settled, an interestingly balanced season emerged, mixing Shakespeare and Shaw, ancient Greek and modern tragedy, Beckett and balletic Moby Dick. Here Patricia Keeney and Don Rubin offer their assessment of a wide-ranging repertoire. Patricia Keeney is a poet, novelist and long-time theatre critic for the monthly journal Canadian Forum. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Toronto's York University. Don Rubin is the founding editor of the quarterly Canadian Theatre Review, General Editor of Routledge's six-volume World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre, and Director of the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies at Toronto's York University.
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Rutter, Carol Chillington. "Harrison, Herakles, and Wailing Women: ‘Labourers’ at Delphi." New Theatre Quarterly 13, no. 50 (May 1997): 133–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00008794.
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As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.
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Justice-Malloy, Rhona. "Theatre in Ancient Greek Society. By J. R. Green. New York: Routledge; 1996; pp. 234. $49.95 hardcover." Theatre Survey 39, no. 2 (November 1998): 146–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557400010322.
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Cueva, Edmund P. "Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World. By Rush Rehm. London: Duckworth, 2003; pp. 174. £10.99 paper." Theatre Survey 46, no. 2 (October 25, 2005): 324–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557405270205.
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In this brief but concentrated text, Rush Rehm attempts to go back to the “radical nature of Greek tragedy” (9), by which he means that he wants to go back to the roots, foundations, and sources of this ancient genre. Rehm carries out his plan in an unusual yet personal way: Dispersed throughout his study of the genre are his personal observations on such matters as the involvement of the United States government in Nicaragua, Haiti, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Chile, Granada, Panama, East Timor, Israel, and Cuba. The events of 9/11 are also central to the later chapters. These political statements and forays aside, the author makes clear in his “Introduction: Timely Thoughts” that the “stage per se—understood as a place for artistic enactments like Greek tragedy—has lost much of its power and significance” (13). Rehm has an equally negative disposition to performance study, performance theory, and a modern stage that has departed from the challenges posed by the “original form of ancient tragedy” (17). Radical Theatre: Greek Tragedy and the Modern World is a stimulating read and worthy of note.
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Diamond, Catherine. "The Floating World of Nouveau Chinoiserie: Asian Orientalist Productions of Greek Tragedy." New Theatre Quarterly 15, no. 2 (May 1999): 142–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00012835.
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Criticism is increasingly being levelled at western directors who, in the name of a vague intercultural aesthetic, embark on experiments combining western texts with various kinds of oriental movement, costume, and music. In this article, Catherine Diamond raises the same issues in regard to productions of western drama in Asia, and offers a detailed analysis of three productions of ancient Greek tragedies to reveal how a new kind of non-specific orientalism has come to pervade the international stage, originating no less in Asia than in the West. Lavish productions, mounted to impress the international festival circuit rather than to engage local audiences, appropriate western tragedies primarily on account of their status in the western literary and theatrical canon; and rather than offering new interpretations of the texts from a different cultural perspective, they contribute to the creeping ascendancy of superficially exotic spectacle. Catherine Diamond, a dancer and drama professor, is currently a director with Thalie Theatre, the only English-language theatre in Taiwan.
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Seidensticker, Bernd. "Ancient Drama and Reception of Antiquity in the Theatre and Drama of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)." Keria: Studia Latina et Graeca 20, no. 3 (November 22, 2018): 75–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/keria.20.3.75-94.
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Theatre in the German Democratic Republic was an essential part of the state propaganda machine and was strictly controlled by the cultural bureaucracy and by the party. Until the early sixties, ancient plays were rarely staged. In the sixties, classical Greek drama became officially recognised as part of cultural heritage. Directors free to stage the great classical playwrights selected ancient plays, on one hand, to escape the grim socialist reality, on the other to criticise it using various forms of Aesopian language. Two important dramatists and three examples of plays are presented and discussed: an adaptation of an Aristophanic comedy (Peter Hack’s adaptation of Aristophanes’ Peace at the Deutsche Theater in Berlin in 1962), a play based on a Sophoclean tragedy (Heiner Müller’s Philoktet, published in 1965, staged only in 1977), and a short didactic play (Lehrstück) based on Roman history (Heiner Müller’s Der Horatier, written in 1968, staged in 1973 in Hamburg in West Germany, and in the GDR only in 1988). At the end there is a brief look at a production of Aeschylus Seven against Thebes at the BE in 1969.
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Bryant-Bertail, Sarah. "The Trojan Women a Love Story: A Postmodern Semiotics of the Tragic." Theatre Research International 25, no. 1 (2000): 40–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300013948.
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Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.
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Mytilinaki Kennedy, Maria. "During the Long Greek Crisis: Jan Fabre, The Greek Festival, and Metakénosis." Performance Philosophy 4, no. 1 (August 30, 2018): 25–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.21476/pp.2018.41209.
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During the fiscal, political, and social disorder caused by the Greek crisis, Greek cultural production has turned to obscure moments of Greek history, such as the Ottoman period, in an attempt to reframe dominant narratives. For Greek cultural politics, rejecting, or at least questioning the ancient past -- that was until now seen as the only valuable past -- is a way for Greek artists to reject Western perspectives on Greek culture and claim their own set of criteria by which to experience their national past. This aspect of the crisis, which is in some ways a renewed principle of historiographic judgment, inevitably presents itself in comparison to the highly influential Enlightenment philosophy of metakénosis. A term coined by Adamantios Korais (1748-1833), metakénosis referred to the transfer of the ideas of European liberal humanism through translation into Modern Greek, while dismissing Eastern influences in Greek culture. European thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was assumed by Korais to be based on classic Greek ideals, and its re-translation into Greek was undertaken in earnest in order to inspire sentiments of national unity, confidence in Greek letters, and continuity with the classical past.For this proposed article, I examine Korais’s highly consequential principle and its legacy by looking at a recent scandal in the Greek theatre world, that of Jan Fabre’s short-lived appointment as artistic director of the Greek Festival in 2016. A large group of Greek theatre artists circulated a letter of protest in which they asked Fabre to resign. In their responses to Jan Fabre’s perceived appropriation of their festival, these artists seemed to be reversing the metakénosis model as they expressed their opposition to standards of cultural value imposed from abroad. The context of the crisis, as fiscal crisis, but also as a new paradigm of krisis as judgment, was instrumental in voicing this protest.