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1st Annual Postgraduate Symposium,
2001:
Greek
Drama in Modern Performance
Introduction, by David Wiles (Professor of Theatre,
Royal Holloway, University of London)
A symposium was organised on June 19/20th 2001 to bring together an
international group of postgraduate students working on the reception
and reperformance of Greek drama. The organisers were Eugenia Arsenis
and George Sampatakakis. The first day was held at Royal Holloway, the
second at the Archive. All the presentations were given by postgraduates.
This was the first formal collaboration between the Archive
of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama - now the main international
centre for studying the reception of ancient drama - and the Department
of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London - where
there is an MA
programme in Greek Theatre Performance and a substantial body of
research students at work in that field. As an event, the symposium
is symptomatic of the importance that Greek theatre now has in the European
repertory, and the importance of reception within all arts disciplines.
The convergence of archival research and the realisation of contemporary
performances was another feature of the occasion. At Royal Holloway,
three students who are incorporating practice as part of their Ph.D.,
gave demonstrations of work in progress, and several other contributors
are in fact practitioners. While some students are gearing their work
to the analysis of contemporary theatre, another group is geared to
the creation of contemporary theatre. A distinction can also be made
between those who refer back to the performance conventions of antiquity,
and those for whom it suffices to concentrate on remakings of Greek
plays the modern period. Some anchor their work in a study of form,
others in ideology.
The importance of Greek theatre today can be explained in many ways:
the spiritual need to reritualize a realist theatre, a cultural need
of Europeans to define their collective historical identity, the postmodern
need to find a cultural reference point that allows meaning to be created
through intertextuality - or should one say interperformativity, the
political and aesthetic need of theatre-makers for distance is a world
where screens bombard us with too much immediacy. However it be explained,
the papers collectively were evidence of that great contemporary importance.
It is hoped that this will not be a one-off event, but be repeated in
an appropriate form in future years.
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Productions Today
Dafni-Doxa Metaxa, 'Three Performances of Electra
by Sophocles on the Greek stage of the 20th Century: A Transition from
a Classical and Modern to a Post-Modern Approach'
All major theatre practitioners in Greece and elsewhere have tried
to re-read and re-perform ancient Greek drama hoping to elucidate different
aspects of its diachronic quality. In my presentation, I will trace
the evolution of Electra's staging during the last 25 years of
the 20th century, focusing on Minos Volanakis', M. Marmarinos' and D.
Mavrikios' productions. In my brief retrospective, I will try to map
the multiple angles and approaches to tragedy, from its faithful reconstruction
to a fresh reading, a post-modern reading or even a misreading. Contemporary
revivals of the classical text will be discussed in association with
the play's plot, aesthetics and ethos as well as aspects of modern Greek
politics, culture and society. In conclusion, I will investigate how
Greek directors and actors deal with their cultural property by means
of translation, production and reception of a classical Greeek play
such as Electra.
MA in English and American Literature (Stanford University)
PhD (current) in Theatre Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Email palsothes@otenet.gr
Chris Vervain, 'Making Masks for Greek Tragedy'
(including demonstration)
Conditioned by the conventions of modern theatre we tend to view
the mask as a sort of homogenous entity when considering the differences
in masked as against unmasked Greek tragic performances. However a brief
consideration of some notable examples of modern masked productions
reveals immense variety and moreover that the type of mask used will
constrain the performance choices to be made. The modern mask maker
and director of masked Greek Tragedy can gain invaluable insights from
a study of ancient models. The evidence that we have suggests that in
the golden age of fifth century theatre in Athens the tragic masks reflected
in their idealised beauty, the contemporary classical style of sculpture.
One aspect of this is a lack of any one pronounced facial expression,
often misleadingly described as "neutral", a term that implies a certain
lifelessness. The classical face rather manifests subtle variations
in emotional tone according to different circumstances and is better
described as "multivalent". A related idea is that classical masks may
have lacked "characterisation" and instead have borne the features of
socially defined types. These are amongst the areas of debate that may
benefit from a new approach in the form of practice based research.
BA in Fine Art (University of Hertfordshire), MA in Text and Performance
(King's College London / RADA)
PhD (current) in the Department of Theatre and Drama, Royal
Holloway, University of London (supervisor: David Wiles)
Email chrisvervain@btinternet.com
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Cultural Traditions
Ioanna Remediaki, 'Sophocles' Antigone
in Modern Greek Theatre: A Journey into Language (1863-2001)'
This report attempts to study the translations of Antigone performed
from 1863 to date. The Ancient Greek Drama on the Modern Greek stage
is translated within one and not across languages. This translation
is a multiple dialogue with:
- The original text. In the case of Antigone we refer to the
language of Sophocles, to the fine balance between opposing tensions,
to the exact and effective expression of basic human questions. The
play has been translated thirteen times, more than any other play of
Sophocles, and has been performed almost continuously since 1863.
- Modern-Greek language. Before the establishment of the spoken standard
Greek, the translations often flirted with an archaic-like language,
ignoring the actual evolution of the language itself. That official
language considered being the most suitable one to render the original
text, according to the current political and ideological deliberations.
- The historical coincidence. How and why Antigone is translated
either at the newly established State of the 19th century or in the
period of the Minor Asian disaster of 1922, or during and after the
Military Dictatorship (1967-1974). How does the translation handle on
every occasion what is termed 'National and Cultural Heritage' or how
it is influenced by foreign models and tendencies, or imitates them?
- The theatrical code, which differs radically from the literary one.
The language is 'physical' and must be translated into a 'physical'
one. It could be said that a theatrical translator is also a first director.
This leads to the remark the every performance should have its own translation,
which finally tends to occur on the Modern Greek stage the latest years.
BA in Classical Literature (University of Thessaloniki), MA in
Theatre Studies (University of Athens)
PhD (current) on the performed translations of Sophocles' plays in
Greece and the ideology of language at the University of Athens (supervisor:
Walter Puchner)
Email remediaki@yahoo.com
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Angie Varakis, 'Karolos Koun and Peter Hall:
An Examination of the Use of Masks in Modern Aristophanic Productions'
The views of two modern directors, and stage designer Photopoulos, on
the use of mask in Aristophanic plays are discussed. To both Koun and
Hall the use of masks is vital to and inseparable from the spirit of
ancient Greek drama. Koun stressed the ritualistic essence of the mask
and its alienation effect while Peter Hall believes in the mask's ability
to contain the anarchy of the comedy's spirit and power to make it less
offensive by concealing identity. Koun's division of Aristophanes' plays
in three main categories (oneiric, country, city) lead to a similarity
of mask images in plays belonging in the same category. In designing
the masks for productions of city plays (Koun's Women at Thesmophoria
1986, Hall's Lysistrata 1993) Photopoulos kept in mind this division.
Originally, Koun in staging oneiric (Birds 1959) and country
(Acharnians 1976, Peace 1978) plays made extensive use
of folk elements including images from the popular Greek Shadow theatre
Karagiozis. Thus Aristophanes became popular to the audiences of the
time but when Koun realised that his folkloric approach had 'itself'
become a 'traditional' mode of performance, his approach and selection
of plays (Women at Thesmophoria) changed to something more urban
in order to become more relevant to Greek audience of the 80's. Accordingly
the masks became reminiscent of half mask in western world carnivals,
refined and not grotesque. "The Mask of Karagiozis no longer appeared
only his gaze was left", as Koun himself noted. It is interesting
to contemplate what the mask would look like in order to make relevant
and appealing Aristophanes' plays to the audience of a unified and globalised
culture.
First degree (University of Patras), MA in Drama and Theatre Studies
(Royal Holloway, University of London)
PhD (current) on the use of masks in modern Aristophanic productions
at Royal Holloway, University of London (supervisor: David Wiles).
Holder of an IKY Scholarship
Email a.varakis@rhul.ac.uk
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The Gesamtkunstwerk
Eugenia Arsenis, 'Mendelssohn's Antigone:
The Relation of Music and Text in the Context of Hegel's Aesthetic Theory'
The paper is focused on the relation of music and text in Mendelssohn's
Antigone and examines the parallels that are drawn between the
work and the Philosophy of Art of the 19th century with main emphasis
on Hegel's aesthetic theory. The socio-political conditions in which
the musical work was developed are also considered. With Mendelssohn's
Antigone music and text equally coexist for the first time in
a vocal/musical work. Fidelity to the text - as it is the first time
an original text of Greek tragedy was used in theatre - and autonomy
of music - a product of the latest aesthetic evolutions - attempt to
hold equal significance within the work. Music, a non-textual probably
less comprehensible medium becomes an element of at least the same importance
with the actual text. Philosophy and more specifically the philosophy
of art played a determinative role in the realization of the significance
of music. Mendelssohn's music 'shouldered' the responsibility of proving
that it is not only the text that captures the core of drama. And this
was just the beginning ...
BA in Drama and Theatre (Royal Holloway, University of London),
MPhil (Philosophy Department, University College London)
PhD (current) on the relation of music and text in Greek tragedy in
the context of Philosophical Aesthetics of the 19th and 20th centuries
in the German Department of Royal Holloway, University of London (supervisor:
Andrew Bowie and Robert Vilain). Holder of an IKY Scholarship
Email e.arsenis@rhul.ac.uk
In addition to directing for theatre, she has also composed music
for theatre (including Euripides' Hypsipyle, directed by David Wiles
for the Classical Association Conference).
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Yana Zarifi, 'Transposing the Chorus - Euripides'
Hippolytos 732-741' (including demonstration)
We, today, do not have the choros culture of the ancient
Greeks. Java, on the other hand, gives us a living instance of the traditional
and culturally central combination of mask, song, dance and drama: dances
continue to be performed at socially significant occasions and at religious
festivals by ordinary members of the community and Javanese dance still
has an educational function in comportment and in physical training
as it once did in classical Greece. With these parallels between Java
and classical Greece in mind, I adapted Euripides' Hippolytos
as Indonesian dance-drama (first performed at the Cambridge Triennial
Conference in 1998 and recently at the International Festival of Ancient
Greek Drama in Paphos), keeping the choral odes in the original Greek
and setting them to Javanese dance. In this paper, I concentrated on
a choral passage from the Hippolytos (732-741), where the chorus
sing of escape, flight, travelling in the sky over water, and where
they evoke images of wedding, death and lamentation. The demonstration
began with a metrical reading of the text, followed by the music and
song that preserved the original metre. A video extract featuring the
Javanese choreographer, Untung Hidayat, illustrated the interrelationship
between imitative dancing and text. Finally, a video recording of the
choral passage in question danced and sung by a full chorus in the performance
of the Hippolytos at the Royal Holloway Noh Studio in January
1999, showed how the combination of song-music-dance, formality and
imitativeness may be integrated in a way that allows us to transcend
the narrow limits of our own aesthetic experience. I also tried to show
that the effect of transposing the Greek chorus into the different and
more distant context of Javanese culture may be one of enrichment rather
than alienation. The layers of meaning created by the synthesis of mournful
music, bodily movement imitating birds flying, words speaking of escape
combined to form the Gesamtkunstwerk.
BSc in Sociology (London School of Economics), MA in Classics
(University College London)
PhD (current) on 'Performance as Research on the Ancient Greek Chorus'
at Royal Holloway, University of London (supervisor: David Wiles)
Email YanaSistovari@aol.com
Theatre director of ancient Greek drama that privileges the chorus,
music and dance. Greek theatre productions include a long list of
Greek plays for schools - especially Camden School for Girls and also
King's College Medea in Bharatanyatah Indian classical dance 1996,
Aristophanes' Plutus 1999 at Exeter, London, and Austin Texas, Euripides'
Hippolytos as masked Indonesian dance drama in Cambridge 1998-2001,
Interface international festival in London, Noh Studio, and in the
International Theatre Festival at the ancient Odeion of Paphos, Cyprus.
Recently (London's Cockpit Theatre, October 2001) produced and co-directed
Aristophanes' Peace, which had a successful performance in Texas.
I work closely with Farrah (hon. RSC designer), and Jamie Masters,
composer. My next production will be Euripides' Bacchae in 2002-3.
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Theory and Practice
Themelis Glynatsis, 'Enas eros tou penthous:
Ancient Greek Tragedy in Contemporary Context, a propos Yorgos
Cheimonas' Tragic Speech and Contemporary World Drama'
The approach of this paper towards ancient Greek tragedy in a modern
context follows faithfully Cheimonas' literary phenomenology concerning
the ancient dramatic genre. Cheimonas' theory separates the 'tragic
being' into two catgories, the manifest and the latent, and subsequently
descibes how the Greek tragic poetry manages to merge on the one hand
highly sophisticated linguistic clusters and on the other a primal,
mythic content. The fundamental thesis of the paper is that analytical
and performative approaches to Greek tragedy have reached a plateau,
a condition which demands a radical rethinking of the genre. It is proposed
that instead of making random theatrical experimentations and futile
over-analytical dissections of the texts themselves, one needs to shift
one's attention towards an organic approach to the genre, view it as
a condition, a process, rather than a static text. In other words, the
paper suggests, one should become more attentive to the constituent
elements of tragedy, not from a structuralist or hermeunitical perspective,
but from a more sensory orientation. The primal emotionalism and morality
on the one hand, and the strict linguistic confines on the other need
to be entoned so as Greek tragedy can function as a total, valid theatrical
spectacle.
BA (Kent), MA (Nottingham)
PhD (current) on 'Language in Antonin Artaud's "Theatre of Cruelty"'
(supervisors: David Bradby and David Wiles) at the Drama Department,
Royal Holloway, University of London
Email themelis_g@hotmail.com
He has contributed to the following performances: July 1998, Blood
Wedding, by Lorca (director, choreographer, performer), Old University,
Athens; December 1998, The Just, by Camus (actor), University of Kent;
March 2001, The Soldier's Tale, by Stravinsky and Ramuz (narrator),
University of Surrey; May 2001, chamberplayMEDEA, (director and adaptator),
King's Head Theatre, London; June 2001, chamberplayMedea (director
and performer), Royal Holloway.
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Jane Montgomery, 'Carnal Art and Electra'
What are the boundaries of representation in tragic performance?
Where does the actor draw the line between 'representing' and 'becoming'
her character? Exploring the relationship between Sophocles' Electra
and interventionist body art, this paper draws parallels between the
'unmasking' process of Orlan's 'Omnipresence' and the visceral experience
of acting Electra. Detailed analysis of Electra's performative 'eidos'
moves to an examination of abjection in the text, and its relationship
to live performance.
PhD (current) on Sophocles' Electra and its relationship to performance
theory at the University of Melbourne (co-Classics / Drama supervision
with Dr Chris Mackie and Dr Denise Varney)
Email janemonty@aol.com
Leventis Visiting Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and Director
of the 2001 Cambridge Greek Play, Electra.
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Kathleen Riley, 'Mr. Heracles: A Case
Study in Heroism'
The single male heroic figure of Herakles is quite unusual among the
characters of the extant Euripidean corpus and Euripides' tragic treatment
in the play of the heroic male identity marks a turning point in the
literary tradition of the Herakles myth. In dramatizing the darkest
and most difficult episode of the myth, namely Herakles' madness and
murder of his wife and children, Euripides charts Herakles' progression
from the conventional and inadequate heroic impulse to a new and morally
more demanding response to human suffering. He also explores the tension
between the expectations and conditioning of the heroic culture and
those of civilian life, the gap between oikos and polis, by giving equal
emphasis in the play's first half to Herakles' role as alexikakos and
saviour to Hellas and to his love for, and sense of duty to, his family.
Born in Yorkshire, Simon Armitage has produced several collections of
verse and a prose memoir. He was also Britain's official Millennium
Poet. Mister Herakles, his first stage play, was commissioned by the
West Yorkshire Playhouse where it opened in February 2001. The focus
of Armitage's reworking of Euripides' text is an analysis of the cultural
psychology of masculinity and militarism and, in particular, the problem
of trained killers adapting to civilized and civilian society. The militarism
which pervades the play is overt although highly eclectic, with images
borrowed and condensed from history and popular culture and reflecting
the fragmented focus of the military in the post Cold War era. Herakles
kallinikos is variously transformed into an astronaut, an English squaddie
and a Vietnam soldier. Armitage has reproduced the breach in the original
drama between heroic and domestic values and the dislocation of the
male warrior in a society based on co-operative values. The character
of Madness in Armitage's version activates in Heracles a violence that
is intuitive and has been honed by years of killing on behalf of the
state. In the play's most sustained analysis of the causes of the madness,
Heracles recalls his gradual desensitization to the act of killing and
the shift from what was a trained action to the point where 'instinct
and reaction take over' and the natural movement from this state into
mania. Armitage sees in Euripides' Herakles a powerful symbol for the
uncertainty of our own age as well as a means of responding to questions
about the place and nature of masculinity and approved violence in modern
society.
DPhil (current) on 'The Reception of Euripides' Herakles' at
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford (supervisors: Edith Hall
& Fiona Macintosh)
Email kathleen.riley@classics.ox.ac.uk
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Politics and the Bakkhai
George Sampatakakis, 'A Methodology for
Dionysos: Rethinking Performance Histories'
Axioms:
1. Performance is a live and not a textual event; however, performance
reconstruction is solely textual history based upon the re-materialization
of 'memory'.
2. Performance is a bygone event that survives only in 'memory', thus,
'the history of performance resides in the history of memory itself'
[Roach (1998) 24].
3. In any case, memory (and its evidence) is 'ideologized' per se; thus
the reconstruction of a performance involves - most of all - a hermeneutic
of transcendence in a sense that it un-validates the sources and puts
them into a test which screens out meanings anew.
4. As a result, 'polyvocality' [term by James Clifford] was restrained
and orchestrated in many traditional methodologies by giving to one
voice a pervasive authorial function and to others the role of sources,
'informants', to be quoted or paraphrased. Once polyphony and poly-documentation
are recognized as modes of re-performing the past, monophonic authority
is questioned, revealed to be unreliable for recalling in the present
an already performed history.
5. The de-'aesthetization' of our methodologies re-allows performance
histories a consequent political hypostatization. 'Histories' in general
can authorize realizations of Power in their attempt to conserve a seamless
single-versioned past. Nonetheless, seeing the re-performance of the
Bakkhai as monologic is unrealistic for a 'text' that has been used
as a political metaphor by revolutionary classicists, gay directors,
black Marxists, conservative feminists, queer playwrights, Left directors,
environmentalists, Greek nationalists, radical postmodernists, even
as an allegory for Greek Orthodoxy.
BA (Athens), MPhil (Cantab.)
PhD (current) on 'Bakkhaimodel: the Re-usage of Euripides' Bakkhai
in Text and Performance' (supervisor: David Wiles). Holder of a scholarship
from the Onassis Foundation
Email g.sampatakakis@rhul.ac.uk
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Konstantina Foskolou, 'Bakkhai and
Troades in Performance: the Directions of Matthias Langhoff'
Matthias Langhoff was born of German parents exiled in Zurich in
1941. Educated in the Berliner Ensemble, he has worked and lived not
only in GDR but also in various European countries. What we tried to
detect was the reasons why, for a director who does not have a permanent
group and does not work in his native language, Greek tragedy remains
one of his unchanging orientations. Langhoff's staging of Euripides'
Bakkhai with the State Theatre of Northern Greece at the ancient
theatre of Epidavros in 1997 was an event that marked not only that
very summer, but also Greece's recent theatre history in general. Langhoff
interprets hoots and hisses in a particular way: 'Even if it sounds
coquettish, I'm very pleased with the premiere. Reactions revitalized
the audience. Greek tragedy offers the material for this awakening'.
Women of Troy, 'adapted from Euripides by Matthias Langhoff',
was a National Theatre of Brittany production first presented in Rennes
in 1998. If sticking to the theme of war is natural for Langhoff, it
is equally natural to draw on the source of tragedy: 'For Müller as
for me, ancient tragedy is the greatest example of political literature'.
Fascination by the political dimension of tragedy, research onto its
links with modern society, shock-tactics through violent and provocative
images, exclusion of gods, polemic aroused because of the performance,
intrusion of elements of modern Greece: this is how we may briefly describe
Langhoff's approach to Greek tragedy.
BA (Athens), MA (Paris III)
Thesis (current) on the performance history of the Oresteia on the
Greek stages during the 20th century at the Theatre Studies Institute,
Paris III - 'Sorbonne Nouvelle' University (supervisor: Georges Banu)
Email nadiafos@yahoo.com
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