Posts Tagged ‘greek drama’

Greek Drama and Aesthetic Archeology

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Modes of minimalist thinking often find fullest expression in Greek stories. Layers of culture are stripped back to the origins of Western discursive and narrative approach. Cutting through layers of history and culture to expose its root means cutting through all narrative structures to find their essence.

Minimalism forces upon us a kind of archeology of style. Idiosyncratic and stylistic flourish often fail when exposed to the archeology of minimalism. The Greeks allow for a minimalist narrative in large part because their stories are so close to the archetypal source there is little extra. Often, Greek stories provide the bare minimum of context before moving forwards with a primal and archetypal tale.

Sophocles, in many ways, deals in pure archetype. Some of this is based on the stories he chooses to tell. Focus on the parent child relationship, as in the Oedipus cycle, strikes to the core of the human experience. This essential story is amplified by the narrative structures available to him. In his day, drama was seen as consisting of two actors and a chorus. Because of this constraint, he was forced to fit the complexity of human experience into a dichotomy. It forced dialog and paired monologue instead of conversation.

This very contained world is in sharp distinction to the plays of Euripides. Not only is Euripides willing to call into question the very power dynamics underlying society, he does so through a revolution in the dramatic form. The addition of a third actor increases, logarithmically, the complexity of potential storytelling dynamics.

In The Bacchae, for example, the same actor who plays the priest also plays the god. The actor who plays the mother plays the son. The king is played by the same actor who plays the servant. In this way, Euripides is able to question social politics through the very structures of narrative. If the king and the servant are manifested through the same soul, through being played by the same actor, what does that say about power and control in society?

What implications does this have for those of us who would design these worlds? Are there lessons we may learn? What are these plays speaking that would inform us, in a useful way, as builders and designers of the worlds these plays would inhabit?

First, it would serve us well to look at the structure of these stories. As designers, we are first and foremost visual storytellers. The story we are telling comes from the text. If it is a minimal or archetypal text, then perhaps we ought to look for that archetype in our design.

But what kind of minimalism is this?

The minimalism of Sophocles is different than that of Euripides. Do the characters have a single, unchanging, soul? Do they have a shared soul which manifests different aspects? Are these writers even minimalist?

A lot of evidence indicates that these texts are little more than the equivalent of an operatic libretto. In short, we are missing the music, the songs, and the choreography which these plays originally had and which made them far more of a spectacle than common thinking often allows of them today.

It was recently discovered that Greek statuary was painted in vibrant colors. Perhaps, then, neo-classicism and classical minimalism are nothing more than aesthetic anomalies founded on a misinterpretation of historical evidence. Minimalism, as an aesthetic concern, may indicate a far more modern line of thought than we typically consider it to be.

All of this concerns us as designers of theatrical worlds. Scenery, props, lighting, costumes, and music are all implicated by our asking of these questions. Our results are determined by our answers.

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Listen to the Murmer of the crowd

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

Link

As the ancient Greeks were placing the last few stones on the magnificent theater at Epidaurus in the fourth century B.C., they couldn’t have known that they had unwittingly created a sophisticated acoustic filter. But when audiences in the back row were able to hear music and voices with amazing clarity (well before any theater had the luxury of a sound system), the Greeks must have known that they had done something very right because they made many attempts to duplicate Epidaurus’ design, but never with the same success.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have pinpointed the elusive factor that makes the ancient amphitheater an acoustic marvel. It’s not the slope, or the wind — it’s the seats. The rows of limestone seats at Epidaurus form an efficient acoustics filter that hushes low-frequency background noises like the murmur of a crowd and reflects the high-frequency noises of the performers on stage off the seats and back toward the seated audience member, carrying an actor’s voice all the way to the back rows of the theater.

[Snip]

But as Declercq’s team experimented with ultrasonic waves and numerical simulations of the theater’s acoustics, they discovered that frequencies up to 500 Hz were held back while frequencies above 500 Hz were allowed to ring out. The corrugated surface of the seats was creating an effect similar to the ridged acoustics padding on walls or insulation in a parking garage.

So, how did the audience hear the lower frequencies of an actor’s voice if they were being suppressed with other background low frequencies? There’s a simple answer, said Declercq. The human brain is capable of reconstructing the missing frequencies through a phenomenon called virtual pitch. Virtual pitch helps us appreciate the incomplete sound coming from small loudspeakers (in a laptop or a telephone), even though the low (bass) frequencies aren’t generated by a small speaker.

The Greeks’ misunderstanding about the role the limestone seats played in Epidaurus’ acoustics likely kept them from being able to duplicate the effect. Later theaters included different bench and seat materials, including wood, which may have played a large role in the gradual abandonment of Epidaurus’ design over the years by the Greeks and Romans, Declercq said.

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The Prayer of Ajax

Thursday, July 6th, 2006

Avenging Furies, help me,
grave Furies who bestride the world,
forever virgin, who supervise all mortal pain,
witness. The sons of Atreus have destroyed my life
evil for evil, snatch them down to Hell,
let them die as I do now. Come now!
Be quick, be just, and glut yourselves on Greeks.
–Sophocles, Ajax

In his final moments, Ajax sends a prayer to the gods. He laments his fate and prays for a quick death. The quick death is granted sure enough. But there is another part of his prayer. A curse upon the souls of the Greek army who betrayed him. He asks for the just deaths of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The two brothers who are responsible for his first shame, losing the armor of Achilles, that led to his rage and madness, the cause of his second shame.

Agamemnon dies horribly at the hands of his wife upon his return to Argos. His swift return home lends an even more pathetic element to his swift and brutal death. Menelaus we know lives on to old age. His suffering is old age with a woman he knows loves someone else, who would leave him but for force of arms. In a way Ajax does get his wish granted, the sons of Atreus suffer pain and humiliation at least equal to his own.

There is no forgiveness in Ajax. His final prayer is of a man so consumed with pride that even at the moment of his own suicide he thinks only of that. While he recognizes his misery, he fails to learn the true folly of that pride and continues to hope for retribution within a logic system that does not value pride. With his suicide we see a man whose pride quite literally killed him.

I reread the play while Arvo Part’s Sarah Was Ninety Years Old pounds away incessantly. Hollow. Vacant. As I reach the suicide of Ajax, the drums give way to the organ and the sky is opened up in possibility. The drums return, but now transformed. They support the voice calling out with divine grace, the gong beats and silence. The voices return but are in some way almost hidden. They must struggle to be heard. Ethereal. Transformed.

These are Ajax’ last words on earth: whatever else I say only the Dead will hear.

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On Theatre as Global Art

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

Why do we care about the Greeks? I often ask myself this when reading through stilted translations whose language is self-consciously old fashioned. These plays were written within a socio-historical context so radically different than ours it becomes almost impossible to try and relate the two. The only real similarities are that we read some of the same authors. I guess we have a similar political system since power is vested only in the hands of wealthy land owning white males. But even there the differences arise as the Greeks were up front about this while we mask it in language of universal suffrage. But I digress.

I am currently in the process of working on two greek texts, Antigone and Ajax. The Antigone is a new translation of the Anhouilh adaptation while the Ajax is an as yet unfinished adaptation of the Greek into Rumanian. These two productions are as different as can be and yet they both pull from some common source, some need to look back.

It always amazes me that these texts hold such strong relevance for a modern audience. But in a way it is not a looking back so much as it is a locating of ones foundation or grounding. For these texts never are the final product, rather they are the jumping off point for an exploration of our contemporary condition. The text becomes contained within a larger experiential context, the production. By using these old texts we immediately find ourselves in the world of metaphor. We know we are talking about the contemporary world, but it is through the veil of history. We are instantly looking at parallels between then and now, us and them. This creates a situation whereby notions of time and identity are at once compressed and expanded. We live and operate beyond the linear qualities of time that daily life presents us with.

One of the reasons I feel that places like New York or Chicago or London or Berlin have such strong artistic and theatrical communities is that daily life is confronted with these very issues. The simple fact of living in a heterogenous cosmopolitan environment lends a vital force to the simple repetition of daily life that one does not get outside of these places. When I worked on Medea this vitality was inherent to the process. Everyone involved was either a full time or part time New Yorker, but all non-native to New York. At the same time everyone except for me was a native of Puerto Rico. We were handling a Greek text translated into English and then adapted and retranslated into Spanish.

The work was performed in a space that had never before seen a performance. But more interestingly, the space was a cross roads. We performed in the open area between the cannon batteries and the kitchen of a 16th Century Spanish fortress. The physical space itself embodied the very psycho-emotional tensions created from these culturally layered situations.

Ajax will be performed in Europe after a workshop production in New York. In this way a further mix of old and new world will come out in the setting and performance. But I find more importantly that this explodes the idea of locality and community. Sure there are communities that are geographically determined, but these are quickly becoming, if not obsolete, at least secondary to the regular functioning of human life. The rise of new and evolving technologies show that we must reconceive the very notion of community. After all, my community is New York. But it is also the San Francisco Bay Area. But it is also the theatre, dance and opera worlds which spans the globe. My community is also the theatre blogosphere which again is not geographically determined but rather determined by thought and ideas. The global underground of rave communities further places me in a community that is bounded by philosophy rather than geography.

To say that theatre must be local because it must be oriented towards community fails to address the very nature of community in the 21st century and risks causing us to stand still at the threshold of possibility. Rather we must take a more expansive stance and see that we live in a world of radical cross-polination. We live in a world that demands of us to look beyond the simple geographical boundaries that have limited human thought for millennia. Theatre allows us to live simultaneously in ancient Greece, 16th century Colonial Spain, contemporary New York and Puerto Rico. But this possibility exists only if we lift ourselves out of the geographical determinism of the past and fully embrace the borderless potential of contemporary existence.

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Mirror up to action

Saturday, June 17th, 2006

Plot and story are two ideas that are often so intertwined they are seen to be the same thing. However, it is clear that while the plot is the same, the story of Antigone and Antigone are very different. While both speak to issues of justice and leadership, the historical uniqueness of each play points to the radical departure that Anouilh takes with the classic story.

Sophocles does not give the audience much in the way of moral ambiguity. The case is clear, and Creon suffers the death of his family from his unwavering resistance to permitting the burial rights of Polynices. The tragedy of Creon is a kind of mirror reflection of the tragedy of Oedipus in reverse. Oedipus, so deeply committed to finding out the truth and doing right by the gods causes his own demise. His quest for the truth sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Creon, in counterpoint, falls because of his resistance to what is right and just. Creon’s unwillingness to change, his unwillingness to do what is demanded by the gods causes the ruin of his house.

In this way he echos too the role of Pentheus in The Bacchae with his unwavering commitment to the course of action he has chosen. That unwavering style of leadership brings down the mighty Pentheus, as he is slaughtered by his own mother as a kind of sacrifice to the Gods. In an interesting way this same ending is mirrored through the Chorus’ incantation of Dionysos near the end of Sophocles’ Antigone and the resultant bearing of the corpse of Haemon on stage. Through these similar structural events we see a kind of poetic end to the House of Cadmus.

But the central conflict in the two Antigone‘s is so different that we must look here first. In the Sophocles, the moral of the story is, obey the gods and you will be happy. That a striving for this kind of unwavering contentment and happiness is the highest goal attainable to humanity. Anouilh is strict contrast uses the common idea of human happiness as the point of no return for an until then wavering Antigone. In Creon’s attempt to sway her he says that she should return to her room for soon she will marry Haemon and they will have a happy life.

But what is this happiness? To Antigone it is the height of human mediocrity. Be it the two point five kinds, white picket fence and dog of suburbia, or the court appearances, child bearing and queenly routine of head of state, she does not want it. She does not wish to fight over scraps of happiness like a dog fighting over a bone. No she wants the entirety of her desire NOW. Compromise is not something she is willing, or indeed able to strive for. The height of despair to her is succumbing to that mediocre compromise. To live not for herself but for a role written for her.

I found it interesting to read George’s piece on Lacan the other day in light of this play. For the Anouilh play clearly takes an idea of us being inscribed in our roles. This is a clear textual device employed to help point to the futility of human action. Yet, Antigone and indeed all authentic beings, are oriented towards this inscription in a fundamentally different way than the mass of humanity. The journey of Antigone is at one level a story of growing up and coming into one’s own. Of making independent choices and suffering the consequences there of. But that is more the Sophocles than the Anouilh. The story of Anouilh’s Antigone is one of transition from caricature to character. From inauthentic to authentic actor.

The true genius of Anhouilh is that he gives us that struggle, that hard fought struggle, and never wavers from the story. In fact, Antigone at a literal factual level, maintains the same course of action she set out on at the beginning of the play. Yet, when she rejects the mediocrity of happiness and truly explores her motivations for her actions and then continues from that true and authentic place, she has become whole. The significance of her actions change not because the actions themselves change, but because the motives behind them change.

Anouilh further addresses this struggle in yet another subtle and interesting way. He is very precise to avoid the kind of moralizing that is infused throughout the Sophocles. Instead of dividing the world between the Good and the Bad, he shows how the moral and ethical systems of both Antigone and Creon are valid from within their own view point. Even the guards who are wholly unable to delve deeper than the merest surface of being are treated in a dramatically sympathetic way. He gives a choice to his audience, albeit within a rather limited fashion. While the course of ones life may well already be written, our actions prescribed by some divine playwright who has orchestrated the events of our lives, still we are able to choose. Within that tightly controlled formula of our life story we hold within us the freedom of authentic action.

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Heroically Flawed

Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006

The tragedy of the Greeks is a social tragedy. What is of concern is not the inner workings of the soul, but actions in the world. This is the tragic isolation of the Greek Hero. Oedipus is faulted not for a conniving mind, but for unwitting actions. Knowledge of the crime is immaterial next to the crime itself. It is often commented that the moral laws governing the Gods do not apply to the world of men and are thus, cruel or unfair. But the Gods, remember, are physical manifestations of personality traits and emotions. The laws of the Gods are the laws of the inner workings of the Human Soul. They are beyond moral dictates and are incomplete. They may soar to heaven but they can never truly fall. And it is the ability to fall that is the heart of the Human condition. There is no undo button in the control panel for the game of life. There is no force quit. There is only action. A forward moving unfolding of events.

In his Introduction to the 1982 Bantam Classics Edition of The Complete works of Sophocles Moses Hadas writes:

A hero, in the Greek sense, is a man who by his extraordinary career has pushed back the horizons of what is possible for humanity and is therefore deemed worthy of commemoration after his death. He is not a flawless man, above the nature of ordinary humanity, but his flaws are inherent in and inseparable from his virtues which enable him to become a hero. Achilles himself was self-centered and ruthless, but without these traits he would not have been Achilles, and his status as a hero is unquestioned. Some of Sophocles’ heros may be questionable, and his plays then amount to a weighing of merits and demerits and an eventual demonstration that the hero is in fact worthy of heroization.
The clearest example is in the oldest Sophoclean play, Ajax. Ajax is an unqualified brute, arrogant, obsessed with self, savage, unfeeling to his wife and his crew who are dependent upon him. His flaws are serious indeed, but he is the only Greek who could stem the rush of the Trojan army . . . Did such a man deserve heroization? The Ajax is demonstration that he did.

The crime of Ajax is a social crime. In a fit of madness he violates the herds of the Greek army. In doing this he shows not only that he is the physical enemy of the Greeks, but is a kind of mental enemy to these lovers of reason. And as such he find himself located in a psychic space so far removed from society that his aloneness is palpable in the text. His aloneness forces him into a corner where the only escape is suicide. The final and extreme act possible for any one. A total denial of life, a fundamental and whole rejection of self. The strongest Hero next to Achilles, without whom the Greeks would have lost the war can no longer face his enemies and must retreat in death.

It is base for a man to crave the full term of of life when he finds no varying in his woes. What joy is there in day following day, now pushing us forward, now drawing us back, on the verge – of death? I rate that man as nothing worth who feels the glow of idle hopes. No, one of generous strain should nobly live, or forthwith nobly die.

But he does not nobly die. It is not the heros death of battle. But rather the shameful and cowardly death of suicide. He joins the Greeks as his own enemy and judge and executes that ultimate act of negation. The rest of the play is essentially an early working of the ideas in Antigone with Odysseus, Ajax’s enemy, providing the voice of compelling reason that allows the body of Ajax to receive a good and noble burial.

The final confrontation between Teucer, Ajax’s half-brother, and the leaders of the Greek army Menelaus and Agamemnon is a beautifully rendered sequence. First Menelaus then Agamemnon argue that Ajax should be denied burial as he is an enemy of the Greek host. The responses by Teucer are fantastic meditations on the notions of nobility and valor. His arguments nearly send Agamemnon away but are finished with the forceful words of Odysseus who argues for a kind of reasoned understanding.

Thus Ajax who was undervalued in life, finds salvation and exaltation in death. It is only through confronting the opposite of the hero’s path that he might find completeness of self. This is not a manifesting of the ‘tragic flaw.’ I am not a fan of the idea of the tragic flaw. I am not a fan because I, for the most part, do not see these things as flaws. Or rather, it is not the flaw that is interesting to me. What is interesting is the tension created between the life of the soul and the phenomenal world of actions. Oedipus never does anything consciously wrong. In fact, his actions are based upon the intentions of a pious man searching for the truth in order to save his kingdom. What makes the story a tragedy is that Oedipus suffers not from a flaw, but from misplaced virtue. Every reason and intention is virtuous and good and every action leads to a greater and greater tragic ending.

In fact it is a bit limiting to look at the story of Oedipus Rex and see it as a tragedy. Taken on its own it quickly becomes one, but it did not exist on its own. The audiences that came to see the play were well aware of the mythology surrounding Oedipus. They knew that in the end Oedipus will die in a far away land and that his burial spot will become a shrine. A good and virtuous place. Oedipus Rex is like taking the story of Job and only telling of the suffering. Rather it is part of a moral tale about enduring the suffering in the world that you might not have brought to you, but you none the less must bear the weight of.

The Greek audiences knew the final outcome. Not just the end of the play, but the final outcome of the larger story arc. The interest was not as a murder mystery whodunnit but rather how will the story be told. What new level of understanding will the playwright bring to this old and well known story. How the story was told was an interesting as what the story is. Does Ajax deserve his Hero status. Of course. We all know him as one of the great Heros of the Trojan war. But why is it important to us. What about us? A contemporary audience living in this modern world, why should we care? These are the questions the Greek audiences asked. These are the same questions we must ask whether telling ancient stories or modern fables.

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