For The Curious: As we steel ourselves for the final weeks of this seemingly endless election, I’m reminded of the ancient Greeks. Not because Trump keeps making odd debate references to the Trojan horse, but because it’s crucial to remember that the birthplace of democracy was also the birthplace of theater.
If we trace the lineage of our western theatrical tradition to its roots, we go back 2500 years to Greece and the festivals of Dionysus. Ancient Greeks discovered the ineffable magic that happens when fictional characters tackle real problems using the words of a poet as their primary tools. At the same time, the Greeks were birthing a new form of government: democracy.
6 comments:
This article is a nice and sobering reminder of the opportunity that we all have as theatrical artists to try and effect change through contributing to the public discourse. Many look at the current election cycle and view it as demonstrative of a political problem in this country, and though I don’t really want to argue that point I will say that the issue is almost certainly also one of culture. Any division in political ideals is almost certainly reflective of a division in culture, and though I certainly appreciate the broader perspectives that different cultures can offer (and, in fact, I think that the greatness of the United States is the fact that we’ve set up our country to try and give a voice to all those perspectives), they need to come together in a way that resembles a conversation more than a brawl. I think theatre has a place in adding to a conversation in a way that’s productive, and as artists going into that field (presumably, although this argument could be made about any form of entertainment that a graduate of CMU SOD might be interested in perusing professionally) we should be aware of the role we have in that cultural conversation.
It’s been awhile since I’ve heard anything about Greek mythology and history – so to start off this article is pretty refreshing. From what I can remember from the stories of Greek myth, most of the stories have to do with moral choices and their effects on the main character, and arguably more about the people surrounding the main character – family, friends, demons, other gods, etc. Because of this, I believe this ancient Greek argument holds great weight in politics, especially when seen by the right people. If in order to be a politician plays had to have been attended, it would expose and educate the people who are going to be making decisions that affect masses of other people, and that’s probably the best preventative measure to keep bad politicians out of government. If anyone came out of a Greek play thinking the bad guy was the good guy or that the general population characters were unimportant, that could be good enough reasoning to keep them out of politics.
I don't necessarily think it's time to write a eulogy for theatre as an art form, which I felt like this article was attempting to do, but rather focus in on the consequences of having theatre separate itself from us as a cultural landmark. This is a foggy subject. There isn't a clear person or replacement that we must look to blame, but rather consider all the changes and developments that have come about over the last century that have contributed to our loss of cultural connection to the theatre. Sure, it may be that reality tv certainly comes with a different kind of cathartic experience than Oedipus may, however, I still feel as though we can't pin down reality tv with the blame for the death of catharsis in our culture and politics. With saying this also must come with recognition that there are thousands of working theatrical artists in the U.S. today, that have devoted their lives and careers to an art form that still finds places to thrive. The largest and most well known city in the U.S. continues to flourish as a hub for the theatre that we all know and love.
I agree with what seems to be the author’s main premise: that theatre has a civic responsibility and (done well and powerfully) can ennoble its audience, but I have a few problems with the romanticizing in this article. First, Greece didn’t *birth* democracy. They may have birthed *Greek democracy* or democracy on the scale of a city-state (which is no doubt impressive,) but democracy as a mode of organizing people wasn’t entirely new. There is evidence that suggests democracy had been present long before on smaller scales in villages and tribal cultures and that there may have been several, proto-democratic societies all across the globe. The same goes for theatre. There were thousands of years of storytelling, dance, recitation, poetry and theatrical performance leading up to the solidification of the thing we identify as Western theatre. This article makes it sound like they invented something from scratch, but in fact Greek theatre and Greek democracy are just a point on a long continuum. The author paints an overly rosy picture of Greek political life. Not to diminish its genuine accomplishments, but Athens had a civic theatre and they had just as many political problems as we do. The author asks, “Can it be an accident that those ancient Greek tragedies include, alongside the suffering men, the voices of so many women, foreigners, and slaves?” Well, perhaps not, but that didn’t stop the Greeks from disavowing the personhood of women and foreigners and owning slaves. They censored and executed political troublemakers. They had imperial ambitions and brought war to others and ruin to themselves. Power was still heavily influenced by an aristocracy. Perhaps the theatre enlightened some and spoke truth to power, but it was not a panacea. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now.
This article is pretty interesting. I knew that theatre originated with the greeks and Dionysus but I had no idea that politics was so connected to theatre during that time. I find it really fascinating that they would connect such seemingly unrealted topics but as the article points out, theatre can teach someone a lot about what it is like to deal with hardship and tragedy and how to over come such things and end up victorious (or maybe even what not to do). I am not exactly sure what the author truly means when they say that we have stryed from our ideals in the theatre. He mentions reality TV as a decline in entertainment but I personally think that the past years have contributed some very meaningful and innovative works of theatre. In a lot of ways I think that we are seeing more clearly that theatre is a voice for political justice and outright oppression.
This is such an interesting idea of how politics and theatre are so incredibly intertwined. I think that one thing that greek theatre entails that would be very helpful for many politicians is that there is not often a totally “bad” character. Characters are often conflicted and do bad things, but many have reasons. I am really thinking about the play Medea, which we just did a couple of projects for in Design for the Stage and Foundations II. In it is Medea, who kills her children, the king, and the princess all to get back at Jason for wanting to marry the princess. However, she did have a reason, the she gave up everything in her life irrevocably to be with Jason, and mental anguish over to kill her children. I am not saying that what she did is right, just that she is not a bad person/character. I think that this lesson would be useful for many politicians to see their opponents as multi faceted rather than merely good or bad.
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