341-1
November 4, 2003
What We’re Doing
The Athenians invented—or raised to heights of excellence—competitive sports, the art of sculpture, public debate. Early in the quarter I suggested that you get busy learning (assimilating into your very muscles and heartbeat and breath) some of the aspects of these elements of Athenian culture and by extension of all Athenian art.
Sports
Opposing forces in direct conflict: wrestling
Resistance to forces: javelin and discus throwing
Balance: javelin, wrestling, high jump and broad jump
Pursuing these activities in a public arena (if you can’t do it actually, do it imaginatively) will also give you that extra dimension of public awareness, both spatial and human, that is essential for the Athenian tragedies. Keep working on ways to literalize this aspect. I have suggested such metaphors and The World Court or CNN has its cameras trained on you, etc.
Fifth Century Sculpture
All of the elements mentioned for athletics play into the Athenian sense of sculpture, another public art (not a private museum affair) of the Greeks. I suggested that you study statues, work to embody them, to bring them to life in response to the stimuli that have led them to the position of the statue. Note in sculpture: the removal of the unnecessary, the trivial neuroses that contemporary art focuses on.
Work toward dramatic characterization using this model of the sculpture: imagine a statue of Agamemnon just as he decides whether or not to take that first step onto the tapestries; turn yourself into a statue of Electra just as she realizes that the man before her is Orestes. And remember: the Athenians painted their statues bright colors, jewels for eye irises, etc. Opposition, resistance to forces, balance, clarity of line, essential elements.
The warm-ups that Nicole and Greta and J. Lauren and Hannah have done, especially the yoga-based ones, have encouraged you to explore opposition and the healthy, vital interplay between forces in opposition in your body: the left shoulder is pulled down while the right lifts up against it; the spine is pulled backward while the shoulders reach forward, etc. The paired warm-ups today (Tuesday) were terrific: opposition, balance, resistance, in action, in dynamic movement and response to partner.
You could take principles of sports, of sculpture, of yoga and today’s paired warm-ups and turn them into rhythmic movement and dance, which would eventually form the basis of choreography of individual choruses. Imagine/create the dance of Medea as she responds to the messenger; the Oedipus dance/movement as he discovers the final piece of his who-am-I puzzle. Etc.
Bring your bodies, your physical/human totalities alive to the great magnificent oppositions at work in the Athenian theatre: a circular dancing space surrounded on three-fourths of its perimeter by an expanding cone of seats up the rising hillside. On the far side a platform for the palace. A doorway. On either side, entranceways from the city, from the country. Entrances must be made on the run or at least with growing momentum until the character bursts into the orchestra place—the courtyard before the palace most of the time. And every response must be intensified and extensified up and out. No intimate, private, inner-directed angst. Action, response, fired from within, aimed up to the heavens and out to the horizon. Work on this.
The plays were played up to the heavens and out to the horizon—literally. The concerns motivating these plays had to be deep enough, passionate enough, to animate human beings up to the skies and out to the horizon—literally. Philoctetes reaches across the dancing floor (not a palace courtyard but now the rough area outside his cave) to Neoptolemus, who stands thirty feet away. Part of Philoctetes is pulled toward his cave, part reaches to Neoptolemus, part is already lifting itself toward the ship that will carry him home. (Improvise/create these forces until they play fully, vibrantly upon your human totality—and with the invigorating joy of the public performer.) Neoptolemus reaches toward Philoctetes (from the balls of his feet up through his spine, into his upper torso, out the arms to his hands comes the strong, positive pull) while his heart faces the skies, the gods, to ask: Can I do this deceitful thing? Part of him wants to run to the ship with the bow, part wants to lift Philoctetes and beg his forgiveness, etc. etc. And all are powerful enough forces to pull the characters out to the horizon and to lift them up to the skies….
Public Debate
The Athenians invited any citizen to come to the public assembly (again, outdoors, Investigate the implications of this reality for your acting/creating.) and to speak on issues of moment to the polis. The Athenians prized the ability to speak, to debate, to persuade, to present ideas publicly and compellingly. They valued the man (Not women: When Clytemnestra speaks so convincingly at Agamemnon’s arrival, she performs a male act—a transgression.) who developed skill in public speaking (Jason carries this skill to smarmy extremes. Odysseus in Philoctetes has become the deceiver he is known as in the Greeks’ histories of themselves.)
Work to develop your abilities to do these:
Point-counterpoint
You present your case, I present mine.
Then: cross-examination
Look up rhesus and stichomythia.
Discover the basis for these rhetorical forms in real human interaction.
As we literalized Monday with our ‘Cosmic Abacus’ illustration (By the way, when we discover/work on such an active metaphor, you incorporate it into your work. There was little evidence of this work in today’s presentation of the same scene): What is the objective of public debate? What are the mini-goals along the way to that final objective? (In the same way, you can analyze a play: What does it get to? What’s the final curtain? How does each sequence reach mini-climaxes on the way in a direct line to the final climax?)
Combine physical opposition and conflict with vigorous, passionate public debate—and we approach the form that these one-on-one scenes take in the plays. The strict form of debate (and the so-called classical form of the plays themselves) is necessary to contain (and to give communicating form to) the violent, mighty passions that come into direct conflict in these situations. (War was hand-to-hand combat experience for the Greeks, not the button-pressing missile launching technology of today.)
And in the middle of such interactions, characters have the power of their own convictions to spread their arms wide and to hold back the forces while they make huge realizations. The world stops for a moment during a realization. Or rather, a human being stops the world for a moment to try to grasp what is happening to and around him/her—an act that often needs words in the attempt to grasp the enormity of what is happening.
I’ve written all this to give you specific illustrations of the form to cast your work into, of the embodiment form in actual space that the concerns behind the plays are reaching toward. About those concerns: I’ve suggested this quarter that the actor must be motivated by a concern for the world today that matches in passion the concern that consumed Sophocles for his Athens behind Philoctetes, that must have fired Euripides as he wrote Trojan Women. Behind both of these plays are the Athens Greeks who, in pursuing a war or wars that not everyone saw as fundamentally essential anyway, had given up their essential values in order to win. Trojan Women appeared the year that Athens conquered the island of Miletus, slaughtering its citizens, raping the women, enslaving the children—and all because Miletus questioned the Athenian mandate for others to pay tribute to Athens for its military protection from the evil empire of the Persians.
Sound familiar?
Out of such concerns come the plays. Out of the plays come the characters who individually embody fully (think through this phrase) one of the forces powerfully at work in the world of the play.
This idea sits behind the extremes I have pushed people to in creating Electra and Clytemnestra. Full embodiment of the basic driving force of the character. Work on this concept. Make it your own thinking. Roll it around in your mind. Let it activate your behavioral work to learn, to discover, to assimilate.
Philoctetes is a man with a great human power to win a war, a man with a great gift—wounded, crippled, stained, disabled, exiled.
Clytemnestra’s spine lifts, thrills to the touch of Aegisthus, her arms dance with the feel of fine silks as they move over them—whose tongue delights in the taste of …what? Whose kinesthetic muscle sense quivers in joy at…what? Create Clytemnestra with fully total embodiment of the basic driving force of her character first. Then: ….the Dream threatens that. An external force from the gods threatens to smash all this life she has built up and which is her basic driving force. Suddenly the wailing, scrabbling Electra is not just a peripheral annoyance to be kicked aside or locked in a cellar. Suddenly: What if the gods (Apollo) are listening to Electra?
And so she decides to take action.
Electra is not passive.
She wastes no time feeling sorry for herself.
She knows about the dream.
Her heartbeat has quickened.
She senses that maybe the time has come.
She goes on heightened alert.
And—BAM—Clytemnestra appears to make an offering to Apollo.
Electra immediately goes into action, Which Clytemnestra must immediately squash—
BUT
It’s in the public arena.
People are watching.
The gods are alerted.
Values in Western Culture come in conflict and Western Culture hangs in the balance.
What to do, each of you, in order to win your case?
Create Realities
Create with Realities
Choose stimuli, realities, that will reach the necessary distance and magnitude of the form Athenian tragedy takes.
And along the way these plays will free you to respond, free you to reach up and out, which all acting in the theatre demands, free you to develop your own capacity for concern for humanity which has always motivated the great drama of the world, free you to become the artist you want to be, free you to discover and embody the astonishment of living which all drama roots itself in—the mystery of being human which is the bedrock of great theatre.
Reach for this.
Begin with deep passionate concern in your heart and soul and spirit and reach up to the sky and out to the horizon.
Discover something about yourself.