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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell-Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Dionysus Resurrected analyzes the global resurgence since the late 1960s of Euripides' The Bacchae. By analyzing and contextualizing these modern day performances, the author reveals striking parallels between transformational events taking place during the era of the play's revival and events within the play itself. * Puts forward a lively discussion of the parallels between transformational eventsduring the era of the play's revival and events within the play itself * The first comparative study to analyse and contextualize performances of The Bacchae that took place between 1968 and 2009 from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia * Argues that presentations of the play not only represent liminal states but also transfer the spectators into such states * Contends that the play's reflection on various stages of globalization render the tragedy a contemporary play * Establishes the importance of The Bacchae within Euripides' work as the only extant tragedy in which the god Dionysus himself appears, not just as a character but as the protagonist
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Contents
Cover
Series
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Part I: Festivals of Liberation: Celebrating Communality
Chapter 1: The Birth Ritual of a New Theatre
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 2: Celebrating a Communion Rite?
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 3: Sparagmos and Omophagia
Notes
References
Further Reading
Part II: Renegotiating Cultural Identities
Chapter 4: On the Strangeness and Inaccessibility of the Past
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 5: Performing or Contaminating Greekness?
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 6: In Search of New Identities
Notes
References
Part III: Productive Encounter or Destructive Clash of Cultures?
Chapter 7: Dismemberment and the Quest for Wholeness
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 8: Transforming Kathakali
Notes
References
Further Reading
Chapter 9: Beijing Opera Dismembered
Notes
References
Further Reading
Epilogue
Name Index
Subject Index
Blackwell Bristol Lectures on Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition
Series Editors: Neville Morley, Charles A. Martindale and Robert L. Fowler
The Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition promotes the study of Greco-Roman culture from antiquity to the present day, in the belief that classical culture remains a vital influence in the modern world. It embraces research and education in many fields, including history of all kinds, archaeology, literary studies, art history and philosophy, with particular emphasis on links between the ancient and modern worlds. The Blackwell Bristol lectures showcase the very best of modern scholarship in Classics and the Classical Tradition.
Publications
Why Plato Wrote
Danielle S. Allen
Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West
Greg Woolf
Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides' The Bacchae in a Globalizing World
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Past Speakers and Lectures
2013 Mark Vessey, University of British Columbia “Writing before Literature: Later Latin Scriptures and the Memory of Rome”
2012 Bettina Bergmann, Mount Holyoke College “Worlds on the Wall: The Experience of Place in Roman Art”
2011 Colin Burrow, All Souls College, The University of Oxford “Imitation”
2010 Erika Fischer-Lichte, Free University of Berlin, “Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides' The Bacchae in a Globalizing World”
2009 Greg Woolf, St. Andrews University, “Barbarian Science: Ethnography and Imperialism in the Roman West”
2008 Danielle S. Allen, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, “Philosophy and Politics in Ancient Athens”
2007 Ian Morris, Stanford University, “The Athenian Empire”
Future Speakers
2014 Andrew Feldherr, Princeton University
2015 Susan E. Alcock, Brown University
2016 Glenn W. Most, University of Chicago
This edition first published 2014
© 2014 Erika Fischer-Lichte
Registered Office
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, author.
Dionysus resurrected: performances of Euripides' The Bacchae in a globalizing world / Erika Fischer-Lichte.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-7578-4 (cloth: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-118-60975-0 (epub) – ISBN 978-1-118-60977-4 (wol) – ISBN 978-1-118-60978-1 (epdf) – ISBN 978-1-118-60979-8 (mobi) 1. Euripides. Bacchae. 2. Greek drama–Modern presentation. I. Title.
PA3973.B23F57 2014
882’.01–dc23
2013030057
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover design by Nicki Averill Design
Acknowledgments
It is no secret that authors rely on the help of other people, without whom their books would not get written.
I would like to thank Charles Martindale for the invitation to Bristol and Pantelis Michelakis for taking such good care of me while I was there. At Wiley Blackwell, I am grateful to Alfred Bertrand for providing me with the initial guidance, to Haze Humbert and Ben Thatcher for seeing the project through from start to finish, and to Elizabeth Saucier for managing the public relations side of the book.
I am also indebted to the four respondents to my lectures, Martin White, David Wiles, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, whose insightful comments flowed into this book, as well as to the readers of the individual chapters, Susanne Klengel, Małgorzata Sugiera, Natassa Siouzouli, Georgios Sampatakakis, Eiichiro Hirata, Vasudha Dalmia, Phillip Zarrilli, and Shen Lin. I would also like to thank Fiona Macintosh and Maria Shevtsova for their helpful remarks after reading the full manuscript.
Dorith Budich and Konrad Bach provided invaluable assistance by formatting the manuscript in accordance with the stylesheet and taking care of the permissions for the images and the quotes. I am very thankful to Ursula Schinke for taking on the unenviable task of typing out my handwritten manuscript pages. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Saskya Jain for editing the manuscript.
Preface
This book seeks answers to the question of why Euripides' The Bacchae, which until the late 1960s had almost no performance record at all, has since been staged a number of times. This is true not just of Europe and the United States, which pride themselves on a long tradition of performing ancient Greek plays, but also of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
During the time of late antiquity in Greece, The Bacchae was among the most popular tragedies. Plutarch (De Gloria Ath. 8) reports that it was performed in Athens frequently. Apart from performances of the whole play, actors also successfully toured with some of its solo arias. People referred to segments of the tragedy on a number of occasions – as for instance at an event that took place in the camp of the Parthians, as recorded by Plutarch (Crassus 33):
Now when the head of Crassus was brought to the king's door, the tables had been removed, and a tragic actor, Jason by name, of Tralles, was singing the part of the “Bacchae” of Euripides where Agave is about to appear. While he was receiving his applause, Sillaces stood at the door of the banqueting-hall, and after a low obeisance, cast the head of Crassus into the centre of the company. The Parthians lifted it up with clapping of hands and shouts of joy, and at the king's bidding his servant gave Sillaces a seat at the banquet. Then Jason handed his costume of Pentheus to one of the chorus, seized the head of Crassus, and assuming the role of the frenzied Agave, sang these verses as if inspired (anabakheusas…met' enthousiasmou):
“We bring from the mountainA tendril fresh-cut to the palace,A wonderful prey.”
(1170–2)
This delighted everybody.
(Perrin 1915: 421–422)
Plutarch also mentions that Alexander the Great frequently quoted from the tragedy at his banquets and that his mother Olympia, believed to have been a devotee of Dionysian cults, liked to play the role of Agave (Plutarch, Alexander 53).
In view of the tragedy's popularity during antiquity, its complete absence from European stages until 1908 and very rare reappearances after that until the end of the 1960s seems even more striking. This is not to say that The Bacchae had been forgotten. In the second half of the sixteenth century several translations into Latin and even one into Italian (in 1582) appeared. This more or less coincided with the inauguration of the newly built Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, for which Oedipus the King was performed (1585). While many Greek tragedies were adapted or rewritten and performed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there is no record of a new version of The Bacchae. Interest in it was rekindled only in the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany. In 1799 Friedrich Hölderlin translated the first 24 verses of the ‘Prologue’, which inspired him to write his hymn “Wie wenn am Feiertage,” in which Dionysus is likened to Christ. Goethe praised The Bacchae as his “favourite play by Euripides” and translated parts of it in 1821 (see Petersen 1974: 198). Despite his plaudits, however, the tragedy was not performed, and Goethe only staged Euripides' Ion (1802) in a version by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Sophocles' Antigone (1809) at his theatre in Weimar. Schlegel, who disliked Euripides' tragedies and set out to “correct” him in his version of Ion, excepted The Bacchae from his harsh verdict. In his Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature held in Vienna in 1808, he states:
In the composition of this piece, I cannot help admiring a harmony and unity, which we seldom meet in Euripides, as well as an abstinence from every foreign matter, so that all the motions and effects flow from one source, and concur towards a common end. After the Hippolytos, I should be inclined to assign to this play the first place among all the extant works of Euripides.
(Schlegel 1965: 139)
Still, this did not encourage a theatre to stage the tragedy. It was not until the last three decades of the nineteenth century that The Bacchae and its protagonist Dionysus rose to prominence again, this time in the context of the quest for the origin of ancient Greek theatre, especially among classicists. The trigger was Friedrich Nietzsche's seminal treatise The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), in which he states:
Greek tragedy in its oldest form dealt with the sufferings of Dionysus…all the celebrated characters of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus and so on – are merely masks of that original hero…this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, the god who himself experiences the suffering of individuation.
(Nietzsche 1993: 51–52)
While Nietzsche identified the Dionysian chorus of satyrs as the origin of Greek theatre, the so-called Cambridge Ritualists some decades later believed to have found it in the so-called eniautos daimon ritual, the slaying and resurrection of the year-god. In her book, Themis: A Study of the Social Origin of Greek Religion (1912), Jane Ellen Harrison, a classics scholar and the leading spirit behind the Cambridge Ritualists, set out to prove that ancient Greek theatre originated as such a ritual. Gilbert Murray contributed a chapter entitled ‘Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Tragedy’ to the book. In it he attempted to show that the elements identified by Harrison as constitutive of the eniautos daimon ritual had survived in The Bacchae, where, so he argues, they fulfill similar functions as in this ritual. Murray's enthusiasm for the tragedy grew to the extent that he translated it into English, but, rather than spurring a series of performances in England, this led to only one: in 1908 the stage director William Poel, famous for his Shakespeare productions, used Murray's translation for staging the play at London's Court Theatre. Instead, in England as in the United States, The Bacchae was relegated to university campuses, particularly at women's colleges.
Yet the tragedy and its protagonist remained a favorite subject of classical scholarship, as demonstrated impressively by, amongst others, Walter F. Otto's study, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (1933), and Eric Robertson Dodds' edition of and commentary on The Bacchae (1944).
Despite the classicists' fascination with the play, it remained more or less absent from the stage. Two performances are known to have taken place at the ancient theatre of Syracuse (in 1922 and in 1950, the latter starring Vittorio Gassman as Dionysus) and one was recorded at the Teatr Wielki in Lwów in Poland in 1933. In 1950 Linos Karzis staged The Bacchae at the Odeon of Herodes Atticus in Athens, and in the early 1960s the tragedy was performed at the National Theatre of Greece, directed by Alexis Minotis (1962).
Against this backdrop of the rather meager performance history of the tragedy until the late 1960s, the sudden abundance of productions from 1968 onwards begs for an explanation. The worldwide spread of The Bacchae coincided with the dissemination of ancient Greek plays in general. As Edith Hall has stated in Dionysus Since 69, “more Greek tragedy has been performed in the last thirty years than at any point in history since Greco-Roman antiquity” (Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley 2004: 2). Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (2004) focus on the question, which is also the title of their introduction, “Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century?” By restricting their examples to performances in Western countries (with one notable exception: Lorna Hardwick's contribution on “Greek Drama and Anti-Colonialism”) and discussing them in the context of issues such as the sex war, politics, aesthetics of performance, and “the life of the mind,” the performances are related to more recent social, political, aesthetic, and scientific developments in that part of the world, serving as a kind of missing link in terms of an explanation.
Other classicists often discuss the fascination with and subsequent spread of performances of Greek tragedies, especially when including those of non-Western countries, in terms of an ideology of universalism. The tragedies can be performed in cultures that lie outside of the purview of the Greek heritage, so the argument goes, because they embody universal truths and values (e.g., McDonald 1992). The same argument also frequently appears in Western theatre reviews when such performances are presented at international theatre festivals in Europe.
This argument is unacceptable for at least two reasons. First, during the colonial period, it was generally used to back up the colonizers' claim to superiority. The dichotomy between the universalism of Western cultures and the particularism of colonized cultures, constructed and upheld by the colonial masters, suggested that the only way in which the people they ruled over could enjoy universally valid cultural goods was to adopt Western ones. This means that, even today, performing a Greek tragedy enables them to experience the universal truths and values embodied in it. The concept of universalism must therefore not only be questioned but also abandoned altogether.
Second, the argument of universalism fails to answer the question of why Greek tragedies were not performed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once translated or performed, they ought to have revealed their universal truths and values and spread like wildfire – right? The fact that this did not happen and the plays remained neglected until fairly recently highlights that the argument of universalism simply makes no sense.
Moreover, two other ideas I do not believe in often go hand in hand with universalism – that of ownership and that of the text as the primary authority controlling the performance. Often, an author's birthplace or passport is used to justify a nationalistic claim. Shakespeare is thus believed to be “owned” by the British, Ibsen by the Norwegians, Brecht by the Germans, and so on. This becomes more complicated in the case of the ancient Greek tragedies. Undeniably, the Greeks claim the exclusive right to ownership. However, most European nations but also the United States, Canada, and Australia have appropriated these plays, asserting that they also form an essential part of their cultural heritage. But if ownership can be extended from one nation to include another, as has clearly been the case, why not extend it to all without claiming universalism? The claim to ownership usually serves the purpose of awarding oneself greater competence in interpreting, understanding, and staging the plays and of rebuking “misinterpretations” committed by others.
The debate on the relationship between text and performance is not new. The idea that the written text of a play serves as an authority that controls the process of staging or that a performance acts as “concretion” or “realization” of the meanings hidden inside the text has long been superseded. Yet it is still reproduced by Western critics and sometimes even scholars with regard to Greek tragedies performed by artists from non-Western cultures. It was Brecht who already argued with respect to Antigone that the text of a play is nothing but a raw material to be changed at will to serve the most diverse purposes. Greek tragedies are usually translated in order to be performed. All translations are by their very nature “adaptations” and should be seen as a first step in the process of appropriation culminating in a stage production. The creative use of the main materials – the space, the actors' bodies, the translation, light, sound, etc. – and their combination, synchronization, or opposition is what constitutes the production. In addition, it is the special relationship between stage/auditorium and actors/spectators that, each night, determines the success and impact of a performance. The text is just one enabling factor among others and by no means the determining one.
This understanding of ownership and of the text as a controlling authority ultimately serves the same purpose as the ideology of universalism – to maintain the superiority of Western artists, critics, and scholars over everyone else. It does not offer any clues concerning our question.
The subtitle of this study, “Performances of Euripides' The Bacchae in a Globalizing World,” might suggest some kind of a connection between the renewed interest in the play and globalization, even though the beginning of globalization has been a subject of some debate. Some date it to after the fall of communism, others to the 1960s, when societal shifts, e.g. due to the emergence of postcolonialism, the passage from industrialism to post-industrialism (such as in Japan and in the Western countries) and the rise and spread of novel communication technologies, provided new conditions and possibilities for politics, the economy, the market and financial flows, the production and circulation of commodities and knowledge, services, information, lifestyles, etc. As such, the above-mentioned time frame does more or less coincide with the period during which The Bacchae began to be revived on the world's stages.
The concept of globalization has also been defined in many different ways, which, mostly, are not mutually exclusive but simply bring one or more aspects of it into sharper focus (e.g., Appadurai 1996; Beck 2000; Ellwood 2001; Held and McGrew 2003; Lechner and Boli 2007; Steger 2003; Waters 2001). For our purposes its consequences rather than definitions are of interest, which the above-mentioned authors also discuss at great length. In summary, they seem to agree on three interrelated consequences:
It is striking that the three most influential scholarly interpretations of The Bacchae in the early 1970s – i.e., at the beginning of the process of globalization – by the Swiss and German (respectively) classicists Walter Burkert and Bernd Seidensticker, the Polish theatre scholar Jan Kott and the French literary scholar and anthropologist René Girard, each focus on one of these three consequences, as will be explained in the introduction. Similarly, the performances discussed in this book all highlight one of these aspects while also considering the others. This is not to say that the reference to the process of globalization will fully answer our question. The performances discussed here all came into being in different countries between 1968 and 2008 and often under very different circumstances – in other words, global processes encountered very specific local conditions.
In this context I would like to define “local” as the given frameworks and particular circumstances prevalent at the place in which the production came into being. These include specific social and political conditions as well as cultural and theatrical traditions. The latter, for example, refers to the artists' and spectators' knowledge of various theatre forms, performance traditions and conventions, acting, dance and music styles, the actors of the company, their repertoire of plays, and their performance history, as well as many other aspects.
These conditions are important for any process of staging without, however, determining it. They form a sort of enabling structure allowing for a number of possibilities to be tried out and realized without imposing one. That is to say that the local is not necessarily or exclusively to be identified with the traditional but with the sum total of the factors and conditions prevalent at that place. The particular performance aesthetic can therefore not be predicted on the basis of a detailed description and thorough analysis of all the local conditions informing the process. The local, with all its specific conditions, does not act as a determining but as an enabling factor.
This scenario renders any kind of generalizing or homogenizing approach counterproductive, which is why I will base my arguments on individual case studies instead, taking into consideration the specific conditions of each production and its particular ways and purposes of appropriating and localizing the tragedy.
The present book is not a reception study in the classical sense. It does not consider all performances of the tragedy during this time span or investigate the different readings of the tragedy highlighted by each performance. Rather, this is a study centered on why and how the play is put to productive use and whose needs it is meant to satisfy.
This is also not a study on intercultural theatre. It is true that my case studies include performances from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Greece, and Poland, as well as from Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, India, and China. Yet the mere fact that a text usually regarded as constitutive of the Western tradition is performed in a non-Western cultural context does not make it “intercultural theatre,” especially not if we truly are to abandon the ideology of universalism, dismiss such concepts as ownership or authority of the text, and focus instead on the practices of localization. With regard to the guiding question of this study, I cannot identify a single fundamental difference between performances in so-called Western and so-called non-Western cultures that would suggest the use of the term “intercultural theatre” as a useful heuristic tool.
Lastly, I would like to define more positively what kind of a study this is. My analysis of the carefully selected performances examines how each of them dealt with and related to the three consequences of the globalizing process outlined above in terms of what they chose to show, how they showed it, and what its effect might have been. The assumption of such a link to the globalizing process serves as the point of departure. The performances in this book were chosen on the basis of whether they suggested a certain, even if not as yet apparent, affinity to this process at an early stage of my research. In order to avoid the risk of a premature and altogether misleading tendency to generalize and homogenize, I do not discuss the general link to the process of globalization in my chapters, of which each one is devoted to a different production. Instead, I relate each production to one of the consequences of globalization outlined above. It is in the epilogue that the overall process of globalization is addressed.
The situation regarding the availability of sources and other documents on the productions varies greatly in each case. Some of the performances I have seen myself. Others are documented in detail, while in some cases only a number of photographs, very few reviews, and an interview with the director, stage designer, and/or the actors exist. A note at the beginning of each chapter indicates what kind of material was available for that production. Since the material is rather scarce in some cases, it cannot be avoided that some conclusions are drawn as a result of my argument without any further evidence at hand. These cases are clearly marked, so that the reader will not mistake an assumption for the statement of an evidenced fact.
This book is intended for a broad readership. It primarily addresses theatre as well as classics scholars and students with an interest in the performance history of Greek tragedy. It is also meant for a wider public interested in theatre and its relationship to overarching political, social, and cultural developments. Moreover, those researching such developments and the impact they may have had on cultural institutions in different societies hopefully will also find some stimulating ideas in this book. Lastly, it might offer some food for thought to readers working on or interested in problems of cultural comparison – a vast and still deeply contested field. Since this book addresses not only specialists but also a broad readership, it is inevitable that, depending on their field of interest, some readers might wish that this or that argument or aspect had been included or elaborated on in more detail. However, it is my hope that the overarching line of argument is drawn clearly enough that it might spark a fruitful discussion.
References
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 2000. German 1997. What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity.
Dodds, Eric R. ed. 1960. Euripides' Bacchae. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellwood, Wayne. 2001. No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization. London: Verso–New Internationalist.
Hall, Edith, Fiona Macintosh, and Amanda Wrigley, eds. 2004. Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. 1962. Themis: A Study of the Social Origin of Greek Religion (1912). New York: Meridian Books.
Held, David, and Anthony McGrew, eds. 2003. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity.
Lechner, Frank J., and John Boli, eds. 2007. The Globalization Reader, 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
McDonald, Marianne. 1992. Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage. New York: Columbia University Press.
Murray, Gilbert. 1962. “Excursus on the Ritual Forms Preserved in Greek Tragedy.” In Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Edited by Jane Ellen Harrison, 341–363. New York: Meridian Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872). Translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited by Michael Tanner. London: Penguin.
Otto, Walter F. 1965. German 1933. Dionysus: Myth and Cult. Translated by Robert B. Palmer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Perrin, Bernadotte. 1915. Plutarch's Lives. London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Petersen, Uwe. 1974. Goethe and Euripides: Untersuchungen zur Euripides-Rezeption in der Goethezeit. Heidelberg: Winter.
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. 1965. German 1808. Courses of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. New York: AMS Press.
Steger, Manfred B. 2003. Globalization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Waters, Malcolm. 2001. Globalization. London: Routledge
Further Reading
Fischer-Lichte, Erika, and Rustom Bharucha.2011. “Dialogue on Intercultural Theatre.” At http://www.textures-platform.com/?p=1667. Accessed June 12, 2013. On my rejection of the term “intercultural theatre.”
Rebellato, Dan. 2009. Theatre and Globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Some more aspects of the relationship between theatre and globalization.
Introduction
Rediscovering The Bacchae
Figure 0.1 Bronze sculpture of Dionysus. Photo: bpk/Antikensammlung, SMB/Johannes Laurentius.
Re-enter Dionysus
Dionysus, the ancient god of wine, of communal celebration, of the mysteries and of theatre, is dead. He was ousted centuries ago by Jesus Christ and passed away. But is he really gone from us? As the myth tells us, Dionysus, son of Zeus and Semele, the daughter of King Cadmus of Thebes, was dismembered and devoured by the Titans. However, Zeus destroyed them with a throw of his thunderbolt, reassembled the parts of Dionysus' body and restored his son to life. What happened once could happen again.
And it did. On June 7, 1968, at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York, a slender young man with glasses addressed the audience with the following words:
Good evening, I see you found your seats. My name is William Finley, son of William Finley. I was born twenty-seven years ago and two months after my birth the hospital in which I was born burned to the ground. I've come here tonight for three important reasons. The first and most important of these is to announce my divinity. The second is to establish my rites and my rituals. And the third is to be born, if you'll excuse me.
(Schechner 1970: n.p.)
After having undergone the ritual of his rebirth the man continued:
Here I am. Dionysus once again. Now for those of you who believe what I just told you, that I am a god, you are going to have a terrific evening. The rest of you are in trouble. It's going to be an hour and a half of being up against the wall. Those of you who do believe can join us in what we do next. It's a celebration, a ritual, an ordeal, an ecstasy. An ordeal is something you go through. An ecstasy is what happens to you when you get there.
(Schechner 1970)
This was clearly Dionysus resurrected, making his reappearance in the United States of America. He came back to life in a place that had genuinely belonged to him at least from the sixth century BCE onwards: the theatre. He did so through a performance of Euripides' The Bacchae entitled Dionysus in 69, but he did not stay long. A few years later he left again and continued his journey through the modern globalizing world. Where he went immediately after his departure from the United States is unknown. Some years later he popped up again in Jamaica, England, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and later on back home in Greece, from where he set out on a long journey to Japan, India, China, Brazil, Cameroon, and Nigeria, to name just a few countries which he honored with his divine presence. He is still roaming the five continents.
The Bacchae was Euripides' final tragedy. He wrote it in the last years of his life in Macedonia, where he had been exiled from Athens. It was performed after his death (406 BCE) in Athens, along with Iphigenia in Aulis and Alcmaeon at Corinth, which were also written abroad. The Bacchae is the only extant tragedy in which the god Dionysus himself appears, not just as a character but as the protagonist. The tragedy tells the gruesome story of revenge by the god against his mother's family for not believing in his divinity and spreading the rumor that he was fathered by a mortal lover of his mother. Arriving in Thebes as a stranger in the guise of a mortal human being and accompanied by a band of women from Lydia, he strikes the women of Thebes with madness so that they leave their households and ecstatically celebrate the god in the Cithaeron mountains. Pentheus, ruler of Thebes and son of Agave, one of Semele's sisters, confronts Dionysus and throws him in jail. The god frees himself by causing an earthquake that destroys the palace. Pentheus wants to spy on the women in the mountains, suspecting acts of immorality. Dionysus convinces him to dress in women's clothes in order to watch them unrecognized. He guides him to the mountains, places him on a tall fir tree and announces his presence to the women of Thebes. They get Pentheus down and tear him apart, the first blow dealt by his own mother, Agave. She impales his head on a thyrsus – a long stick twined with ivy branches and tipped with a pine cone – believing in her frenzy that it is the head of a young lion. At Thebes she awakens from her madness and falls into a state of desperation. Dionysus reveals himself and his revenge, granted to him by his father Zeus. He bans Agave, her sisters, and her parents from Thebes and the chorus sings in praise of the god.
While other Greek tragedies in the 1960s, in particular King Oedipus, Antigone, and Medea, had been part of a roughly 200-year-long performance history on modern European stages, The Bacchae had almost no performance record at all until that point. Hans Werner Henze's opera The Bassarides, directed by Gustav Rudolf Sellner, premiered in 1966 at the Salzburg Festival. It was a new version of The Bacchae. After the festival, the production was transferred to the Deutsche Oper Berlin, where it remained in the repertoire for quite a while. It constitutes a prelude of sorts to a series of performances starting in 1968 with Dionysus in 69 (directed by Richard Schechner) and continuing throughout the 1970s. The most famous and widely discussed among them were the productions by Hansgünther Heyme at the Cologne Theatre (1973); by Luca Ronconi at Vienna's Burgtheater (1973); an adaptation by Wole Soyinka, later a Nobel laureate, commissioned by the London National Theatre, where it premiered (1973); a production of this version by Carol Dawes in Kingston, Jamaica (1975); the performance staged by Klaus Michael Grüber at the Berlin Schaubühne (1974); another one by Luca Ronconi in Prato, Italy (1977); productions by Michael Cacoyannis at the Comédie Française in Paris (1977), by Karolos Koun at the Theatro Technis in Athens (1977), and by Tadashi Suzuki in Tokyo (1978). This impressive record would justify labeling the years between 1968 and 1978 the decade of The Bacchae. However, this was just the beginning. The tragedy not only entered the repertoire of European theatres and was henceforth performed on a more or less regular basis. Until recently in Japan, Tadashi Suzuki restaged it several times and encouraged other directors to do the same. Moreover, The Bacchae has been performed in other parts of Asia and in Africa and Latin America since the 1990s. Its recurring presence on the stages of the world over the last forty years, contradicting its almost complete absence until the late 1960s, is remarkable. With it, Dionysus returned to the theatre, raising the question of why this happened. Did staging The Bacchae seem an adequate response to the issues and developments that were on people's minds? Was it understood as a topical play?
The Topicality of The Bacchae
Dionysus' return to the theatre was not entirely coincidental. It responded to certain events and developments within the societies in which he made his appearance. The plot of The Bacchae seemed somehow to have resonated with these societies. The Bacchae was performed because its protagonist, Dionysus, in whatever manifestation, was about to appear to the community or had already done so. The play became topical because it was interpreted differently in each cultural context, depending on the local situation.
However, the tragedy is ambiguous and so is its protagonist Dionysus. The tragedy continuously emphasizes two of the god's attributes. Firstly, he is a “democratic” god because “To rich and poor he gives/the simple gift of wine,/the gladness of the grape” (Euripides 1960; v. 423–5). Secondly, he has no fixed physical form, but rather takes on different appearances at will (v. 478), his favorite embodiments being three aggressive and dangerous animals – the bull, the snake, and the lion.
The first characteristic offers comfort and gives joy to all: “by inventing liquid wine/as his gift to man,/For filled with that good gift/suffering mankind forgets its grief; from it/comes sleep; with it oblivion of the troubles/of the day” (v. 280–3). Wine releases man from the burdens of social pressures and needs and induces a state of physical satisfaction and well-being.
The second characteristic incites man's urge to commit acts of violence:
O Dionysus, reveal yourself a bull! Be manifestA snake with darting heads, a lion breathing fire!O Bacchus, come! Come with your smile!Cast your noose about this man who hunts your Bacchae! Bring him down, trampled underfoot by the murderous herd of your Maenads!
(v. 1017–23)
Through this second characteristic the god stokes man's drive to overpower the opponent through aggressive and brutal acts of violence. He invokes the wild beast in man.
These are only two of the many ambiguous characteristics of Dionysus as well as of the tragedy. A single reading cannot possibly account for its topical relevance in so many different places and over such a long stretch of time. Rather, each case brought into focus specific aspects and elements of the tragedy.
In this respect, the analogy between the events of the tragedy and phenomena emerging in the 1960s in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world is striking. As happened in Thebes after the appearance of Dionysus, many countries faced serious challenges to the political, social, cultural, and moral order established or reestablished after World War II. It was a time of transition and transformation, a time of politically motivated violence – a time of crisis. In November 1963 the US President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. One year later Congress authorized President Johnson to greatly increase US involvement in Vietnam. The 1960s will always be remembered as the years of the Vietnam War and of the fierce protests against it. It was also the era of the Civil Rights Movement. Riots took place in New York, Newark, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, and Los Angeles. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in May 1968, which resulted in another outburst of riots. In 1968 the Civil Rights Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War reached a peak. Robert Kennedy was killed in June 1968 – and with him, the last hope of a speedy end to the war. A colossal anti-war demonstration was held at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in August but it was brutally put down by the police.
The year 1968 also saw various rebellious movements peak across Europe. In May, millions of French students and workers erected barricades and demanded significant changes to the French educational system. In Germany, riots had already begun in 1967. In June, when the Shah of Persia visited Berlin, students at the Free University organized a large-scale demonstration against his dictatorial reign. When the police tried to control the protest, one student was shot – we know today that the bullet was fired by a policeman who worked for the Stasi, the secret service of the GDR. This was the beginning of the student rebellion led by Rudi Dutschke, who later survived an attempt on his life but suffered from its consequences until his untimely death. The Baader-Meinhof gang, which later developed into the Red Army Faction terrorist movement, was born, first targeting huge department stores with arson, later robbing banks and kidnapping important business and finance figures, humiliating them in public and killing them.
In August 1968 Catholic civil rights marches took place in Derry, Northern Ireland. These marches are usually regarded as the beginning of a new outbreak of violence between the Protestants and the Catholics, between the British occupying forces and the Irish people, a kind of civil war that lasted about thirty years. The same month, the Prague Spring, which seemed to bring Czechoslovakia closer to democracy, was crushed by Soviet tanks. One year earlier, Greece saw the establishment of a brutal dictatorship, which lasted until 1974.
The situation was equally disastrous in other countries in which The Bacchae was performed. After Nigeria gained independence in 1960 and drafted its constitution in 1963, a military dictatorship was established in 1966 following several coups. In 1967 the Biafran War broke out. The region of Biafra, mainly inhabited by Christian-Catholic Ibos, declared itself an independent republic. The bloody war, notorious for its cruel hunger blockades, ended in 1970 with the reintegration of Biafra into Nigeria. This meant the end of the war but not of the instability of the political situation.
In Brazil the military coup of 1964 led to a wave of oppression and persecution. People were arrested on the most unlikely charges and tortured by the military police. Freedom of speech and expression in the arts was abolished. The military regime lasted for more than twenty years. It began to crumble from 1982 onwards and finally came to an end in 1985.
The 1960s in Japan were marked as much by rebellion, upheavals, and changes as in Europe and the United States. The protests against the US occupation and the Westernization of all strands of Japanese life first erupted in 1960 and were directed at the planned US–Japan Mutual Security Treaty. They intensified when the USA entered the Vietnam War and continued for fifteen years, i.e., even after the treaty had been signed and implemented by both parties. At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s a new religious sect, Asahara Shôkô's AUM Supreme Truth Cult, plagued Japanese society, splitting up families and other groups, if not the society as a whole.
In the early 1990s, India was faced with renewed clashes between Hindu and Muslim communities. In December 1992 the Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque located in the town of Ayodhya, was destroyed by a mob of Hindu fanatics who believed that the mosque had been erected after the destruction of a Hindu temple marking the birth place of Lord Rama on the same site. Hundreds of people were killed as the tensions between Hindus and Muslims escalated in the aftermath of the demolition. Riots broke out, leading to many more deaths and horrendous destruction.
With the fall of communism at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the world order as established after World War II dissolved. All central European countries underwent a period of transformation. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) ceased to exist – Germany was reunified. The others, liberated from Soviet dominance and oppression, regained national autonomy. In Poland the process of transformation had already begun on July 1, 1980, when the Union Solidarity called a strike because of rising meat prices. This triggered a huge wave of other strikes. Although the union was outlawed under martial law on December 13, 1981, and Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Catholic priest and supporter of the Solidarity movement was murdered by the Polish secret service, it continued its work towards bringing about change from the underground or exile. The first, partly free, elections on June 4, 1989 were won by Solidarity. Tadeusz Mazowiecki from the movement became the first non-communist prime minister of Poland after World War II. Lech Wałsa, the icon of the 1980 strike of Gdask, was elected president in December 1990. From the very beginning the new government turned towards Western Europe. As early as September 1989, Poland entered into an economic contract with the European Economic Community. In 1994 Poland applied for membership of the European Union.
Meanwhile, the United States found it necessary to redefine its status and role in the face of radical changes going on around the world. It claimed to be and act as the only superpower, as emphasized by George H. W. Bush in his “Address on the State of the Union” on January 28, 1992, when he declared that “the leader of the West…has become the leader of the world.” China set out to rival this claim. After the end of the cultural revolution (1966–1976) and, even more so, after the death of Mao Zedong, who had fiercely opposed all Western influence, Deng Xiao-ping inaugurated a policy of opening up to the West. The economic reforms beginning in the 1980s enabled a broader and deeper engagement with Western cultures, resulting in, among other things, the first performance of a Greek tragedy in China: Oedipus the King was directed by Luo Jinlin in 1986. The claim of the United States as expressed by Bush was met with reflections on how to compete in the field of culture, especially how to respond to the “invasion” of US popular culture. Attempts were made to succeed with one's own cultural productions in the worldwide markets.
Most of these cases speak to a particular kind of violence – violence by individuals against others who represent the state; violence by the government against the people of another state or against their own people; violence by groups of people against the representatives of the state or different groups fighting each other. In general terms, the authority of the state or government was challenged, to which its representatives responded with violence. This led to power struggles of many different kinds.
The same scenario can be found in The Bacchae. Pentheus, the ruler and representative of the State of Thebes, is introduced as a tyrant who reigns by spreading fear and terror. He has abolished free speech, as the shepherd's words confirm:
But may I speak freelyin my own way and words, or make it short?I fear the harsh impatience of your nature, sire,too kingly and too quick to anger.
(v. 668–71)
His subjects also fear his uncontrolled, despotic whims because, once challenged, he maintains his control as king solely through violence. He orders Tiresias' abode to be demolished with “crowbars” (v. 346); he sends out soldiers to “catch” (v. 433) the Stranger (Dionysus) and bring him “in chains” (v. 355); he threatens to execute him, later to stone him, and orders him to be locked up in the “stables” (v. 509). He intends to fetch the women who escaped from Thebes to Cithaeron “out of the mountains” and have them trapped in “iron nets” (v. 288/9); later, to “march against them” with “all heavy armoured infantry” and the “finest troops among our cavalry” (v. 781–2, 784), and be rid of them through “a great slaughter in the woods of Cithaeron” (v. 796). After being confronted with disorder, he confirms his identity as ruler of Thebes exclusively through acts of crude military power. Anyone who refuses to comply with his will or who opposes him in any way – such as the Stranger, the Lydian Bacchae, the Theban women, or Tiresias – is accused of “mocking me and Thebes” (v. 503), of being “unruly” (v. 247) and is brutally hunted down. Pentheus is, in fact, nothing more than a wild beast which only knows how to assert itself through physical violence:
With fury, with fury, he rages,Pentheus, son of Echion,born of the breed of Earth,spawned by the dragon, whelped by Earth!Inhuman, a rabid beast.A giant in wildness raging,storming, defying the children of heaven.
(v. 537–44)
However, he seems to be convinced that he alone defends the integrity of the state and works for the common good. All those who do not follow him are denounced, charged with the pursuit of egotistical or amoral goals. Thus Pentheus accuses Tiresias of self-serving profit-seeking in following Dionysus: “Yes you want still another god revealed to men/so you can pocket the profits from burnt-offerings/and bird-watching” (v. 255–7). He believes he can prosecute the women of Thebes who have left “home” (v. 217) because the cult of the new god is being used solely as an excuse for immoral behavior:
And then, one by one, the women wander offto hidden nooks where they serve the lusts of men.Priestesses of Bacchus they claim they are,but it's really Aphrodite they adore.…When once you seethe glint of wine shining at the feasts of women,then you may be sure the festival is rotten.
(v. 222–5, 260–2)
When Pentheus learns from the messenger that his suspicions are unfounded, he quickly finds a new excuse for violent action against the women: “Like a blazing fire/this Bacchic violence spreads. It comes too close. We are disgraced, humiliated in the eyes/of Hellas/…Affairs are out of hand/when we tamely endure such conduct in our women” (v. 778–9, 785–6).
Pentheus believes he must take action against the Stranger because “His days and nights he spends/with women and girls, dangling before them the joys/of initiation in his mysteries” (v. 235–6) and, thus, is “mocking me and Thebes” (v. 503). He rationalizes and legitimizes his brutal acts of violence with carefully chosen words, so that Tiresias justly accuses him of being “The man whose glibness flows/from his conceit of speech declares the thing he is:/a worthless and stupid citizen” (v. 269–71).
However, politically motivated violence, challenging an authority that has lost its legitimacy and entering into power struggles, were not the only issues faced by many countries in the 1960s and later. Deeper cultural changes were taking place. For instance, the 1960s saw the feminist movement grow and witnessed the emergence of a new youth culture. Young people were not only committed to political causes such as anti-war demonstrations and civil rights marches. They also experimented with new lifestyles and cultural expressions that undermined the social and moral order of the establishment. These were realized through rock music and ecstatic dances; they used psychedelic drugs; they grew their hair long and wore patchwork clothing. In Germany the student movement also meant living together in groups, so-called communes, replacing family and university dormitories, and practicing sexual freedom. Wilhelm Reich became the most popular author among German students. The students' movement also resulted in a far-reaching generational conflict. Young people attacked their parents for not having resisted the Nazis or for having contributed to their crimes in one way or another.
In some respects, the feminist movement, the hippies, the flower power movement and, generally, the new youth culture found an analogy in the women of Thebes leaving their households in order to realize a radical alternative to their former lives. After leaving their homes and their town (v. 217), they take on another way of life in the mountainous forests of Cithaeron.
First they let their hair fall loose, downover their shoulders, and those whose straps had slippedfastened their skins of fawn with writhing snakesthat licked their cheeks. Breasts swollen with milk,new mothers who had left their babies behind at homenestled gazelles and young wolves in their armssuckling them. Then they crowned their hair with leavesivy and oak and flowering bryony. One womanstruck her thyrsus against a rock and a fountainof cool water came bubbling up. Another droveher fennel in the ground, and where it struck the earth,at the touch of god, a spring of wine poured out.Those who wanted milk scratched at the soilwith bare fingers and the white milk came welling up.
(v. 696–712)
After giving up their social duties as defined by the men, the women have become one with nature. Not only do they dress in animal skins, living snakes, and plants, they also adopt wild animals by feeding them. In return, they themselves are nurtured by nature's juices – water, wine, milk, honey. The boundaries of the ego are lifted and any kind of identity of the self is extinguished. Its place is taken by a collective identity with nature, .
The crumbling of obsolete forms of authority and these new, alternative ways of living seem generally to justify labeling the 1960s and 1970s in the Western world and Japan as well as the 1990s in other parts of the world as a time of transition and transformation. Focusing on the cultural changes, one might subsume them under the term “cultural revolution” as it was coined by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse:
In the West, this term first suggests ideological developments which rush ahead of the development of the social basis. Cultural revolution – but not (yet) political or economical revolution. Whilst changes have occurred in art, literature and music, in forms of communication, in morals and customs, which cause new experiences, a radical reevaluation of values does not seem to alter the social structure and its political forms of expression very much, or at least lags behind cultural changes. “Cultural revolution” implies at the same time that radical opposition today extends in a new way to the region beyond material needs and aims towards wholly reorganizing traditional culture in general.
(Marcuse 1973: 95)
The term “cultural revolution” in our context foregrounds the radical transformation and, indeed, total break with traditional culture. Revolutionary times – including those of a cultural revolution – are liminal times. The term “liminality” was coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner in the 1960s with reference to the work of Arnold van Gennep. In his study The Rites of Passage (1909), van Gennep compiled a vast array of ethnological material demonstrating that rituals are linked to liminal and transitional experiences loaded with symbolic meaning. He divided rites of passage into three phases:
According to van Gennep, this structure can be observed in a wide range of cultures. The content alone distinguishes its variants from culture to culture. Victor Turner labeled the state induced during the second phase the state of liminality (from Latin limen – threshold) and defined it as a state of a labile existence, “betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial” (Turner 1969: 65). He elaborates that the liminal phase creates an experimental and innovative sphere for cultures insofar as “in liminality, new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols are tried out, to be discarded or accepted” (Turner 1977: 40). According to Turner, the changes brought about by the liminal phase usually affect the social status of the participants in the ritual and extends to the entire society.
Even if taken out of the context of ritual theory, Turner's definition of liminality still applies to the state of many societies in the 1960s and 1970s and later on in the 1990s. It also applies to the plot of The Bacchae. In all of these cases we are confronted with new forms of behavior, in which “new ways of acting, new combinations of symbols are tried out”– be it by challenging an authority that seems to have lost its legitimacy, be it in the acts of violence ordered or committed by the state and its representatives, be it in the new ways of life adopted by members of the feminist movement or the new youth culture or in the new life the women of Thebes lead in the mountains. Although one has to be careful not to generalize, it appears that the societies in which The Bacchae has been performed from the late 1960s onwards can be regarded as societies in transition, experiencing a liminal state and partly even deep crisis, which will be described and defined in greater detail later on. The above sketch of the political, social, and cultural situation in the countries concerned has undeniably been executed with a very broad brush that allows only for the most obvious similarities to emerge. The specific political, social, or cultural factors and analogies between elements of the tragedy and the societies in which it was performed will be considered and discussed in the following chapters that will each focus on a particular performance.
Theories of Sacrificial Ritual in the 1970s
At the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s The Bacchae was rediscovered not only by theatres, but also by classicists and other theoreticians once again dealing with the question of the origin of Greek tragic theatre. Despite key differences between their theories, they all agreed on the importance of focusing on the ancient sacrificial ritual as the most likely origin. In his essay “Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual,” which appeared in 1966, Walter Burkert argues that tragedy grew from the sacrificial ritual: “The are originally a troop of masked men who have to perform the sacrifice of the which falls due in spring.” Later on, emancipated itself from the , and yet the essence of the sacrifice still pervades tragedy even in its maturity. In Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides there still stands in the background, if not in the centre, the pattern of the sacrifice, the ritual slaying, ” (Burkert 1966: 115, 116). Burkert took Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Trachiniae, and Euripides' Medea as examples for his main argument. Bernd Seidensticker (1979) argues that, in fact, The Bacchae provides the most convincing example. As he demonstrates, the second half of the tragedy follows exactly the order of the sacrificial ritual as described by Burkert,1 although it does not mirror or even perform a sacrificial ritual but rather perverts it.
It begins with the decoration of the victim, which in the tragedy corresponds to Pentheus being dressed up. Then the victim is led in a procession to the place where the actual sacrifice will happen – as Dionysus leads Pentheus into the Cithaeron mountains. As in the case of the sacrifice, everything is prepared for its performance before the arrival of the sacrificial animal; in the case of the tragedy the bacchants are assembled, singing holy songs in praise of Dionysus. In the next step, the sacrificial animal “was supposed to express its consent by bowing its head” (Burkert 1966: 107). In The Bacchae it is Pentheus himself who asks to be placed on top of the fir tree, which is sacred to Dionysus. The god does as requested, places him on the tree, and disappears. Now, the sacrifice proper begins: “There is a prayer, a moment of silence and concentration; then all participants throw the (the barley) ‘forward’ at the victim and the altar” (Burkert 1966: 107). Accordingly, Dionysus speaks a “prayer”: “Women, I bring you the man who has mocked/at you and me and at our holy mysteries./Take vengeance upon him” (v. 1078.18). It is followed by a “moment of silence”–“The high air hushed, and along the forest glen/the leaves hung still, you could hear no cry of beasts” (v. 1084–5) – as well as by a “moment of concentration”: “The Bacchae heard that voice but missed its words,/and leaping up they stared, peering everywhere” (v. 1086–7). Then the women run towards the tree and begin to throw stones, branches, and their thyrsoi at Pentheus. As described by Burkert, all participants are involved.
According to Burkert, the participants form a sacred circle around the victim and the priest steps forward to begin the sacrifice as it is here done by Agave. “Now the fatal stroke follows. At this moment the women scream, …; this marks the emotional climax of the
