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Constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective.
Peter Arnott discusses Greek drama not as an antiquarian study but as a living art form. He removes the plays from the library and places them firmly in the theatre that gave them being. Invoking the practical realities of stagecraft, he illuminates the literary patterns of the plays, the performance disciplines, and the audience responses. Each component of the productions - audience, chorus, actors, costume, speech - is examined in the context of its own society and of theatre practice in general, with examples from other cultures. Professor Arnott places great emphasis on the practical staging of Greek plays, and how the buildings themselves imposed particular constraints on actors and writers alike. Above all, he sets out to make practical sense of the construction of Greek plays, and their organic relationship to their original setting.
This exciting collection constitutes the first analysis of the modern performance of ancient Greek drama from a theoretical perspective. The last three decades have seen a remarkable revival of the performance of ancient Greek drama; some ancient plays - "Sophocles", "Oedipus", "Euripides", and "Medea" - have established a distinguished place in the international performance repertoire, and attracted eminent directors including Peter Stein, Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Sellars, and Katie Mitchell. Staging texts first written two and a half thousand years ago, for all-male, ritualised, outdoor performance in masks in front of a pagan audience, raises quite different intellectual questions from staging any other canonical drama, including Shakespeare. But the discussion of this development in modern performance has until now received scant theoretical analysis. This book provides the solution 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 sixteen experts in Classics, Drama, Music, Cultural History and the world of professional theatre.The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Classics and Drama alike.
GREEK DRAMA and the Invention of Rhetoric “An impressively erudite, elegantly crafted argument for reversing what ‘everybody knows’ about the relation of two literary genres that played before mass audiences in the Athenian city state.” Victor Bers, Yale University “Sansone’s book is first-rate and should be read by any scholar interested in the origins of Greek rhetorical theory or, for that matter, interested in Greek tragedy. That Greek tragedy contains elements properly described as rhetorical is familiar, but Sansone goes far beyond this understanding by putting Greek tragedy at the heart of a counter-narrative of those origins.” Edward Schiappa, The University of Minnesota This book challenges the standard view that formal rhetoric arose in response to the political and social environment of ancient Athens. Instead, it is argued, it was the theater of Ancient Greece, first appearing around 500 BC that prompted the development of formalized rhetoric, which evolved soon thereafter. Indeed, ancient Athenian drama was inextricably bound to the city-state’s development as a political entity, as well as to the birth of rhetoric. Ancient Greek dramatists used mythical conflicts as an opportunity for staging debates over issues of contemporary relevance, civic responsibility, war, and the role of the gods. The author shows how the essential feature of dialogue in drama created a ‘counterpoint’—an interplay between the actor making the speech and the character reacting to it on stage. This innovation spurred the development of other more sophisticated forms of argumentation, which ultimately formed the core of formalized rhetoric.
"The book argues that rediscovered ancient Greek plays exerted a powerful and uncharted influence on sixteenth-century England's dramatic landscape, not only in academic and aristocratic settings, but also at the heart of the developing commercial theaters."--Introduction, p. 2.
Specially written for students and enthusiasts, David Wiles introduces ancient Greek theatre and cultural life.
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An inexplicably understudied field of classical scholarship, tragic reperformance, has been surveyed in its true dimension only in the very recent years. Building on the latest discussions on tragic restagings, this book provides a thorough survey of reperformance of Greek tragedy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC, also addressing its theatrical, political, and cultural context. In the fifth and fourth centuries, tragic restagings were strongly tied to cultural mobility and exchange. Poets, actors, texts, vases, and vase-painters were traveling, bridging the boundaries between mainland Greece and Magna Graecia, boosting the spread of theater, facilitating theatrical literacy, and setting a new theatrical status quo, according to which popular tragic plays were restaged, by mobile actors, in numerous dramatic festivals, in and out of Attica, with or without the supervision of their composers. This book offers a holistic examination of ancient reperformances of tragedy, enhancing our perception of them as a vital theatrical practice that played a major part in the development of the tragic genre in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.
Is "space" a thing, a container, an abstraction, a metaphor, or a social construct? This much is certain: space is part and parcel of the theater, of what it is and how it works. In The Play of Space, noted classicist-director Rush Rehm offers a strikingly original approach to the spatial parameters of Greek tragedy as performed in the open-air theater of Dionysus. Emphasizing the interplay between natural place and fictional setting, between the world visible to the audience and that evoked by individual tragedies, Rehm argues for an ecology of the ancient theater, one that "nests" fifth-century theatrical space within other significant social, political, and religious spaces of Athens. Drawing on the work of James J. Gibson, Kurt Lewin, and Michel Foucault, Rehm crosses a range of disciplines--classics, theater studies, cognitive psychology, archaeology and architectural history, cultural studies, and performance theory--to analyze the phenomenology of space and its transformations in the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. His discussion of Athenian theatrical and spatial practice challenges the contemporary view that space represents a "text" to be read, or constitutes a site of structural dualities (e.g., outside-inside, public-private, nature-culture). Chapters on specific tragedies explore the spatial dynamics of homecoming ("space for returns"); the opposed constraints of exile ("eremetic space" devoid of normal community); the power of bodies in extremis to transform their theatrical environment ("space and the body"); the portrayal of characters on the margin ("space and the other"); and the tragic interactions of space and temporality ("space, time, and memory"). An appendix surveys pre-Socratic thought on space and motion, related ideas of Plato and Aristotle, and, as pertinent, later views on space developed by Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Kant, and Einstein. Eloquently written and with Greek texts deftly translated, this book yields rich new insights into our oldest surviving drama.