1,720,960 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
Negotiating Translation for the Stage
No full textThis exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. ... This book provides the solution [to scant theoretical analysis] in the form of a lively interdisciplinary dialogue, inspired by a conference held at the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama (APGRD) in Oxford, between nineteen experts in Classics, Drama, Music, Cultural History and the world of professional theatre
Provocation: Athens, a Work-in-Progress
Get PDFThis provocation contests the familiar construction of classical Athens as an ideal exemplar of democratic politics through a focus on the city’s material fabric, its visual artworks, and the performances which took place within its public spaces. It highlights the city’s ongoing process of material re-building (particularly following the Persian invasion of 480 BCE), during which process many of its old artworks were appropriated or re-purposed to express democratic aspirations and anxieties. It also foregrounds the ongoing tensions given articulation through the city’s new showpiece building projects and performance events, including theatrical tragedy and comedy. The aim, throughout, is to challenge clichéd (and idealising) views of classical Athens as a unified and serene white-marble vista. Instead, this provocation cultivates an alternative vision of the democratic city as unfinished, insecure, and frequently disunited: a permanent “work-in-progress” in both a material and a political sense. In conclusion, the Athens of the fifth century BCE is re-positioned as a timely (though not a “timeless”) reminder to today’s politically-engaged artists, educators, and activists that democratic self-definition and practice can only be sustained through a vigorous, ongoing, and open-ended process of debate, confrontation, and contestation within the civic and creative spaces of the city
Greek Tragedy in the Drama Studio: Lecoq, Agonism, and the Politics of Choral Pedagogy
Get PDFThis chapter considers the ways in which classics education takes place within the drama studio; the understandings of ancient theatre practice and its current meanings which are (explicitly or tacitly) promulgated within studio settings; and the implications of dominant training models and practices for wider cultural understandings and imaginings of Greek tragedy in the UK today. It contends that, in failing to recognise or acknowledge the (culturally conservative) ideological underpinnings of established approaches, the customary pedagogies of UK HE are often unable to confront students with a Greek tragedy capable of intersecting meaningfully with their own lived experiences of power, dissent, struggle, and aspiration. The discussion developed here specifically focuses on approaches to choral training derived from Jacques Lecoq’s theatre pedagogy, critically analysing dominant practices currently in use in UK drama studios, and tracing the emergence of an alternative approach to Lecoq-inspired choral training, aimed at empowering students as creative agents, both within and beyond the studio
Grounded, Heracles and the Gorgon's Gaze
Get PDFGrounded by George Brant is a drama which explores the psychological consequences, and moral implications, of our increasing dependence upon remote high-tech warfare. It takes the form of an extended monologue, in which The Pilot (we never learn her name) tells her own life story, from being a hot-shot F-16 flyer zooming over the skies of Iraq to the dislocation of piloting an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (commonly known as a “drone”) from Creech Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas. This essay discusses Grounded in the specific context of the Gate’s (London) production. It begins with a critical examination of my own “mis-seeing” of the play’s protagonist as a version of the tragic Heracles. The analysis which follows compares key aspects of The Pilot’s narrative with Euripides’ Heracles and Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and relates my “mis-seeing” to Brant’s referencing of symbols and characters from ancient Greek myth within the drama. It finally considers the Gate’s staging of the play’s closing moments in relation to the dramaturgy of Athenian tragedy, examining the ways in which the production denies its watchers the expected tragic spectacle of the fallen hero, instead foregrounding and interrogating the ethics of the audience’s own spectatorship
Greek Tragedy, Agonistic Space, and Contemporary Performance
Get PDFThis article combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy’s contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. It focuses on Athenian tragedy’s competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance-space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles’ structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy’s spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle; as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a current case-study; Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and The Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016-17. It is proposed that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. Throughout, is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe’s terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting, and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics
‘Ercles Vein’: Heracles as Bottom in Ted Hughes’ Alcestis
Get PDFTed Hughes’ version of Euripides’ Alcestis (1999) is a play which diverges significantly from its ancient source-text, most notably in an interpolated sequence during which the drunken Heracles re-enacts his own labours, before experiencing traumatic visions. This article identifies this un-Euripidean interlude as a characteristic instance of inter-textual adaptation practice, in which Hughes constructs a self-reflexive, meta-theatrical play on the bombastic, tyrannical ‘Ercles’, as exuberantly performed by Nick Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c.1595). It locates this analysis within the context of developing scholarship on Hughes’ adaptations from the classics, and an increasing focus on the poet’s use of mediating texts, especially Shakespearean verse, in constructing complex, multi-layered and challenging re-writings of classical source-texts. It contends that the meta-theatrical comedy of Hughes’ Heracles-as-Bottom offers a familiar analogue for some key elements of the ‘prosatyric’ Alcestis, while also allowing the modern poet to expand upon the back-story of Heracles’ labours, as well as providing him with an opportunity to dramatize some of the darker aspects of the ancient hero’s violent career. It finally goes on to consider how this characterization might be related to the wider reception of Heracles, especially in his maddened, murderous aspects, in recent adaptations for the theatre
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Provocation: Athens, a Work-in-Progress
Get PDFThis provocation contests the familiar construction of classical Athens as an ideal exemplar of democratic politics through a focus on the city’s material fabric, its visual artworks, and the performances which took place within its public spaces. It highlights the city’s ongoing process of material re-building (particularly following the Persian invasion of 480 BCE), during which process many of its old artworks were appropriated or re-purposed to express democratic aspirations and anxieties. It also foregrounds the ongoing tensions given articulation through the city’s new showpiece building projects and performance events, including theatrical tragedy and comedy. The aim, throughout, is to challenge clichéd (and idealising) views of classical Athens as a unified and serene white-marble vista. Instead, this provocation cultivates an alternative vision of the democratic city as unfinished, insecure, and frequently disunited: a permanent “work-in-progress” in both a material and a political sense. In conclusion, the Athens of the fifth century BCE is re-positioned as a timely (though not a “timeless”) reminder to today’s politically-engaged artists, educators, and activists that democratic self-definition and practice can only be sustained through a vigorous, ongoing, and open-ended process of debate, confrontation, and contestation within the civic and creative spaces of the city
- …
