Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy by Rodosthenous George;

Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy by Rodosthenous George;

Author:Rodosthenous, George;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Auteurship and Directorial Visions
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2017-12-14T16:00:00+00:00


A further collaboration: A different compositional direction

Swados and Serban took the approach of inventing the sounds of the language. A different, ‘archaeological’ approach was taken by the director Włodmierz Staniewski in his production of Elektra for Gardzienice6 in 2004. Fascinated by Great Jones’s version, Staniewski invited the company to perform The Trojan Women in Poland, allowing performers and directors to compare approaches, and presenting the pieces in a double bill, beginning indoors with Gardzienice and then travelling outside to ruins where The Trojan Women was performed. Gardzienice worked from fragments of an Ancient Greek score to recreate music, and from ancient vase paintings to recreate theatrical or rhetorical gestures (chironomia), creating a multi-lingual version of Elektra in which ‘the extremes of emotion [are] expressed in a tempestuous blend of song, sound, word and gesture’.7 Though the results are recognizably related to Greek folk music and more obviously melodic than Swados’ work on The Trojan Women, the effect on the audience has been described as similar to Great Jones’s production, ‘breaking the texts into their essences, creating a fully visceral world’.8 Ben Spatz, who performed in the production in Poland, commented that Staniewski is concerned with an embodied technique of sound and movement, ‘a distinct territory where what you care about is the integration of these aspects of technique in a single body or group of bodies’ (Spatz 2015) rather than the layering of different ‘texts’, like digital imaging and recorded music, which creates a different kind of complexity. This stance towards the performer and the performance also makes it clear why both productions can, essentially, be performed anywhere, indoors or outdoors.

Gardzienice’s performance of the sounds and movements of Greek tragedy is the result of an extended period of research and experimentation, comparable to Swados’s and Serban’s work from 1971 to 1974 with Brook and Great Jones. It is informative to compare a short excerpt from Gardzienice’s 2007 production of Iphigenia at Aulis in Ancient Greek, Polish and English, also premiered at La MaMa Annex in New York.9 Here, the rhythmic beat for the Ancient Greek text comes from the force of two blades repeatedly struck together by Agamemnon as he prepares to sacrifice his daughter. The filmed excerpt takes place during the company’s expedition to the Corycian Cave on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, and sounds echo from the walls. Although the performance, at least in film documentation, seems less forceful than Great Jones’s The Trojan Women, it sprang partly from the same wish to make the piece communicate across cultures through the use of gesture and sound. Where it differs fundamentally is in its use of the mother tongue of the host country where performances take place (English, German and Polish) to express elements of the narrative.

But by collaboratively re-examining and re-inventing the sounds of Greek tragedy, like Great Jones’s The Trojan Women, Staniewski and the actors of Gardzienice were trying to re-find the scale, sounds and physical energy of fifth-century bce Greek theatre for our own times in



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