FEBRUARY 2003

Staging classical tragedies in a modernist and postmodern world. An impossible or necessary mission?
Freddy Decreus (Gent)

1. McLuhan introduced us to the world of 'Post literary culture', Fukuyama to 'Post-history', Schechner and Badmington to 'Post humanism', Irigaray and Deleuze to 'Post-representation'. Poststructuralism and postmodernism became respectable ways to talk about contemporary Western culture. Derrida attacked the 'Metaphysics of Presence'; Barthes proclaimed 'The Death of the Author' and Fuchs discussed 'The Death of Character'. However, all those twentieth century writers were preceded by Nietzsche who proclaimed 'The Death of God'. Lyotard advocated the collapse of the 'Master Stories' ('les métarécits'); feminists like Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva indicted the central position occupied by the phallogocentric Western male citizen. The last decades, every political, sociological, religious and cultural authority seems to have entered a 'legitimation crisis'.

Reasons enough to accept the idea that we are living in a period of fundamental transitions, which is affecting the deepest categories of our thoughts and emotions. Although the notion 'postmodernism' may be suspect for several reasons, it may be a good way to study the changes which affected the epistemological and ontological conditions of knowing. Who are we, how can we know ourselves, in what kind of worlds are we living, can we still believe in an “I” as a true and real subject, what versions of the Self and the Other impose themselves nowadays? Fundamental discussions like these represent enormous challenges for Western man, obliging him to reconsider completely the borders of what used to be accepted as “human”. New ideas about the cosmic worlds which surround him on the outside and the psychic worlds which besiege him from the inside changed him completely and obliged him to answer new questions about responsibility and freedom, about traditionally unitary ways of thinking (one religion, one science, one nation, one view on sexuality), about self-protection and self-definition.

2. In the last decades, Greek tragedies were staged in a number of traditional, modernist and postmodern ways. Roughly speaking, they were obliged, in one way or another, to take part in the kind of discussions just mentioned. In order to understand the contemporary scene, it could be indicated to differentiate between modernist and postmodern productions. A very useful distinction was made by Marianne McDonald in her book Ancient Sun, Modern Light (1992:6): 'For the previous generation the ancient tragedies were still patterns; they held them up and drew their drama out of the friction created with their own. The current generation sees no patterns, no sense to the suffering. They can only show us scene after scene of the same suffering. The difference, then, is that modernists could still make collages out of the fragments of the past, but we cannot; for us, everything is just bits and pieces'.

Since the beginning of this century, European Modernism was fully aware of a generalized failure and chaos . Humanist values gradually collapsed, Victorian ethics and self-confidence were undermined and replaced by centrifugal phenomena like dispersion, despair and disbelief. Existential Unity, perceived as a sum of some vague notions like Tradition, Humanism, Christianity, ..., was definitely lost. In theatre the absurd drama and the Brechtian epic theatre became fashionable answers, the first one led to the explosion of traditional language, action and heroism, the second one created a clear distance towards emotions and actions. In modern drama the hero often became a pathological figure, who withdrew into the depths of a disturbed mental state and often ended as a cynic or a narcissist .

But, in spite of what they knew, modernists (1910-1945) still wanted to have recourse to:

•  to patterns of the past (Ezra Pound, Cantos , 1917-1949),

•  to structures belonging to psychoanalysis (Jean Cocteau, La Machine Infernale , 1934; Eugene O'Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, 1931),

•  to religion and philosophy (T.S. Eliot , The Family Reunion, 1939; Jean-Paul Sartre, and his atheist philosophical drama Les Mouches , 1943),

•  to the hypothesis that a work of art meant always a kind of order (James Joyce, Ulysses , 1922),

•  or to the idealism of the new rebel (Jean Anouilh, Antigone ,1942; Jean Giraudoux, Electre , 1937),

•  even to historical primitivism (Antonin Artaud, Le Théâtre et son Double , 1938)

•  and to new social conditions which explained why people, guided by local prejudices, behaved like this (H.R. Lenormand, Asie , 1931, and Maxwell Anderson, The Wingless Victory, 1936),

3. More recent productions have been called postmodern or postdramatic. (Poschmann, 1997; Lehmann, 1999) . Producers are not primarily interested in the fabula , but in the suzjet (Sklovsky), not in the logical and chronological ordering of the plot, but in the way the main figures are “disembodied”. Many directors rather focussed on a language of silence, were impatient with language and were dissociating its syntax, since they were much more fascinated by disjunction, discontinuity, decontextualization. These are the very terms which define the theatre of Robert Wilson and Heiner Müller (Holmberg, 1996). Therefore, one often has to pay attention to a conflict between text and stage, which makes the text act as a strange and disturbing element, out of place, causing alienation and disintegration, functioning as a gigantic sound machine, an acoustic chimaera, which contests the traditional interpretation of a central logos and its syntactic and formal arrangements. On the other hand, a new kind of rhythmic breathing, moving, dancing and behaving took over and invited language to turn into processes of deconstruction, of a polyphonic collection of sounds, mainly an outward recollection of language.

The theatrical space itself was never conceived as a neutral place. Either it was enormous or (extremely) reduced, framed within a frame, testifying to the importance of distances and empty spaces. Relations between space, sound and voice mostly created an important kind of tension. Aesthetics were often minimalist and relied upon sculptured presences and many kinds of visual thinking. Performances took place on location, in old factories, far away from the traditional cultural centre. When the text was losing its traditional rights, the body took over. Theatre became dominantly physical or digital, it took place in a closed space where no escape was possible and where spectators got immersed in a flux of movements and actions. This is the theatre of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jan Fabre, La Fura dels Baus, Klaus Michael Gruber, the Needcompany, Luk Perceval, Johan Simons & Paul Koek (Hollandia), Societas Raffaelo Sanzio, Theodoros Terzopoulos, Ivo Van Hove, Bob Wilson, the Wooster Group.

4. Generally speaking, Modernist and PoMo directors didn't stop staging the well known Greek tragedies and often enough they didn't destroy completely former patterns of meaningfullness. They still relied upon the general contents of the old models, created new forms and models, wrote new monologues, explicitly staged those who have been kept muted, without a voice of their own (Clytaemnestra; Cassandra). Sometimes they also longed for 'roots', wept for the existential loss (Botho Strauss), and exposed moments of incredible violence and repression (Tony Harrison, Howard Barker, Sarah Kane). Their specific way of handling the notion of 'time' and their consciousness of all kinds of gaps, absences and losses sometimes stimulated them to re-introduce old mythic themes (La Fura des Baus, Barba, Nitsch). A number of directors also reacted in a more aggressive way and accused the former non-tragic, enlightened, logocentric and clichélike performances (Perceval, Muller, Castellucci). The deliberate use of PoMo techniques (fragmentation, irony, hybridization, carnivalization, contradiction, permutation, discontinuity, excess, impatience with language, use of the body instead of the text) certainly resulted in a new understanding of the old tragedies, presenting them as fragments and ironic revisions of the past and Western cultural history. On the other hand, radical PoModernists shared the conviction that constructing a world was pointless: it was both impossible and useless to try and establish some hierarchical order and some system in choosing priorities in life (Deafman Glance; Philoctetes Variations; Medeamaterial ). Abstention from interpretation is what several postmodernist writers explicitly required from their spectators. Just enjoy the bits and pieces, free yourself, don't look for a central meaning. In the opinion of those radicals, writing a PoMo Greek 'tragic' tragedy is impossible and useless, it is even a contradictio in terminis, since tragedy as such is a category finally aiming at elucidation and interpretation. All they wanted to do was turning tragedy into a form of the grotesque and the absurd.(cf. John Barth's parody of the Oedipus trilogy, “Taliped Decanus”).

5. The success of contemporary Mo/PoMo Greek tragedy is an interesting case because it also raises the question of the tragic feeling, which is not only a phenomenon experienced by one individual, but on the contrary by a whole society. Yes, we stage a lot of tragedies, but what do they signal and why are they so massively present all over Europe? Are they a kind of reaction to the feelings of anxiety, loneliness and loss felt by a PoMo and technological society, or are they mainly an aesthetic phenomenon? Greek tragedy (and tragedy in general), being a Western hypothesis and sensitivity, always reappeared in times of crisis and transition, ready to investigate the consciousness we have of existential and social problems and therefore to question our presumed security (Storm). Today, do we share, once again, the (tragic) feeling of being limited and finite beings, always threatened by dismemberment and lack of sound vision, or do we suppose that technology, science and rationality will save us and generate new paradises which will protect us from the same old problems? Maybe the return of tragedy, be it in a Mo or PoMo style, has to be conceived both as a real cultural problem and as a typical Western challenge, not only depending upon the scrutiny of classical philologists, but engaging the attention of all those interested in the mental and emotional well being of the West.

Bibliography:

• Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance. Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism, London & New York, 1997, Routledge
• Rudolf Boehm, 'Tragik'. Von Oidipus bis Faust, Würzburg, 2001, Köningshausen & Neumann
• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2. Mille plateaux, Paris, 1980, Les Editions de Minuit
  Jean-Marie Domenach, Le retour du tragique , Paris, 1967, Seuil
• Elinor Fuchs, The Death of Character. Perspectives on Theater after Modernism , Bloomington & Indianapolis, 1996, Indiana University Press
• Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson , Cambridge, 1996, Cambridge University Press
• Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatisches Theater, Frankfurt am Main, 1999, Verlag der Autoren
• H.A. Mason, The Tragic Plane, Oxford, 1985, Clarendon Press.
• Gerda Poschmann, Der nicht mehr dramatisches Theatertext. Aktuelle Bühnenstücke und ihre dramaturgische Analyse, Tübingen, 1997, Max Niemeyer
• George Steiner , Tragedy, Pure and Simple , in: M.S. Silk, Tragedy and the Tragic. Greek Theatre and Beyond , Oxford, 1996, Clarendon Press, p.534-46
• William Storm, After Dionysus. A Theory of the Tragic , Ithaca and London, 1998, Cornell University Press.
• Stephen Watt, Postmodern Drama. Reading the Contemporary Stage , Ann Arbor, 1998, The University of Michigan Press

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RESPONSE

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, UK

Many thanks to Freddy for such a thought-provoking paper. I would like to ask him about the extent to which he thinks that modern performances of classical tragedies are also beginning to contribute to another among the 'transitions' he mentions, that is the construction of new kinds of cultural awareness. It seems to me that, almost uniquely on the modern stage, Greek drama in performance not only deconstructs western icons but also acts as an agent of transformation enabling us to experience simultaneously and in tension different cultural perspectives and aspects of being. This capacity is partly a function of Greek drama's creation of critical distance between ancient and modern and between early modern, modern and post-modern traditions. However, it is also a consequence of the ways in which modern performance is mediated by non-western translation, adaptation and especially staging - for example in Japanese and African performance. The latter especially has recuperated song, dance, ritual into modern perceptions of Greek drama and to some extent liberated it from the stranglehold of western cultural hegemony. What I am less sure of is whether what we are now left with is myth (in its turn freed from the refigurations imposed by the Greek dramatists) or whether we still have Greek drama but with a redrawn balance between the verbal and the physical?

Final Response from Topic Leader Freddy Decreus

Dear Lorna, Thank you for your response: In contemporary discussions, cultural awareness, first of ourselves, and secondly, of the way we stage and interpret Greek tragedy indeed became a hot issue. Addressing these questions, it might be indicated from the start to differentiate between theory and practice, between the university and the theatre, between accepted Western opinions and new considerations coming from other continents.

First, there is the general context of the question, which didn't fall out of the blue. We have to acknowledge that, inspired by some general evolutions in the field of sociology and epistemology of science (Popper, Kuhn, Hanson, Feyerabend), an increased awareness of what we have been doing lately in classics has been teasing us a lot and it invited us urgently to re-examine the political and methodological thoughts which have been guiding research and education till now. Classics are changing and so is contemporary theatre. The last decades, it became a fashionable and an accepted part of our academic disciplines to dig into pragmatic aspects of Classics, for instance into the history of performances of Greek and Latin tragedies and to differentiate between baroque, positivist, romantic and more 'modern' approaches of Greek tragedy. As Charles P. Segal once said, the shift of emphasis over the past thirty years has been from text to context, from thematics to pragmatics, from a historicist model to a semiotic one, from old Positivism to New Historicism. Only the last decades, we started to investigate our own presuppositions of research and it allured us into a number of important discussions (Back to Basics; Defense of the Canon; Black Athena) which are mainly debates on methodology and cultural politics (Cf. Cultural Studies; New Historicism) and which are dealing with general epistemological and political topics (lack of neutrality in science; elitism; feminism). Among them, one cannot ignore Orientalism (on a theoretical level: Said, Schechner, Bharucha; on a practical level: productions made by Brook, Ninagawa, Suzuki) and Afrocentrism (Lefkowitz; Wole Soyinka, Ola Rotimi) and both of these fields of discussion illustrate that multiculturalism, since the 1980's, became a new touchstone to be studied in a non-colonial way (however, in the eyes of Hanson & Heath, it was one of the Beasts that killed Homer!). From the interbellum on, the changed intellectual climate made us reconsider every accepted truth, including our main views of Greek tragedy. However, philology, and classical philology in particular, didn't change as fast and as thoroughly as theatre practitioners did, cf. Gide's Prométhée enchaîné , which, already in 1899, reflected a great number of Modernist characteristics. Anyway, the fundamental discussions which took place in the Academy and which brought us from positivism to the world of deconstruction, Cultural Studies and New Historicism, had their counterparts in what happened on the scene, causing us to leave Naturalism and to adopt a PoMo mask.

Secondly, Modernism and Postmodernism which translated feelings of a generalized XXth century epistemological and ontological doubt analysed Greek tragedy in radical new ways, questioning Aristotelian poetics, undermining traditional views of space, time, cause and effect (cf. the Heiner Müller rewritings). As such, they only illustrated what was going on in major intellectual and philosophical XXth century debates. Modernism (esp. French writers) studied tragedy as a Greek invention and a dominant European genre, crucial in understanding western culture in general, but a great number of heterogeneous questions which were never heard before started to question the strong Western logocentric view of tragedy. From then on, tragedy was no longer studied from within the tradition which has nurtured it, but also from without it. For the first time in Western history, Japanse, Chinese and African directors, departing from totally different worldviews, staged a literary genre (nearly) unknown in their country and adapted it in ways (No, Kabuki) which were exotic to us (but never fully accepted in their homeland: Ninagawa's Greek tragedies are felt like 'japanesque' in the eyes of the Japanese). Nevertheless they succeeded in opening many western eyes, since their recuperation of song, dance and music, use of masks, and care for the ritual, persuaded many directors to pay special attention to non-verbal aspects (and hence to reduce logocentrism). The staging of Greek tragedies in Bouddhist and Islamic countries made us aware both of completely different mental, mythological and religious backgrounds and the difficulties other worldviews had in staging the tragic experience. Staging Oedipus in Taiwan made people think of him in terms of the many bad things he must have done in his previous life (problem in reincarnation); staging Pentheus in China disturbed the Confucianist longing for existential stability; discussing Agave in Cairo and Tokio largely dislocated traditional gender hierarchy. Nevertheless, incidents like these proved to be very functional in opening our eyes for a new philosophical awareness of the tragic, no longer based upon a christian (Baroque) or a German idealistic philosophy, not as an attempt to create a new intercultural (Hegelian) synthesis, but rather as a invitation to study the old Greek texts again as the incarnation of the tragic, a typical 'heathen' insight into the nature of Western man, in terms of this very unique cultural hypothesis which allows a lot of freedom, criticism and responsibility in 'conceiving western man'.

Modern and PoMo performances of Greek tragedies not only spring from a changed intellectual and aesthetic climate, they also, in an active way, reveal the functioning of the western mind and the limits of its representability on other continents. Moreover, contemporary performances signal the same discussions classicists have within the Academy. Artists and academics cannot escape from this period of transition, on the contrary, they find benefit in joining forces and in participating in all major cultural debates.

Dear Lorna, I don't know whether or not I answered your question, but it seemed to me that the idea of 'cultural awareness' was a crucial point in the discussion.