MARCH 2003

Greek Tragedy and the Avant-Garde: Lee Breuer's Gospel at Colonus[1]
Barbara Goff, University of Reading

There's a potential contradiction involved in being avant-garde with such traditional material as Greek tragedy, but tragedy has often provided a rich resource to experimental theatre practitioners. Christopher Innes defines the avant-garde as using ‘revolutionizing aesthetics…to prefigure social revolution' (1993:1) and Greek tragedy offers a range of alternatives to the mainstream of naturalistic western theatre. Formally it is very different and, according at least to Aristotle, it provides a direct transfer of emotion to the audience in the experience of catharsis, thereby approaching the avant-garde dream of a ‘concrete language, intended for the senses and independent of speech' which gives a ‘physical knowledge of images' and thus ‘directly affect[s] the organism' (Innes 1993:15, 20). Tragedy's direct evocation of ritual and myth can similarly be linked to the avant-garde's ‘aspiration to transcendence, to the spiritual in its widest sense' (Innes 1993:3). In social terms, moreover, Greek tragedy offers a complete alternative to the bourgeois society that the avant-garde often rejects, and conversely instantiates the dream of a theatre that finds itself in the heart of its community -- a theatre and a community that are practically coextensive.

Lee Breuer is an avant-garde writer and director who has participated in the recent turn to Greek tragedy, specifically in his Gospel at Colonus , a version of Sophocles' last play. In the late 1970s, along with Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, he was heralded by Bonnie Marranca as part of the Theatre of Images, which she saw as calling for ‘for alternative modes of perception on the part of the audience' (1984:78). Since that point Breuer's theatre practice has continued to deploy a battery of avant-garde techniques, such as use of Bunraku puppets, combination of video or audio with live performance, and innovative explorations of the stage space.[2] He has experimented with animal characters instead of human and has cross-gendered his productions with e.g. an all-female Lear. His practice is almost always informed by non-western models, or by models from popular art and culture, and if his own account of his politics is anything to go by, his work also subscribes to an agenda for social change.

Gospel at Colonus fertilised the avant-garde with Greek tragedy and vice versa. All commentators note the importance in it of music, dance and ritual, which derive both from the practices of Greek tragedy and from Breuer's commitment to the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Many audiences have testified that Gospel has a direct effect on the audience, communicating by means of music, movement and a heightened emotional atmosphere as much as by the meaning of the words.[3] Breuer seems to state that Gospel aims at this effect, because he highlights the notion of ‘catharsis' in several contexts. The classical Greek performance was ‘a communal catharsis which forges religious, cultural and political bonds' (Breuer 1989: ix) and the value of all theatre seems to reside in its ability to recreate this experience: ‘All of us who are really involved with theatre on a spiritual basis are in it for catharsis'.[4]

But the really crucial thing that Gospel at Colonus does with Greek tragedy, and indeed with the avant-garde, is to bring into its telling of the Colonus story gospel music and the performance traditions of the black Pentecostal church. The play's most experimental, radical gesture is this collocation and interpenetration of two genres that have otherwise had very little to do with each other. The practices of the Pentecostal church, an institution that has had almost immeasurable influence on the lives and the theatre of African-Americans, offer the manifold of music, dance, spirituality and emotional affect at least as much as does either Greek tragedy or the technique of the avant-garde. D'Aponte writes: (1991:102):

Gospel at Colonus thus brought to fruition in a single theatrical event the morality play focus generic to American Black theatre since its inception, the blossoming of experimental post-modern techniques on Broadway, the evolution of the gospel musical genre to a work of philosophical importance, and the establishment of ritual structure as viable means of contemporary, popular entertainment.

Gospel thus synthesises different traditions several times over: the ‘high' art of Greek tragedy with the popular and populist enterprise of gospel music; the difficulty of the avant-garde with the demotic of the black Pentecostal church; white cultural forms with black. The Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus is a promising vehicle with which to do this synthesis because its overt themes have often been seen to include reconciliation, between god and mortal, and between Oedipus and his destiny.

But even though these syntheses indicate that Gospel is working within a tradition that is humanist in the best sense of the word, the play nonetheless raises quite uncomfortable questions about the cultural politics of reception. In all its syntheses Gospel can be seen to work for a change both in the way audiences perceive theatre and in the ways that society is organised. But because the terms that are brought together are not simply oppositions, but also hierarchies, the play's dynamic has to partake of the nature of a struggle, rather than a straightforward reconciliation. Some critics herald the play's syntheses in most laudatory terms, as we have just seen with D'Aponte. Some reviewers, however, had problems with the play's politics of race and culture. Frank Rich wrote ‘instead of liberating the singers, it [the play] hems them in, gratuitously requiring that Afro-American artists worship at a shrine of Western culture before they can let loose with their own, equally valid art'.[5] Richard Kostelanetz stated that the idea of combining Greek tragedy with gospel song has ‘a certain charming vulgarity that seems to miss Breuer' before going on to range Gospel with ‘all those predecessors for making white black…whose racial transfer always seems embarrassing in the face of retrospective criticism' (1994:19). These reviewers, then, see the ‘black' or gospel element of Gospel losing out to the ‘white' or Greek, and find the play to emphasise the racial differences rather than to achieve an integration of theatrical and cultural forms.

Breuer himself in certain early interviews was not particularly upfront about the progressive politics of Gospel , preferring apparently to concentrate on its more cultural search for the formal and spiritual elements of Greek tragedy, and suggesting implicitly that the black music and ritual was but a way to rediscover the practices of the Greek theatre. However, in other contexts he has articulated more clearly what is at stake:

With ‘Gospel'… I wanted to make a statement that a white man can work not just with a bunch of black intellectuals who have gone to Yale, but with the real performers – that I could respect their art and they could respect mine, and that we would not rip each other off, thus disproving the idea that never the twain shall meet. In other words, that I could make an integration statement in terms of this country by making it happen on stage.[6]

Still later, he also recognises that the politics of Gospel can be seen to be conflicted, in the ways suggested by the different reactions of D'Aponte, Rich and Kostelanetz, and therefore that:

The only reason we got away with Gospel was because it fooled people. The music essentially was non-political even though the event was highly political, and one of the things that actually made me uncomfortable is that I was getting support from people I didn't want support from. (Cody 1999: 458)

Breuer's account here indicates that the cultural gap between Greek tragedy on the one hand, and black gospel music on the other, is reproduced in terms of an audience divided between an element which ‘gets' the play's radical import and an element which doesn't, and which funds the play only for that reason. The synthesis of ‘Greek' and ‘gospel' is thus not complete, and the play could not survive financially if it were.

One of the reasons for this political vulnerability is undoubtedly the historical situation in which Gospel emerged, in terms of the economic and cultural conditions for many African-Americans. While the specifics would take too long to go into here, we can note with Ryder, writing in 1984 (i.e. a year after Gospel 's first major production) that not only was black theatre, which had flourished economically and culturally in the 1960s, being assailed by ‘Reaganomics and cut-backs' but also that:

The showcasing of black performers as brilliant singers and dancers continues, but a look behind the scenes [reveals that] whites are once again writing, producing, directing, choreographing, costuming, managing and composing ‘black' material; that is they have reconsolidated the artistic control. (1991: 243)

Ryder's remarks have obvious relevance to Gospel , which was directed and composed by white people and is usually performed throughout by black. Despite Gospel 's ostensibly progressive politics, then, it was caught up in an artistic situation some of whose aspects undermined its own gestures.

A look back at Oedipus at Colonus , to reconsider that play's aims, provides further cause for concern. An earlier generation of critics often heralded Oedipus at Colonus as primarily mystic and spiritual. More recently, with the injection into criticism of the concerns associated with the Paris school, the play has been read in terms of mingled celebration of, and warning to, an Athens on the brink of the disaster which Sophocles did not live to see. But increasingly, critics tie the play directly to the awful assembly of 411, held in the deme of Colonus, where the democracy voted that Persian gold was more important to the winning of the war than was democracy itself. Most recently, Wilson 1997 has analysed the play as anti-democratic in most of its lineaments, and therefore implicitly as incompatible with Breuer's ostensible project. I said at the outset of this piece that Greek tragedy has served as a rich resource for alternative theatre, but in the case of Gospel it is possible to conclude that the play's progressive agenda is actually undermined by its deployment of Greek tragedy. The tension in the avant-garde's use of Greek tragedy, then, is perhaps not resolved.

Bibliography

• Breuer, Lee. 1989. The Gospel at Colonus . New York : Theatre Communications Group
• Cody, Gabrielle. 1999. ‘Interculturalism and Performance'. In Conversations on Art and Performance . Ed. Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta. Baltimore
• Innes, Christopher. 1993. Avant Garde Theatre 1892-1992 . London and New York
• Kostelanetz , Richard. 1994. On innovative performance(s) : three decades of recollections on alternative theater. Jefferson N.C.
• Marranca, Bonnie. 1984. Theatrewritings. New York : Performing Arts Journal Publications
• Ryder, Shauneille Perry. 1991. ‘Will the Real Black Theater Please Stand Up?' Freedomways 24.1 (1984) 23-27. Reprinted 242-247 in Hazel Arnett Ervin ed. African American Literary Criticism, 1773-2000 . New York
• Wilson, Joseph P. 1997. The Hero and the City: an interpretation of Sophocles Oedipus at Colonus. Ann Arbor MI

[1]Gospel began as a 15-minute piece in a small downtown N.Y. theatre in 1980, but reached public consciousness as part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave festival in 1983. It went to Broadway in 1988, and the 1000 th performance was given at Carnegie Hall in 1996. In 1998 in an online interview Breuer stated that he received dozens of requests each year for amateur performances. See http://www.beloit.edu/~classics/main/courses/fyi98/gospel.html (consulted in March 2003 - last accessed 6/9/2007).

[2]In the Red Horse Animation the actors perform lying on the stage and up against the back wall as well as standing on the stage in the usual fashion.

[3]See e.g. the account of the audience experience at Philadelphia Citypaper.net, July 27–August 3, 1995, http://citypaper.net/articles/072795/article013.shtml (consulted in March 2003 - last accessed 6/9/2007).

[4]New York Times 20 March 1988, II :5 and 17.

[5]New York Times 25 March 1988, III:5.

[6]New York Times 21 Jan 1990, II:5.

RESPONSES

Edith Hall, University of Durham , UK

I really enjoyed this sophisticated piece on a very important adaptation of Greek tragedy. I feel that that the situation with regards to politics -- and therefore to the politics of the avant-garde -- is even more complicated than Goff's analysis allows, and would add two points.

1.Gospel music is neither a monolithic cultural phenomenon nor a unified force within Afro-American communities. Its history, both before and after 1983, is a profoundly divided one. Clarence Fountain and the Blind Boys of Alabama, who starred in Gospel at Colonus alongside Morgan Freeman, have always, since they began touring in 1944, represented a particular strand of ecstatic, instrumental, and noisy 'Jubilee' gospel oriented ritually more to celebration than lament. It was ragtime-influenced, florid, used many musical techniques and rhythms from white 'pop', and was totally different from the more bluesy and austere traditional church singing of the gospel. It only emerged at the end of the Second World War and was deeply suspected in the 1950s to 1970s by many serious, progressive, civil-rights oriented Pentecostalists and black Baptists who regarded it as an offshoot of 'whiter', much more cynically commercial popular music. It was actually banned from many churches as spiritually bankrupt or corrupting. All black Moslems (of whom there are increasing numbers, especially amongst younger radicals) and many black Christians still do suspect it, especially since the huge commercial success of the group and Fountain's increasing drift towards r and b / hip-hop and also collaboration with other super-wealthy vocal stars of an entirely secular identity (Prince etc.).  Fountain (as well as the other Blind Boys) has been the target of enormous criticism from the black left as exploiting poor consumers in order to enrich themselves and the multi-million-dollar white-led music industry.

2.The most astonishing thing about Gospel at Colonus is indeed that it fuses the ancient Greeks' drama with modern US Christianity. But it could be argued with ease that the Secular Turn in the consciousness of the West, dateable to about 1969 and much discussed in sociological circles (even in the USA where church attendance has not fallen off as much as in Northern Europe), has been one of the preconditions of the revival of Greek theatre since about the same date. Greek tragedy has never really been compatible with the Christian or any other monotheistic mindset, but has in recent decades offered an arena, in an unprecedentedly irreligious age, where people can think about moral, epistemological and metaphysical issues.  Whether Christian revivalism, black or otherwise, is necessarily progressive in contrast needs to be thought about very seriously. And how Breuer's anachronistically 'redemptive' reading of the theologically 'open' and mysterious OC distorts it in order to make it fit with the distinctively redemptive theology of Afro-American Christianity (itself historically related to the experience of slavery), would be well worth exploring.

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, Milton Keynes , UK

I found Barbara's discussion highly rewarding on the question of the ambivalent political situation of Breuer's play and especially the issue of artistic control. It also sent me back again to the OC itself and the way its historical context might have shaped some aspects of audience reception. I have a question about the impact of catharsis (which probably relates to interpretation of Aristotle as well as to the avant-garde). The staging strategies that Barbara describes (puppets, multi-media etc) seem to indicate a director who is concerned with destabilising audience expectations and clearly there are aspects of 'Gospel' which also did this and served as agents for change in both society and in perceptions of theatre. However, wouldn't such a dynamic radically undermine the reconciliation aspects of the play as well as the notion of the broader catharsis which Aristotle privileges? Doesn't the 'reconciliation' reading submerge both difference and the struggle that underlies Breuer and perhaps OC as well? If so, is Breuer (unwittingly) providing a critique of Aristotle's reception of Sophocles? Is there even an implicit parallel between the impact of artistic control in staging the Breuer and the artistic control imposed retrospectively by Aristotle?

Final Response from Topic Leader Barbara Goff

I am delighted to have received two such searching responses to my piece, although slightly embarrassed that they focus as much on the question of black theatre as on the ostensible subject of the essay, the avant garde.

Edith is quite right to draw my attention to the heterogeneous nature of gospel music. I would observe in response that the phenomenon of gospel-influenced theatre, of which Gospel at Colonus is clearly an instance, rehearses a similar divide and provokes similar questions about audience composition and cultural authenticity. In this connection I might note that while working on this piece and the related larger project, I was struck by how the 'avant garde' is never 'black', and 'black theatre' is never 'avant garde'. This is despite the fact that the aims identified by Innes, of direct emotional connection and social change, could in many cases apply to the Black Arts Movement and perhaps to gospel-based theatre.

Re the secular turn, this must indeed be one of the factors behind the turn to Greek tragedy, although I quite favour the rise of mass education too. I think, of course, that Breuer's ending is not about religion at all, not even about African American religion, but about social revolution and a new version of the American polity. I would agree, then, with Lorna, that the redemption, reconciliation, and catharsis aspects of the ending do in fact sit uncomfortably with the destabilising and more 'avant garde' dimensions of Gospel . For me this is an almost inescapable effect of the particular ways in which Gospel has chosen to image forth its vision of a different world - doing the new by means of an especially troubled product from the old. And yes, I think we can implicate Aristotle too, if only because his work has helped to legitimise the notion that any product of a divided society can escape reproducing that divide in some or all of its lineaments. Both OC and GC struggle, I think quite heroically, and visibly, to get out of this bind.