Eseminar Classics in the Modern World - a Democratic Turn? - Session 3

‘Power to the people': language, translation and the revival of ancient Greek tragedy
Anastasia Bakogianni, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

One of the most crucial decisions that a director wishing to mount a production of Greek tragedy on the modern stage is faced with is the choice of language. The decision to use a translation of the ancient Greek text as the basis of the performance text impacts on the audience's perception and interpretation of what they see and hear on stage. The choice of which particular translation to use is significant as is the increasingly popular practice of commissioning a new one to serve the needs of an individual production. The old practice of using an archaic sounding and very formal translation to suggest the ancient Greek was gradually supplanted in the twentieth century by the attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible rather than to the elite few.

Given the kudos and high cultural status that Greek tragedy enjoys in Western culture this issue goes beyond the merely academic. Questions of ideology, cultural politics and national identity are also involved. In modern democratic states the question of how relevant such a performance is in terms of its appeal to the people is also significant. A turn towards more democratic versions of these dramas can be detected particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The choice of translation lies at the heart of this matter. A clear, comprehensible and modern translation can enhance the impact of a performance. Another popular practice is for modern artists to produce new adaptations/versions of the plays that deliberately evoke modern parallels and associations.

The case of modern Greek revivals of Greek tragedy raises some interesting points relating to the question of the choice of language for revivals of Greek drama. The Greek Language Question that plagued the modern state since its creation in 1830 divided the nation over whether it was more authentic to use katharevousa for revivals of Greek drama or whether it was better to appeal to a wider audience by using demotike. Katharevousa was an artificially constructed language, purged of foreign influences and deliberately modelled on ancient Greek. It was the official language of the state, but in everyday life most citizens spoke demotike. Many early productions preferred to use katharevousa because they felt that it ensured their claim to authenticity. The realisation that this would severely limit the appeal of the production led some directors to start using translations in demotike. Gradually appeal and relevance won over concerns about authenticity. In many recent revivals the democratisation process is complete as directors have grown increasingly bold and less reverential in their handling of the ancient material.

Is this trend a useful approach to staging Greek tragedy on the modern stage? The fifth-century BC dramatic festivals were mass events and not reserved for the elite. Trying to limit the appeal of these dramas by couching them in an obscure and highly formal translation seems counterproductive, but embedding too many modernisms limits their long-term currency. Where does Aristotle's famous concept of the ‘golden mean' lie in this situation?

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Contemporary performance of ancient Greek texts
Dorinda Hulton, Exeter University Drama Department, UK

In the theatre strand of this session of our seminar I'd like to try to open up some of the broad questions that are central to contemporary performance of classical texts, and others that I may have missed:

• 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?
• 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?
• 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?
• 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?
• 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 others' attentions in order to support our arguments?

Each member of the panel I am proposing has engaged in practical exploration and/or critical commentary of contemporary performance of ancient Greek texts and together, through a selection of case studies, we hope to offer a spectrum of approaches to the theme of the 'democratic turn'. As someone coming from a drama background, as part of the panel, I will be contributing a report and analysis of a practice-as-research project called 'The Silence of Euridice'. This project is planned for May 2010 to take place on either side of the military border in Cyprus. It is framed as a case study for a 'new aesthetic for creating theatre in a conflict zone': a theme that was raised at a European Off Network conference in Vienna in January 2009 amongst a number of artists and academics, many from war torn regions. The ‘character' Euridice is the ‘minor' one appearing at the end of Sophocles's ‘Antigone' who is unable to speak on hearing of the death of her son. The final question therefore that I would like to open up in our seminar is particular to this project, but indicative of all those above: ‘what does Euridice's silence mean to us today?'

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Documentaries and the Classical Past
Antony Makrinos, University College London, UK

During the last years, a new dynamic in the production of films related to the classical past has been developed and has produced blockbusters which introduced young audiences to antiquity, initialised new debates about its depiction and created new markets interested in exploring historical truth behind the stories. What is the relationship between the cinematographic depiction of antiquity and its presentation by documentaries and how do they influence our reception of the ancient world?

This increase of interest in the cinematic visualisations of the ancient world has stimulated discussions about visual appropriations of antiquity but the documentaries have received little attention to date. The panel's theme concerns the study of antiquity by the documentaries, the way in which they shape the views of modern audiences and their impact on education. Our culture demonstrates a need to be legitimised by the esteemed cultures of the past through a visual dialogue between modern and ancient. Are documentaries successful in creating a 'Democratic Turn' i.e. do they remove the association of classical texts with elite groups? How do academics see the effort of practitioners to search for the historical truth and to provide leisure and education to both suspected and unsuspected audiences? This panel will provide an overview of the ways in which documentary making has consumed and recycled the Classical world and the new meanings that have been bestowed on it in the process.

The speakers will all address case studies which are divided between myth and history, Greece and Rome and which have provided material for documentaries and contributed to the differentiation of the visual representation of the story in comparison to the literary texts. The discussion will include both academics and practitioners and it will explore how documentary making has changed popular conceptions of the classical world. It will also examine the way(s) in which television has revolutionised the elite image of the classical texts through a series of artistic and technological innovations and to which extent it has popularised them.

Our methodology will be based on the examination of themes which are influential for the practitioners and which associate with the literary texts or the historical sources: the visualisation of gods and heroes, women in ancient societies, the use of technological effects and archaeology, and the impact of religion on modern audiences. The search for the key aspects of methods for interpreting classical texts, material culture and ideas will enable us to clarify whether documentaries as popular, cultural products are manipulative or enabling, whether they create reflective readers and viewers or they simply transmit ideas that are not democratic.

The objectives are to set out the ways in which looking at images of the ancient world in modern documentaries is different from looking at its manifestations in other cultural forms. The panel will also aim to show how the ancient world has played an essential role to the creation of highly-developed sets of cultural appropriations through documentaries. The discussion will demonstrate how modern explorations of the ancient world are often highly elaborated and carefully chosen and will explore whether and how they can serve as a source of inspiration for the creation of counter-narratives of the ancient world.

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Democracy and popular media: classical receptions in 19th and 20th century 'political' cartoons
Alexandre Mitchell, University of Oxford, UK

There is much debate, and even outside of the “classics world” on who reads classics, if it is only of interest to the elites of this world, if it is useful to non-specialists, and so forth. I come from a different angle, that of visual humour, which I studied in depth in the ancient Greek context (Greek Vase Painting and the Origins of Visual Humour C.U.P. 2009). The previous study, of the social and political functions of humour within a democratic context, and based on the most popular and cheap art form in archaic and classical Greece, Greek pots, has given me the tools to pursue a new project. The cheapness of the product, the huge market available and the need to please customers to sell the artefacts, the wide-ranging possibilities of visual humour, and the democratic context, all pointed me in the direction of freedom of expression and popular art forms. This was for ancient Greece … what about 19th and 20th century democracies? In 1874, R. Buss wrote: “Had caricature and photography existed in past centuries, how delighted should we be to behold an Alexander, a Nero, a Caesar, or any other be-praised blood-shedder of public liberty, transfixed by the etching-needle of a Gillray or a Cruikshank! Without civil and religious liberty, joined to an unshackled press, caricature cannot exist; thus it becomes, by its free exercise, a sure exponent of the degree of freedom enjoyed in any country”. There are some who assume that only the elites had/have access to classics, but what should we make of the many hundreds of caricatures in prominent newspapers, propaganda leaflets, from the 19th century to today, which use classical references, whether they are visual myths, events or statesmen, and much more, to mock current affairs? Did everyone understand the references? Who was/is mocked? The contemporary politician, or Herakles? More importantly, why would a cartoonist need a reference to Herakles, Caesar or Horace to mock a 19th or 21 st century politician? Does everyone understand these references today? Newspapers: the material is cheap, paper, it has to “please” the public, at least in its design if not in the info rmation it contains; newspapers thrive in democracies. Are certain newspapers more “high brow” than others? There needs to be a move, stronger than ever to study “popular” art forms, maybe part of what we call media today (theatre, films, documentaries, comics, art, visual and verbal humour, poetics, political rhetoric; new media such as the internet) to tap in the immense reservoir of references to the classical world and understand better both our own categories of thought, and our special relationship with Greek and Roman antiquity.

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