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.
As we recall from our basic color wheel there are three Primary Colors of light; Red, Green, and Blue. Those can then be mixed into the three Secondary Colors of light; Magenta, Cyan, and Amber. Obviously by varying the amount of each color, or mixing in slight amounts of the third Primary you can get the full range of possible Hues out of these three colors. Needless to say, you need not limit yourself to six heavily saturated Hues. You can see from the image on the left the basic principals of Additive Color Mixing with light. It is called “additive” because we might take a Red light and ADD Green to it to make Yellow.
If we recall our Primary Color Wheel for light we remember that Blue and Yellow are opposite colors. By adding Yellow to the Magenta we are in essence canceling out the Blue and leaving us with Red. If an algebra equation would help, we are trying to solve M+Y=??? We know that Y=(-B) and M=(B+R) so the equation could be rewritten (B+R)+(-B) or B+R-B=R. Clearly we don’t need to go back to High School Algebra to understand color, but it can help to wrap your brain around the processes involved in Subtractive Color Mixing when first encountering these ideas.
Returning to our Color Wheel we see that Magenta and Green are opposite one another. As we learned in our discussion of Hue, a shadow will take on the opposite color of its light. Because of this, when we put Magenta color media in front of one of the lights it makes the other light appear Green. This is not physics but physiology. How the human eye perceives something is wholly dependent upon the context.
