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15. DISPLACING GREEK DRAMA IN THE MODERN WORLD
Panel Convenors
Giogio Ieranò (Università degli Studi di Trento) [giorgio.ierano@lett.unitn.it]
Maria do Céu Fialho (University of Coimbra - Centre of Classical and Humanistic Studies) [mcfialhofluc@gmail.com]
Fernando García Romero (University Complutense of Madrid) [fgarciar@filol.ucm.es]
Sara Troiani (Laboratorio Dionysos della Univ. degli Studi di Trento)
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Understanding the experience of human time and the action of 'being in time' is a necessity and desire that has always enlivened Man - a need and desire that are impossible to satisfy, with no direct answer to an incessant question, that of anthropological identity itself. The answer, however, appears, plurifaceted, polysemic, returning questions and generating astonishment, fascination, consternation - a response mediated by myth, as a space for imagery and projection of fundamental experiences, poured into the narratives of the action of others. The myth-narrative creates the necessary distance from the listener's specular perception, which is seen in it.
Aristotle already recognized, in his lessons on Poetics, the privileged status that drama enjoys, in its mythical-narrative nature, as a mimesis of human action. Ricoeur, in turn, in Temps et Récit, establishes with Aristotle a fruitful hermeneutic dialogue that transports to contemporary times the importance and anthropological value of dramatic mimesis, as it opens up to the man of the western world in an identity crisis, marked by wars, totalitarianisms, systems alienating economic, denial of matrices, a space-fictional time that condenses his own experiences, anguish and blindness, finitude, and allows him to recognize himself in the performed action, by a process of appropriation of the action (mimesis 3).
The universality of the Classics, in the present case of the Greek myth embodied in drama, has a very peculiar nature: it is a drama in which each author concatenates a fixed nucleus of myth-elements that are part of the Greek cultural heritage and identify a myth, associated with variable elements, so that the whole of the work represents, in turn, the projection of the playwright's worldview and experience of time and world. This is, for Ricoeur, the level 1 of mimesis. Level 2 will be that of representation itself.
Now this dramatic narrative thus constitutes a language that, belonging to the root of our culture and our identity, contains, on the other hand, the ability to, through its universality, offer itself to later centuries as a language that says and stages man in action of all time. Hermeneutic appropriation, in a specific dimension of creation, attests to this. Antigone, for example, Antigone-martyr as seen by romantics, will become resistant to all totalitarianisms; Medeia, the betrayed barbarian, will see her features of a foreigner misunderstood over those of an infanticide in a contemporaneity that is said to be multicultural but struggling with extreme weaknesses in the relationship with the Other that settles in its land.
Moreover, the studies on the performative aspects of ancient Greek drama and its theorising within the Western culture have had a great influence on theatre practitioners too. From the appropriation of the ritual roots of the ancient theatre to the re-invention of the Greek chorus for the modern stage, actors and directors have explored the artistic potential transmitted by the tradition, even adding a deeper interpretation to the ancient texts thanks to the practice of mise en scéne.
It is this inexhaustible capacity that the Greek drama has to transfer with actuality and power to express and mirror the conflicts, the anguish, the questions of the modern man that we intend to bring to the discussion, through the presentation of conferences dedicated to the contemporary drama of Greek inspiration, particularly in the Mediterranean area, and to the staging of ancient Greek dramas and its re-writings as a mean to elaborate new dramatic and performative experiences within the modern theatre itself.
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A - These are the topics for the participation in this panel:
1- Re-writing Greek drama;
2- Modern drama of Greek inspiration;
3- Greek drama on modern stages;
4- Greek drama in modern society;
5- Theory of reception and re-writing;
6- Hermeneutic dialogue with Greek dramatic mimesis.
B - Proposals must be sent to:
Maria do Céu Fialho - mcfialhofluc@gmail.com
C - Congress languages: English, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish.
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D - Duration of papers: 20 or 40 min.
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Abstracts should have:
- Title of communication
- University
- Abstracts (max 250 words)
- Keywords (5 to 10 words)