The E-Seminar
About the E-Seminar

2009-2010
Conference ESeminar
Introduction
Session 1
Session 1 Responses
Session 2
Session 2 Responses
Session 3
Session 3 Responses

The Seminar Archive
1998 Index
     February
     March
     April
     May
1999 Index
     February
     March
     April
     May
2000 Index
     February
     March
     May
2001 Index
    February
    April
    May
2002 Index
     February
     March
     May
2003 Index
     February
     March
     April
2004 Index
     February
     March
     April
2005 Index
     February
     March
     April
     May
2006 Index
     February
     March
     April
2007/8 Index
     November
     December
     January
     March
     May

Copyright Notice

Eseminar Classics in the Modern World - a Democratic Turn?

Response to Session 3

Maureen Almond, Poet, Oxford

Alexandre Mitchell asks an interesting question in Democracy and Popular Media: Classical Reception in 19th and 20th century “political” Cartoons when he says, ‘why would a cartoonist need a reference to Herakles, Caesar or Horace to mock a 19th or 21 st century politician. As someone who responds in poetic form to the satire of Horace I would say it is not so much a question of ‘need' but rather of desire. That desire springs from the belief that to recognise the past within the present is a kind of validation and affirmation – a kind of comfort if you will. When as a practitioner, be it cartoonist or poet or indeed any kind of contemporary artist one is able to attach an ancient context to a modern situation somehow it emphasises and confirms the continuity of the human state. Here is a very simple example: This week I visited a newly opened ‘traditional' sweet shop in my home town. I spent over half an hour simply reading the names of sweets that were familiar to me when I was young; names I hadn't seen for years. When I left the shop I somehow felt more ‘whole' more connected with what I used to be. On a larger scale I think this is part of what contemporary versions of the classics achieve; they engender recognition and thereby produce continuity. That said however, (and herein lies part of the beauty I think of contemporary recontextualisation if it done with thought and consideration for audience), the fact that contemporary versions contain reference to the ancient, which may or may not be ‘understood' by the modern audience does not prevent that audience from ‘understanding' merely in respect of the contemporary reference: in other words, if there is still something in it for them. What I am saying here is, that done well, recontextualisation should not be elitist or exclusive. On the other hand, if both the contemporary and the ancient are recognised, even if only by some, then so much the better.

The crux of the matter, I think, is that having been presented with a version in which you recognise only the modern, but yet suspect there is a deeper meaning, might you be tempted to investigate further? Might you, because you were presented with something from which you did not feel totally excluded – something presented gently and inclusively to you, want to know more? If contemporary practitioners can help to facilitate/generate interest in ancient texts via modern versions, and I believe we can, then does this not add value to those ancient texts?

I am convinced that in this, the 21 st century, we need both our traditional classical scholars to protect, interpret and teach ancient texts in all their richness and modern practitioners who will continually bite at their heels if we are to maintain real vibrancy. If we don't treasure both could the ancient texts disappear or at least be found only in the little ‘traditional' sweet shops of university classics departments?

*****

Deborah Challis, Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London

Years ago, I was persuaded to co-direct Women of Troy when a student at the University of Birmingham. It had varying degrees of success as productions tend to do (there is still a review of it on Didaskalia). My reluctance stemmed partly from my lack of experience, partly that it was my final year, but mainly because I did not want to put on a ‘traditional' Greek tragedy. I and Mark, my co-director, set out to put on a production as far removed from ancient performance as possible with scant resources.

We wanted it to be outside of the university and hired a tiny theatre at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) for a few nights with the idea that we would put on something that people who went to the MAC normally saw – something edgy and more radical than students at Birmingham would want. We could not fit more than 6 people in the chorus on stage. We used Kenneth Mcleish's translation, though I found myself going back to the Greek and re-writing the chorus lines as they had individual parts (and a back story unknown to the audience). The cramped performance space, the contemporary feel, the broken set with blooded sheets hanging down over the audience and Shostakovich's 7th Symphony getting louder to lead into the play – all this, we felt, was a world away from the Festival of Dionysios.

On reflection, I can see that the production, with all its faults (mainly mine) and good points (the cast and crew), was responding to larger questions of ‘relevance' and the cultural debates circling in the mid-1990s. Even at the time, I knew I was influenced by Katie Mitchell's 1991 Women of Troy at the Gate, set during the First Gulf War, and a review of a production of Hecuba set in the Bosnian War. This personal reflection brings me to my main point in response to the papers on media and modes. The means of production and its context are key in understanding the reception of classical texts (visual, textual, performance). It is reassuring to see that the people involved in producing these ‘texts' will be involved (Hulton) as they can impart information about conceptual thinking and, as importantly, practical issues often disregarded in academic critique.

Exhibitions, documentaries, TV/Film drama, historical novels, and translations engage with the classical world in a conversation with competing factors. The Doctor Who ‘Fires of Pompeii' episode will have been influenced by a host of production issues but, most importantly, by the fact that it is a Saturday family tea time show on BBC1. Pompeii as a place in time and space will have been chosen as viewers will have been perceived to have historical familiarity with Vesuvius in AD79 – no doubt due to the screening of various documentaries. The family, derived from the Cambridge Latin Course, fits the familiar perception of a Roman family as well as supposedly reflecting the audience watching the show. The production of popular texts depends on the producers' understanding and perception of audiences as much as (if not more than) the classical world. The democratic turn comes back again to audiences and our understanding of audiences.

*****

Michael Ewans, University of Newcastle, Australia
(Responding specifically to Dorinda Hulton)

Is there inherently a need for updating archaic references within performances of classical texts in order to render them ‘relevant' to contemporary audiences? If not, then how classically educated do we expect our audiences to be in order to understand/appreciate/contextualise such references?

I don't approve of updating, even (I think especially) in comedy. It is possible for the translator to replace an obscure allusion by a meaningful gloss; e.g. ‘Seriphos' in my Acharnians becomes ‘one of our small allied states', ‘The Kyprian/the Paphian' become ‘the love goddess'. If the text does this, the modern audience does not have a major problem.

To what extent might adaptation/deletion/radical rewritings of such texts be justified, in order to draw out the parallels between the themes they explore, and contemporary experience? Is there such a thing as ‘going too far' in appropriating ancient Greek texts as inspirational springboards for contemporary performance? Is there a point at which appropriation becomes insupportable?

Yes; many (most?) modern productions of which I am aware go, in my view, far too far. I have successfully directed here full productions in my own translations of three tragedies by Aischylos, three by Sophokles, and three comedies of Aristophanes, not to mention many workshops.In no case did I see any need for adaptation/ deletion/ radical rewriting, and the productions had no problem in reaching out to the audiences – and stimulating them to think about parallels with contemporary experience. In my opinion “translations” such as the Ted Hughes' Oresteia (National Theatre of Britain!!) and Alkestis (which richly deserved the full force of Bernard Knox's impassioned critique) should properly be entitled new plays ‘after' Aischylos and Euripides. I have published accurate but actable translations of Aischylos in Oresteia and Suppliants and other Dramas, and of Sophokles in Four Dramas of Maturity and Three Dramas of Old Age (both with additional translations by Gregory McCart and Graham Ley) – all from Everyman Classics 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000. Aristophanes: the last years of the war (Lysistrata,The Women's Festival, Frogs) appears next year from Oklahoma U.P. All five books include a section in their introductions on my methodology as a translator.

It is quite another matter when the modern creative writer is not offering a purported translation but a new creative work which takes its springboard from the Greek original - as in the case of the Hofmannsthal/Strauss Elektra (the most profound opera to be based on Greek tragedy [cf. the chapter on it in my Opera from the Greek ]), or more recently Electricidad, the Chicano take on Elektra by Lius Alfaro.These are marvellous works, full of a new twentieth-century vitality of their own.

In what ways can classicists and theatre practitioners collaborate with each other in order to understand the questions of ‘character' that the contemporary actor needs to address in order to perform these texts? What indeed is meant by this term ‘character' within theatre/classical discourses? And if it is inappropriate within the spectrum of classical approaches, what term(s) might replace it? And how might these terms/understandings be helpful to theatre practitioners?

If the director is not equipped with a thorough knowledge of Greek and also with theatrical competence as well (as I and a few others scattered around the world are), then he or she needs all the help they can get – and more, I am afraid, than many modern directors are willing to accept – from classicists. On the second to fourth questions, see below.

What skills does the contemporary actor need in order to approach such texts? Are the training tools of the contemporary Western actor – more often than not rooted in naturalism - sufficient? What kind of skills, for example, need to be developed to embody the choral odes; and how do the skills of the comic actor differ from those of the tragic ?

Stanislavskian method is totally inappropriate, as there are no ‘characters' in Greek drama in any modern sense of that word, and in-depth re-creation of e.g. the ‘character's' previous life is irrelevant. (Ethos in the Poetics does not mean ‘character', as it is invariably translated, but ‘a touch of individuality'.)

Greek drama lives in each present moment. We need actors who appreciate that both their speech and their bodies must ebb and flow, surge and release with the unfolding of the rhetoric, giving themselves to realizing both physically and vocally, both visually and emotionally the dominant emotion of each beat.

Choral odes demand a rich range of modern choreographic skills; in my recent production of Peace these ranged from classical ballet to several different forms of contemporary dance.

Comic acting is totally different from tragic acting; in my Peace referred to above, the lead actor playing Trygaios (a colleague with much knowledge of contemporary acting styles) elected – with my warm approval – to derive many of his techniques for realizing moments in the script from his thorough knowledge of the work of Frankie Howerd.

Are there audiences for whom the themes of the plays are particularly relevant? Can these themes be ‘universally' applied because of the ‘global village' in which we live? Or are there specific themes that are more relevant to specific audiences? What are the case studies we can bring to each other's attentions in order to support our arguments?

I leave these huge questions to other participants in the e-seminar and in the Milton Keynes panel to come.

What does Eurydike's silence mean to us today?

This is not, I suspect, the answer Dorinda was hoping for! To the director of a modern, unmasked production of Antigone and his/her actress, Eurydike presents a huge practical problem – what to do with her face and body as she listens in silence to the Bodyguard? I discuss this on p.239 of Sophocles: Four Dramas of Maturity. I hope a DVD will be available after May 2010 so I can see how Dorinda's project contributes to the enigma.

*****

  Katherine Harloe, University of Reading

Reading the four contributions put me in mind of one of Nietzsche's comments in ‘We Philologists' (1874):

‘This is the antinomy of philology: people have always endeavoured to understand antiquity by means of the present—and shall the present now be understood by means of antiquity? Better: people have explained antiquity to themselves out of their own experiences; and from the amount of antiquity thus acquired they have assessed the value of their experiences.'

All four discussants were, it seemed to me, concerned with how the present might be understood by means of antiquity, and with asking questions about how ancient texts/works/ideas might be made ‘relevant' or ‘appealing' (Bakogianni) or an ‘inspirational springboard' (Hulton) for contemporary audiences. But Makrinos and Mitchell in particular seemed to me to pose the other half of Nietzsche's question: that of how we explain antiquity to ourselves out of our own experiences: how studies of democratic receptions of classics may assist in ‘the creation of counter-narratives of the ancient world' (Makrinos) or help us to ‘understand better our own categories of thought, and our special relationship with Greek and Roman antiquity' (Mitchell). Most people would agree that one reason for Greek tragedy's contemporary relevance is that its themes can be presented in ways that stimulate audience reflection on their own culture and forms of interaction. But what would a modern performance of a Greek or Roman tragedy look like that criticised or changed audience perceptions of ancient culture (and their view of its relation to modernity) from the point of view of contemporary values?

Perhaps this is just another way of re-emphasizing the other half of the old formulation: that classical reception studies justifies itself as a source of new insights into texts as well as readers, antiquity as well as ourselves. But for classicists who are trained in a predominantly historicist manner (among whom I count myself) it is sometimes (still!) easy to lose sight of this and to think of reception in terms of antiquity's power/potential in the present, and to see democratization as primarily concerned with an expansion of focus to yet more examples of that power. The notion that something pre-existing and relatively stable called ‘classics' (as subject, as disciplinary practice) has been ‘democratized' by some of the events and processes we have been discussion we are discussing is an aspect of this kind of thinking, and it has informed many of the contributions to all three e-seminar sessions. So I'm not surprised that a different, comparative approach, which seems to treat neither ‘antiquity' nor ‘ourselves' as stable comes from an archaeologist (Mitchell) rather than a classicist in that sense.

I'm not convinced it would be useful to label it a kind of ‘democratization', but I hope that the conference discussions will engage with these questions of the implicit theoretical models of reception that underlie our work, and seek to broaden existing paradigms by considering/developing a plurality of approaches.

*****

Paula James, The Open University, Milton Keynes

The following are rather random thoughts, picking up on the performance and history on film issues recently raised. Just last weekend I was trying to draw together the classical strands (and highlight our subject's interdisciplinarity) in a lecture for OU students on a level one degree course which introduces them to CS and the disciplines of music, art history, history, philosophy, religious studies, history of science. They start with a study of Cleopatra – constructing and deconstructing an image in the past and the present.

I usually tell students that the Actium sequence in the Hollywood movie is a more accurate historical representation of the battle than the shield ecphrasis in the Aeneid. But then (as they study Stalin in the Reputations Book) I link Virgilian literary techniques of visualisation with Eisenstein movie montage to see what we can learn about trends and movements in history from a contemporary who wants to convey a bigger picture through a fictitious moment or the juxtaposition of symbolic images.

Later in the course the students read Heaney's Burial at Thebes and explore how it ‘translates' in all senses of the word from Antigone (and Philosophy gets them acquainted with the Socratic method via the Laches in an earlier study book.) I try to give students what is, for them, a mostly unexpected perspective upon 5th century Athens. I problematise any idealised picture of Athens as primarily a place where elite cultural forms flowered and meaningful philosophical debates punctuated everyday life, quoting what I was told as a mature student many years ago, that if the average (?! discuss) male Athenian was catapulted into the 20th century he would warm most to Miss World and The Eurovision Song Contest.

As a group we go on to discuss the power of the Sophocles tragedy and its seemingly infinite potential for ‘replay', and what kind of impact it might have carried in its own day. But I do focus on the party atmosphere of the festival of Dionysus and the audience being ‘tired and emotional' etc. I ask whether the modern production, in order to recreate authenticity of effect (if indeed it wants to!) might have to discard the original ‘production values' especially of scale and space. (and not just for practical reasons.) Can a much more intimate and familiar viewing medium (and that might mean television, close ups etc) more readily achieve the reaction of gut wrenching pity and fear from its audience?

Do we believe that teaching or being taught Greek Tragedy is a cerebral (reflective) experience and performing it is a spur to action. Is the consensus that classical drama has the potential to radicalise, socially and politically (rather than to summon up but then drive out the demons of doubt in an Aristotelian catharsis.) How do we disseminate it (especially in advanced Capitalist countries) to those classes with the power to challenge and change the status quo. As teachers can we revolutionise our students' perspective on the past, perhaps by using the critical discourses of popular culture to analyse the plays in their classical context rather than being fixated upon updating the texts themselves.

*****

Angeliki Varakis, University of Kent, School of Arts, UK

Anastasia Bakogianni raises some very interesting questions regarding the issue of translation.

When assessing the effectiveness of a translation one must also pose the question of how playable it is, not only in terms of speaking but also dancing and singing. Is clarity and comprehensibility enough to make a translation effective in performance and appealing to a modern audience? How important is it for a translator to be conscious that he/she is translating for the stage and how might this guide his/her choices? Can existing translations suggest systems of movement to the embodied performer?

In the attempt to transmit the content of a Greek play with clarity one may in the process lose the poetic and corporeal dimension of the text. Audience's may understand the argument on an intellectual level but fail to engage on an emotional level.

There is no clear recipe on how to achieve a successful translation for performance but I think it is important to be able to find a language that would allow speech and movement to conjoin in order to allow actors to embody the variety of perspective that exists within the texts.

An actor's perspective on this issue would be particularly valuable.

In response to Dorinda Hulton's very interesting point on character, I would like to offer my own view on the matter which stems from my extensive research on the use of masks in Greek theatre.

If we accept that the full headed mask was an integral object of the ancient performance and not just a practical accessory, one could make some interesting observations regarding the notion of character and whether it is the appropriate term to describe the tragic parts.

In tragedy, the heroes, just like the mask, were not the product of the text but pre-existed the play as part of a mythical and historical past. The relationship between the actor and his mask was not that of representation but that of embodiment.

What has always fascinated me about the use of mask in a modern performance of an ancient Greek play is that the actor could potentially find a point to enter the dramatic world of the play through an object that is placed outside the text. This makes the entire process less intellectual and more centred in the body.

*****

A final response on comments to his topic from Alexandre Mitchell

Thanks to Maureen Almond for her comments on the need/desire of 19th-21st centuries political cartoonists to use classical references in mocking their contemporaries. She is quite right in thinking that the artist probably feels somehow more validated by his reference to the classical past. But every caricature is quite different from the next, in its scope and references. And I think that some caricatures which make references to the classical world are actually mocking either the classical world or those interested in the past. Then again, the jokes only work if you know the reference themselves, so one ends up with a topsy-turvy situation, typical of humour, and familiar to scholars who work with humour. Parody for example is a little like sawing the branch you are sitting on: it is both a mockery and a hommage paid to the "serious" subject of the mockery.

I much enjoyed Katherine Harloe's philosophical take and comments, and her appreciation of the originality of some of our questions in classics; understanding antiquity in our contemporary categories of thought, and the constant to-and-fro between antiquity and modernity. As an archaeologist I am clearly interested in aspects of classics which are more visually based than others, but it seems to me that the fundamental questions I ask strive to the same goal.

****************************************************