I: "I do not
think there is any other country in the world," Thodoros Kritikos, the
university professor and drama reviewer, has recently pointed out, " that
honors the classics with so many and also such miserable productions as
[Greece]. ...In our country the daily and friendly communion with the leading
writers of ...theatre has familiarized us so much with them that we call them
by their first name and pat them on the back" (Kritikos 16.4.1987:
152). Kritikos obviously
exaggerates. Yet his comments,
with their characteristic spleen, provide a direct entry into the concerns of
this paper.
It is true that in the last
fifteen years there have been more revivals of ancient Greek drama than in any
comparable period of our history, and yet, quality aside, no age has been less
sure about what a "proper" revival of ancient drama, and particularly
tragedy, is. Seldom has the
theatre-goer been burdened by so many competing claims. The positions taken by practitioners
and critics have thrown the genre into a flurry of controversy that serves only
to generate further questions that call forth still more manifestoes. Practitioners, for their part, argue
that the Greek classical heritage has run its logocentric course and that we
must re-examine the appropriateness of traditional dramatic forms to our
contemporary experience (Doufexis 12.4.88: 20). We can no longer act, they say, as if time has done no more
than cover the text with "layers of dust" which one cleans up so as
to make it respectable again. Nor can we enclose ourselves within the privilege
of a highly civilized minority and make privileged isolation thematic. We have to find a way of mediating
between theatrical culture and the public as a whole, which means approaching
classical drama within a broader and everchanging cultural system.
Although contemporary Greek
critics cannot be grouped under any one heading, either aesthetically or
professionally -- some teach in universities, others write poetry, others
translate or work for the radio or review other arts as well, and others come
from different ideological camps or belong to different generations --they
appear relatively cohesive when the subject under discussion is ancient drama
and its revival. While they
generally agree that ancient drama is not an elitist art and that it should be
carefully revived to accommodate, among other things, the tensions and contradictions
of our postmodern times, they disagree with the way Greek and foreign artists
have, thus far, pursued their goal.
The overwhelming feeling seems to be that the source of evil that
plagues the productions of ancient drama in contemporary Greece is crude
commercialization, the ascendancy of the director and the other practitioners
to a superstar status and the hasty appropriation of foreign models.
II: Since 1974,
critics claim, when real money and indiscriminate institutional funding
appeared in the field, ancient drama has been perceived both by Greek society
and by many of its artists, mostly as a means for individuals to gain success
as opposed to an end in and for itself.
Very few of its devotees, critics charge, have really bothered to devote
their lives to this theatre. Most
of them show up in the summer, when the regular season is over, and mount
"cute" artifacts devised for mass consumption, meant to offer instant
satisfaction of the most superficial aesthetic needs or whims of a wide public.
Those involved in the revival of ancient drama, Greek critics maintain, suffer
from an "omnivorous theatrical syndrome"that "surpasses every
bacchic irresponsibility" (Frangopoulos 1988:575). "They want to grasp everything and
respect nothing," Georgousopoulos, the most influential critic of the
country, angrily contends: "They have gone berserk ...They have courage
that cannot be distinguished from audacity" (Georgousopoulos 7.7.1986:27).
How far can a practitioner go, critics wonder, without sacrificing the
integrity of the text? How far is not too far? Artists should be reminded, maintains Lygizos, a critic
whose distaste for modern revivals has remained consistent through the years,
that they are "the vehicles (organum) for the transmission of the meanings
and messages of the author. The author
legislates and the artist interprets." And if he is an
ingenious interpreter, he will probably equal the original vision, but never
surpass it. No one can touch, he
contends, "the deepest essence of tragedy; only the form can be
re-interpreted" (Lygizos 1984:10).
The classics, the argument goes, for better or worse, gave us with their
work a final version of their understanding of the world and its myths. Whoever
questions this understanding has to propose another one in a different form;
but whoever undermines it is "dishonest" (Georgousopoulos
30.6.1986:25). After all, Prof.
Kritikos contends, "classical plays are not knickers to be stretched or
shrunk indefinitely, depending on the size of the leg" or the size of the
market. They are by-products of a
particular epoch, a particular artistic use. "They are sensitive organisms that fall apart if you
exercise violence on them" (Kritikos 15.8.2986:102). Directors have to learn, critics
assert, to look at the classical text as an organic whole, complete within
itself and with each part related to every other. Their guiding principle must be the voice (phone) of
the first creator (rather than the voice of the box office or of instantaneous
fame), for it is there that the deepest meaning of the text lies. His word is all we have, and
that we must treasure in both our translations and in our productions
(Andronikos 27.8.1989:54).
Without rejecting
performance or relegating it to a minor status, critics warn against the
replacement of the proto-text by either alien or external elements. All ideas, forms and values are not
necessarily wrong, the argument goes, because we have learned them from our
predecessors. Isn't the reality,
Lignadis wonders, of, say The Persians or Bacchae similar to
ours? How much do we differ from
their ideas of siege, famine, genocide, the fate of the defeated? Ancient discourse, the same critic
argues, has perfected itself to the point that it has become and a "living
organism" (the Aristotelian zoon). We cannot develop indiscriminately any point of view only to
show our freedom from all constraints.
In our writing and in our reading, the critic concludes, we are bound to
encounter an archival network that governs (or should govern) to a large
degree, our practice. After all, we are Greeks and we partake of our tradition
(Lignadis 1988: 185-190). That
does not mean, of course, the advocates of valid interpretations argue, that we
must be "faithful" to the degree of using performance merely as
translation of the playscript to the stage. Classical plays, like words in a poem, do not
"translate" in a one-to-one relationship of reference. In order to function, artists must carefully
"retranslate" them into
the new idiom, renaming principles of practice where appropriate, but
especially naming indigenous principles of practice -- based on language,
temperament, local rhythms and traditions -- applying those to explicate their
practice. But whatever mise-en-scene
practitioners devise for the needs of their production, they have to make
sure, critics warn, that they do justice to the essence of tragedy, which is to
bring us face to face with the depths of human pain, the "signified
already there" out of which human life molds itself. Eliminating the "tyranny" of
this truth, is like eliminating everything the text stands for. It is like using the set without its
foundations. By actively invading
the autonomy of the text, its visual concepts, its inner rhythms, its emotional
tensions and structural arrangements, by a new and insubordinate commentary
that puts in question all the attributes of dramatic meaning, we not only
deceive the public that goes to see a classical play, but we also stretch the
text beyond its limits. We give the
impression that classical playwriting is faulty in its perception of life and
theatre and that one can do anything with it. This deconstructive practice, critics maintain, might
occasionally produce good theatre, but not necessarily tragedy. The production will be a departure from
the original, in which case we have a new play that should be interpreted
differently.
III: What puzzles and
frequently enrages Greek critics is the ease with which Greek practitioners
imitate theatrical models developed by various cultures as diverse as the
Japanese, the American, the German or the French. Instead of turning to Greek culture for inspiration, artists
sell out their legacy in order to copy models that are most of the time
inappropriate. In fact, critics
charge, Greek artists have committed "adultery" so many times that
they have forgotten where their own bed is: they have forgotten, as the
director Solomos put the case, that it is their "duty" to open the
foreigners' eyes "instead of
losing ours in order to copy them." As long as "we copy foreign artists," the same
director asserts, "we will continue to exhibit our culture in the front
window of our tourist shop... . We
do not love our field. We love
easy profit. We import ideas,
innovations and impressions which we cover with a layer of shadow theatre and
oriental music and sell them as products made in Greece. And this is no different from exposing
the country to international ridicule" (Solomos 1986: 20,18).
A still prevailing view
among local critics is that of ancient drama as mainly a "Greek
affair". Their contention is
that ancient art cannot be easily transported, let alone absorbed, into the
international dramatic repertoire.
Only the technique travels; tradition stays within its own country. And that explains, according to them,
why foreign practitioners are more daring with their transcultural experiments
than their Greek counterparts.
After all, for non-Greeks ancient drama is a neutral ground that they
take for granted. Whenever they
resort to it, it is simply for practical reasons. They are hardly interested in preserving any continuities or
unities. Nor are they interested
in preserving anything Greek in it.
Greece is but a memory, a mask, a pretext for something else. Their major concern is how to increase
the readability of the plays, how to give them a certain notion of
"hominess" and thus enable their spectators to flesh out the old
structures by a series of formal rules that derive from their native
experience (Varopoulou
22.5.1988:60).
So to find the
"code" of Greek theatre, Georgousopoulos declares, "one should
risk a dive into the innermost layers of its tradition," rather than seek
refuge to either principles of impressionism or principle of undigested
interculturalism. The
confrontation of dramatic text and performance should not be the haphazard and
thoughtless assembly of heterogeneous material in the name of modernization,
but a carefully considered system of "colossal analogies and
associations" that will lead to a fresh and synthetic reading of the old
text, a reading based as much as possible on the peculiarities and continuities
of Greek culture and its received patterns (Georgousopoulos 1984:188; also
8.8.1989:23). Where else can Greek
artists find, the same critic wonders, better material for the revival of
tragedy than in the Greek Orthodox Church, the only topos that still
resembles, with its semi-choruses, its exits and entrances, its divine drama
and its crowd of participating (and not judging) onlookers, the workings of the
old theatre? If this tradition is
not enough, he concludes, for a sound revival of ancient tragedy, then "we
better give up our efforts and continue concocting our beautiful performance
post cards" (Georgousopoulos 1984:28). The pseudo imitations of foreign models, be it Kabuki techniques,
Brechtian techniques or Hollywood spectacular effects, critics claim,
"distort the foundations of the poetics of Greek drama" (Lygizos
1984:18 19). Just like soda water,
they help our digestion, and the tourists' digestion after a gargantual meal at
a local taverna.
IV: This rage that
characterizes the ideas of Greek critics, although farfetched sometimes, is to a certain extent
understandable. After all,
contemporary practice has defied many accepted premises of what we have come to
expect from the revival of ancient drama, premises derived primarily from the
conventions of a long logocentric tradition, that have so come to dominate our
view of ancient stage that it is still difficult for critics to endorse
strategies that question long tested values and codes. This paradigm as regards the recent revivals of ancient drama could
be summarized as follows: 1)
Classical drama is a treasure house of experience, if not form, that can still
inspire our contemporary life. It
contains elements of truth about human life that should be respected at all
cost. It cannot be treated as a
container into which anyone can pour his/her precious cultural content. 2) A sound revival of ancient drama
requires, above all, a close reading of the text and its formal attributes. The
stage cannot be used as the topos to fill in with the sounds of the
director's tricks and vanity. Nor
can it be used as an alibi for a tentative show of smartness. 3) The non verbal channels that Greek and foreign practitioners
use so extensively is nothing more than too much showing that tells very
little; it is an index to our indifference to meaning that allows technique to
triumph over imagination. And if
technique is everything and if telling impossible, why do the classics at all,
whose primary goal is to address the mind rather than the eye? 4) Blindly to follow foreign models is like saying that there
is a lack of auto-reflection from within.
The challenge to contemporary Greeks is to derive principles of
theatrical practice primarily from the Greek tradition itself as defined in the
idiom of 2500 years of dramatic history and also in the idiom which constitutes
the language of modern Greece.
Only an in depth investigation of the fundamental manifestations
(synchronic and diachronic) of Greek folk and religious culture can lead to a
sound aesthetic for the revival of ancient drama and to a more constructive
incorporation of international scholarship. And 5) last, but not least, it is the responsibility of the State, as Prof. Andronikos says, to put
an end to the vandalization of the classics by refusing to sponsor people who
"shamelessly" torture with their "insane alchemies" the
"unfortunate body" of Greece's most precious legacy which, unlike
other cultural icons ( the Parthenon, for example), is left totally unprotected
and thus an easy prey in the hands of various experts (Andronikos 27.8.1989:
54). We want people "who have
vision, an opinion and a thesis," Georgousopoulos asserts; "not people
who resort to superfluities to cover the nakedness within"
(Georgousopoulos 20.7.1987: 23). In this way, as Angelos Terzakis once wrote,
echoing Matthew Arnold, "charlatanism shall have no entrance"
(Terzakis 6.4.1954).
V: Thus far I have barely outlined a sizable body of criticism. I
have ignored vital distinctions: for instance I have said nothing about the
contribution of contemporary critics and practitioners to our better
understanding of ancient drama. I
have deliberately placed by emphasis on the readings of mainstream critics
simply because they are the ones who, through their access to academia, course
syllabi, literary anthologies, publishing houses, newspapers, radio and
television programs, the national drama schools and the various festivals and
committees, directly affect the people's assumptions about what kind of person
can be a literary genius, what the role of the director vis-a-vis the classical
text could be, what kinds of subjects great dramatic literature can discuss,
their notions of who can be a hero and who cannot, notions of what constitutes
significant activity or a significant issue and so on. At the same time however, it would be
very difficult to argue that any logos can be so absolute as to cover
the whole spectrum of cultural activity in any country, and it is certainly not
the case in contemporary Greece.
Admittedly, there has been, in the last few years, an increasing
interest in the social context of ancient art by younger scholars (especially
Greek-Americans) and artists familiar with international trends and the whole
debate over the revival of the classics (Patsalidis 1989: 68-78). There is of course little agreement as
to what precisely might constitute this radical shift of perspectives. But the mere emergence of this issue --
or, better, of this new framework for asking questions about the revival of
ancient drama, its modes, and its possible manifestations -- confronts Greek
critics and artists with a major and puzzling cultural phenomenon that they
will soon have to deal with. After
all, the intercultural reality of the European Common Market does not leave
much choice. These performances
from Europe and the rest of the world, as Varopoulou remarks, should be a
signal for everyone to stop and think about what "revival" means and
where ancient drama is heading (Varopoulou 27.3.1988: 60).
As I have argued elsewhere,
mainstream Greek criticism and practice have reached a point where they must
discuss the revival of the classics in their homeland more systematically and
on different grounds (Patsalidis 1989:68-70). This not to say that the prevailing formalist, text-oriented
approaches, with their emphasis upon the internal attributes of the artwork
(style, rules, conventions, thematics, semiotic codes, intertextuality) should
be dismissed, unless of course one wishes to deny all value for formal
interpretations. Nor is to say
that the overall judgments and fears of Greek critics and many practitioners
are totally baseless. We are, indeed,
disturbed by the crude commercializing of the classics and the gradual and
unchecked penetration of culture by the ethos of the market, as we are all
concerned about the cheap experimentation of many self-proclaimed conquistadors
of ancient drama. After all, not
all experiments have been successful, nor have they been truly imaginative. Yet, the point I try to make here is
that thinking of classical theatre and the possibilities of its revival solely
in terms of Aristotle's poetics, or in terms of its "Greekness", its
eternal verity, its unmediated spirit and its aesthetic closure is not
enough. What I sense is needed now
is a critique of issues, of values and of social conditions that shape stage
discourse, in other words, an opening up to influences and new areas of
practical and critical interest (history, anthropology, ideology, interculturalism)
that would not only furnish new directions about how to approach the sacred
status of the past but would also help define its present utility and its
present position vis-a-vis mass culture.
Whether we like it or not we cannot insulate "true" art from
the market in order to resist its commercialization, in the same way that we
cannot ignore the fact that ancient drama, like all drama, is, among other
things, a product directly related to more collective forms of mentality and to
systems of power that determine/d its significance. From my perspective this means that to successfully mediate
between ancient art and the public as a whole we must first find a way to
interrogate and investigate our materials (content, stylistic and linguistic
practices, racial and gender relations) and then proceed to find analogies in
our systems of power and performance.
And this is what Yiannis Kakleas attempted to do with his "heavy
metal" version of Aristophanes' Frogs (1990). Instead of providing
us with the standard "folk version" of the play with its shadow
theatre and commedia dell'arte techniques, Kakleas used the text in order to
criticize the state of affairs of our rapidly decaying urban civilization. To do so he contextualized its
aesthetics and ideology in a specifically intercultural experience where
Dionysus was played as a stoned punk, Hercules as a ridiculous beach boy, the
doorkeeper Aeacus as a paraplegic punk in a wheelchair, and the chorus of Frogs
and Muses as Vampires and Amazons in leather pants, high heeled boots and
chains dangling around their necks.
For their playing area he devised a claustrophobic environment that
resembled a devastated German military headquarters at the end of the second
world war and a deserted Castle of Count Dracula. For two hours the spectators were mercilessly
"bombarded" by images, sounds and improbable forms coming directly
from the world of video clips, soap operas, horror films, rock music and the underground
drug culture. And if the curtain
calls are any evidence of a successful performance, then there is no doubt that
Kakleas' reading reached his audience.
By localizing his text in time and place, through carefully selected
spatial and audio-visual analogies, Kakleas immersed it in a sociological matrix
that domesticated it and thus made it more accessible to the contemporary
spectator.
If seeing a familiar play
in a familiar code is an exercise in recognition, then seeing a familiar play
in an unfamiliar code is an exercise in cultural transformation. And that is the case of Thodoros
Terzopoulos' production of Euripides' Bacchae (1986). Terzopoulos, known for his adventurous
projects and his fascination with such Eastern forms as Bunkaru and Kabuki,
took Euripides' text and opened it up to a non-Western culture (the Japanese),
in order to celebrate its inherent theatricality and at the same time
experiment with the possibilities of a sex-free, age-free and race-free
theatre. Clearly the Bacchae's
delirium perfectly fit his purpose.
With a small cast of five actors and actresses Terzopoulos wove an
elliptical stage syntax (a mixture of ancient and modern Greek, of Western and
Eastern codes), full of unexpected connections and points of view, whose
ultimate goal was to convey the ecstasy of stage transformation. To do away
with the text's complete sentence, complete plot and complete character --all
the hallmarks of the rage for closure-- Terzopoulos refracted each speech
through a multi-vocal, multi-cultural prism that defeated any attempt to
identify a coherent, unified speaker.
The result was a pluralistic subject that could not be reduced to
representing either male or female.
And why not, say the critics echoing the director. Don't we all live in a fragmented world
where everybody craves for power and ecstasy? There are so many opposite
perspectives from which one can view the same event. We can no longer share a consensus of assumptions to
evaluate a situation. Dionysus is
in everybody. And so is Pentheas.
Victimizer and victimized share the same ecriture.
Short of a panoramic
interpretation of ancient cultural history, what these and other recent efforts
offer* is precisely this kind of anxiety to move on, to explore new things in
the light of new configurations in the world of new markets, new theories and
new technologies. What permeates
their work is the feeling that what the classics convey, among other things, is
not just an aesthetic but also an ideology that defines and extends its
authority or power over others (including art). With this hypothesis as their point of departure they
re-situate their text in the sociocultural sites of its production, in order to
understand how this text was produced in its unique historical specificity, and
then proceed to relocate its analogical significance in our own socio-cultural
milieu.
VI.: This analysis
could greatly be expanded, but these suggestions must suffice. In this essay I have not spoken of
changes in the form and tone of dramatic revivals through fifteen years of
rather turbulent history.
Furthermore, I have not spoken of the impact of the political situation
on these attempts. What I hope I
have accomplished, nonetheless, is to have given concrete enough form to the
fears of some of our best known critics about the fate of ancient drama in a fast changing Greek reality. What expression these fears take in the
future, when the issues raised by the intense theoretical and practical debate
that is going on now in Europe and the U.S can no longer be ignored or
marginalized, remains to be seen.
For the time being I sense, at least in the best practical and
theoretical work, the groundwork for future readings.
Wikipedia gives us this definition of exile: to be away from one's home (i.e. city, state or country), while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return. Although most commonly used to describe an individual situation, the term is also used for groups (especially ethnic or national groups), or for an entire government.
