Abstracts

Jude Anderson

Director, Punctum Theatre (Aus)

Looking for the leash when the roof is on fire

“Tragedy is humanity torn from its quadruped position and held upright by a leash whose tyranny is known and whose will is ignored.”
French playwright Jean Giraudoux.

In today’s “whatever” world where all is relative, and reality and memory have little currency, where is the leash that defines the space of tragedy? Where all is relative, there’s no shared vision, no common myth, history, struggle, or conflict, which draws us to our feet. No more hubris, outrage, catharsis; no more cry of the buck. Instead the white-wash of media spin, suffocation of facts, overkill of information, the undermining of trust, and the loosening of tyranny’s grip on our view of the world.

As a director of contemporary performance in a “Post Dramatic” world, my ongoing investigation into “What keeps us standing?” is ultimately linked to Giraudoux’s definition of tragedy. Giraudoux’s definition offers a view of the space of tragedy that in a contemporary context begs the question “where’s the leash and what’s at either end?” It’s my search for a response to that question that informs how I grapple with the relevance of the space, place and form of tragedy today.

Jude Anderson is Artistic Director of Punctum (a new media and performance organisation based in Victoria).

Email: hq@punctum.com.au

Dr Anastasia Bakogianni

University of London (UK)

Electra in the Open: Michael Cacoyannis’ Electra (1961-2)

This paper will examine the ‘spaces’ of a cinematic version of the story of Electra: Michael Cacoyannis’ Electra (1961-2) based upon Euripides’ eponymous play. Cacoyannis wanted his film to be as close to the original play as possible, but he made one important change; he relocated the action out into the open. He used the ruins at Mycenae and the Greek countryside as his background. This translocation changes the emphasis of the original. Euripides’ prologue is unique in that it places Electra in the mean surroundings of a peasant’s hut. Cacoyannis restores her status by having her make her first appearance among the ruins of the palace of Mycenae. The Greek countryside is also presented in a heroic light and most of the action of the film takes place outside. This paper will look at examples where Cacoyannis’ use of space alters the emphasis of Euripides’ play. It will suggest that this was deliberate because as a Greek-Cypriot filmmaker Cacoyannis wished to visually link himself to Greece’s ancient past. This presentation will be illustrated by still photographs from the film.

Currently a Research Fellow of the Institute of Classical Studies in London Dr. Bakogianni is working on a monograph and teaching at the University of London during this academic year. Her interests include Greek Drama and its Reception, particularly Modern Greek Receptions, Women in Antiquity and Mythology. Previously she worked on a research project for the Arts and Humanities Research Council and liaised with them on the issue of funding for postgraduate training. Dr. Bakogianni holds a PhD in Classics from the University of London. The title of her thesis is: Aspects of Electra’s Reception from Ancient to Modern Times.

Email: Anastasia.Bakogianni@sas.ac.uk

Professor Richard Beacham (Keynote speaker)

Kings Visualisation Lab, Kings College, London (UK)

Architectural, Pictorial and Virtual Spaces: Theatrical Phantasia in Antiquity and Today

“Players and painted stage took all my love, and not those things that they were emblems of”. (Yeats, The Circus Animals' Desertion)

As scholars of ancient theatre, we are accustomed to concern ourselves with the “hard facts” of the material conditions of ancient stage architecture, settings, movement and performance. But ancient playwrights and their audiences created meaning and experienced performance in part through the “oculus mentis” of the imagination, and had developed highly sophisticated theories of visualisation. What actually took place in the imagination of the audience?

“Perceptions received by the ears or by reflexion can be most easily retained if they are also conveyed to our minds by the mediation of the eyes. With the result that things not seen and not lying in the field of visual discernment are earmarked by a sort of outline and image and shape so that we keep hold of as it were by an act of sight things that we can scarcely embrace by an act of thought!” (Cicero, De Orat. 2.87.357.

Ancient visual and cognitive theory was greatly concerned with such concepts as “phantasia”, the underlying vision, more real than mere mimesis, from which works of visual and theatrical art were fashioned, and the manner in which the viewer reconstructed that embodied vision in encountering the work of art. A duality of inner, outer, material and imaginative is always maintained in a sort of oscillation.

This paper will consider how – with the aid of modern digital visualisation technologies -- an attempt to understand the informing vision of such theatricalised artefacts as wall paintings, statues, the organisation of both public and private space, and accounts or evocations of scenic and mythic space can deepen our engagement with ancient theatre and its audiences.

Professor Richard Beacham is Professor of Digital Culture and head of the 3D Visualisation Group in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London. He was the co-ordinator and director of the Theatron Project, an EU sponsored online module comprised of numerous VR models and associated research materials for theatres, ancient and modern. Together with Prof. James Packer he directs the Theatre of Pompey Project, the first comprehensive scientific survey and investigation of Rome's earliest permanent theatre, which is currently engaged in an excavation at the site. He is also currently leading a 3-D visualisation-based research project on "The Body and Masks in Ancient Performance Space", sponsored by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Formerly at the School of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, Richard has worked on the application of advanced information technology, especially virtual reality, to the research and teaching of historic theatre sites and stage setting. He has also taught as a visiting professor at Yale and the University of California, and worked as a Resident Scholar at the J. Paul Getty Museum in California. While there he oversaw productions at the Getty Villa, Malibu, of ancient comedy presented upon a replica temporary stage based upon his research. He is an authority on ancient theatre, and has written The Roman Theatre and Its Audience (Harvard), and Spectacle Entertainments of Early Imperial Rome (Yale). He has also published translations of Roman Comedies (Methuen).

Professor Beacham is currently working with Dr Hugh Denard on the forthcoming publication, Performing Culture: Theatre and Theatricality in Roman Pictorial Arts (Yale Press, 2006). He is the English language authority on the work of the early twentieth century theatre designer and visionary theoretician, Adolphe Appia, on whom he has published three books, and numerous articles. His German language book on Appia, Adolphe Appia: Kunstler und Visionar des Modernen Theaters (Alexander Verlag) is appearing later this year.

Associate Professor Robin Bond

University of Canterbury (NZ)

Frogs in space

The paper will be about my production of my translation of Aristophanes’ Frogs in ‘05 in Christchurch. I will explore how the limited space in the theatre was used to represent firstly the journey of Dionysus and Xanthias to the underworld, through the use of the auditorium and of progressively descending painted flats. Some time will be spent on the solution of the ferry across the Styx and the “Frog” chorus and on the staging of the various sections of the journey down under. Secondly, I will demonstrate how the competition between Aeschylus and Euripides was mounted and the chorus members used both as bit part players and a lively critical on-stage audience responding to the various stages of the “agon”, providing a model of response for the audience proper. The paper will be illustrated with still photographs and a DVD of the production.

Grammar School educated in the north of England, undergraduate degree in Classics at the University of Nottingham (1963-66), appointed Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Classics at the University of Canterbury in 1966. Awarded PhD in Classics from Canterbury while working full time on the university staff. Currently Associate Professor in Classics at Canterbury. Teaching and research interests are Roman Satire and all aspects of Greek and Roman Drama, especially the translation, direction and performance of Ancient Drama for the modern stage. Have translated and directed some twenty plus ancient dramas over the last twenty plus years.

Email: robin.bond@canterbury.ac.nz

Dr J. H. Kim On Chong-Gossard

University of Melbourne (Aus)

Gendered Space in Greek Tragedy as Communication

Whilst most discussions of gender and space in Greek tragedy are based on physical dichotomies (exterior vs. interior, city vs. home), this paper suggests that gendered space on the tragic stage is also ‘created’ by communication between the fictional characters. Tragic space is ‘gendered’ when the communication or interaction between characters requires the exclusion of one sex. A male space is one that is represented as inaccessible to women, or in which women clearly do not belong. When women enter it, they apologize for their presence (Macaria in Heracleidae), or are pushed back by a male force (usually verbal, as in Antigone). Whenever female characters converse with each other in such a way that requires the absence of men, a female space is created, regardless of the physical nature of the fictional space they occupy. When men enter female space, their presence is either unwelcome (as in Medea), or the intruding men attempt to usurp the space as their own (Menelaus in Andromache). Euripides in particular often represents women engaged in intimate conversations, sharing knowledge to which men have no access. Most importantly, the invention of gendered spaces is vital to Euripides’ exploration of how women’s unique physical and social experiences shape their expectations of the world and their reactions to domestic crises.

J. H. Kim On Chong-Gossard (known as 'K.O.') is a lecturer in Greek and Latin at the University of Melbourne. A graduate of the University of Michigan in the USA, K.O.'s research and publications focus on gender and language in Euripides' plays, specifically the use of song and lyric metre as a female mode of communication. K.O. is also the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant for a project on Roman sex scandals, entitled 'Public and Private Lies: retelling the clash of duty, power and sexual indulgence in the Roman imperial court.'

Email: koc@unimelb.edu.au

Xan Colman

University of Melbourne (Aus)

Mythospolitik: Construction and Utilisation of the Theatrical Space of Myth in Christa Wolf’s and Heiner Muller’s Medea interpretations

Greek and Roman Theatre have enriched our dramatic landscape in many ways, including notably in the dramatic recording of myth and legend which, transposed across time, continue to occupy privileged space in our cultural canon. The perpetuity of dramatised mythology such as that of MEDEA, delivers the myth its own status of theatrical space, upon which or inside which contemporary practices of theatre and other art forms can be exercised. My brief paper proposes an examination of two German artists’ attempts at occupying the MEDEA space and transforming it into two new and contrasting performative spaces to politicised ends. Christa Wolf’s MEDEA.STIMMEN reduces the theatrically constituted myth-space back into novel on page. Heiner Müller’s MEDEASPIEL and VERKOMMENS UFER MEDEAMETRIAL LANDSCHAFT MIT ARGONAUTEN reduce the theatrical narrative established by the myth-space onto a newly fragmented stage. Both of these new spaces, as applied by Wolf and Müller, offer up a comparable politicisation of the mythical figure – and thereby the ancient form of her construction – as a contemporary symbol of system-critique.

Xan is a Melbourne based director and writer. Xan graduated from Melbourne University with honours degrees in Law and Arts, and Diplomas in Creative Writing and French, completing his German Honours dissertation on Heiner Müller’s reinterpretations of Greek myth. Recent directing highlights include Danielle Elisha’s Cross Purposes (2005 Short & Sweet Festival Melbourne – winner of People’s Choice Award), his own adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Robert Reid's Empire (2006 Adelaide Fringe & 2004 Melbourne Fringe – winner of Fringe special commendation award), and Heiner Müller's Die Hamletmaschine (Germanic Players/Openheart, 2000/2001, Melbourne/Germany tour, co-dir. M Hetzel). Xan is the Artistic Director of A IS FOR ATLAS.

Email: xan@aisforatlas.org.au

Murray Dahm

University of Sydney (Aus)

Performing Nero

The universal ‘fact’ known about the emperor Nero is that he fiddled while Rome burned. This has placed Nero at the forefront of popular conceptions and representations of ancient Greek and Roman performance. This paper examines the representations of ‘Nero the performer’ in opera, film, literature and art from 1642 to the present. It makes use of recordings (both historical and contemporary) and film. The portrait of Nero revealed by this material offers up several surprises to the historian. In opera especially, the image of Nero is not what we would expect; he is not necessarily the villain or the stereotypical tyrant or insane madman. Instead he is presented in a whole gamut of guises, in some of which historians would not recognise him. Nero and ancient performance practice were at the forefront of several artistic and cultural movements – Nero appears as the subject of the first historical opera and is amongst the earliest filmic subjects. ‘Nero the performer’ in these works reveals how his performances (and ancient performance more widely) has been understood and translated to the stages and screens of the world over the last 350 years.

Murray is studying a PhD in Roman military history but is also an opera singer who has sung and taught courses on opera in New Zealand and Australia. He has always wanted to combine his love of opera and interests as an ancient historian. Murray has taught many adult education courses on Opera history and delivered several lectures to groups around Sydney (WEA Sydney, CCE, the Northside Opera Study Group, the Sydney Opera Society, Opera Lunidy).

Email: mdah3206@mail.usyd.edu.au

Associate Professor Michael Ewans

University of Newcastle (Aus)

Translating Aristophanes - for actors, in the round

Translating Old Comedy for modern performance is a complex undertaking, much more difficult than the translation of Athenian tragedy. Over the past fifty years, translations into English by classical scholars have not been particularly successful, and as a result most of the few professional productions have used free adaptations. This necessarily leads to a less than satisfactory reception of Aristophanes by modern audiences.

This paper is drawn from the author’s experience in making new translations of Lysistrata, The Women’s Festival, Frogs and Acharnians, two of which have been performed; the other two are currently scheduled for performance later in 2006 and in 2007. First some principles and strategies for translating the text will be outlined, by which a modern version may attain as close as possible to the twin (and incompatible!) ideals of accuracy and actability; this will be followed by a discussion of how best to translate the performance – to re-create the Aristophanic experience for a contemporary audience as far as is possible, through the decisions the director makes about staging, blocking, casting, costume and music.

Michael Ewans is Associate Professor of Drama and Music at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He specializes in directing, writing libretti, translating Greek tragedy and comedy and writing books and articles which explore how operas and dramas work in the theatre. He has published a complete set of accurate and actable translations of Aeschylus and Sophocles in four volumes, with theatrical commentaries based on his own productions, and is currently working on an edition of three comedies by Aristophanes. In recognition of his achievements, Michael Ewans was elected in 2005 to a Fellowship of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Email: Michael.Ewans@newcastle.edu.au

Jason Freddi

Deakin University (Aus)

The Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Theatre: Architecture, Performance and Pastiche in the New Globe

The First Globe Playhouse was built in London in 1599. It burned down in 1613 and was rebuilt the following year. The Second Globe was pulled down in 1644. Evidence for the original design is scanty and the absence of solid facts has stimulated many varied reconstructive attempts, culminating in the design of the New Globe which opened in London in 1997.

This paper looks at the performance space of the Globe Theatre, asking what kind of performance seems to be demanded by the space. This is not a simple question. A look at some of the rejected proposals for the New Globe, reveals that the performance tradition of our own era prejudices our capacity to imagine the space of the theatre used in Shakespeare’s time. In the New Globe, we are assured that we have an authentic replica of the Second Globe. Is it then possible to produce authentic performance of the kind demanded by the space? Or does the architecture demand a kind of performance which cannot escape pastiche?

Jason is preparing a doctoral thesis on psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare. He has previously completed a Masters of Arts at Deakin University. Jason is deeply involved with Shakespeare in Melbourne. He is President of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society and has been a participant in two complete readings of the Shakespeare canon with that group; has co-produced two Melbourne Shakespeare Festivals and a number of Shakespeare’s plays; and is currently seeking support for the construction of a demountable Globe Theatre based in Melbourne.

Email: freddi@deakin.edu.au

Dr Ron Goodrich

Deakin University (Aus)

Present Performance, Past Playscript: James McCaughey’s Practice, James Moffett’s Principle

This paper aims to demonstrate that James McCaughey in practice and James Moffett in principle enable us to engage in a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between present performances and past playscripts. The first part of this paper, a contribution to reception studies, specifically focuses upon the directorial approach associated with McCaughey, founder of the Greek Theatre Project in the 'seventies. McCaughey's ways of dealing with ancient stage and script do not attempt to reproduce the physical conditions involved. Aside from theatre reviews, we admittedly confront a paucity of readily available writings of and interviews with McCaughey himself. Yet it is clear that he consistently re-stages ancient theatre in terms of the dual dimension of movement and sound in space. The second part of this paper, by contrast, contends that physical and mental space in theatre might be best construed in terms of differing degrees of distancing that hold between a writer and his or her subject and a writer and his or her audience. Behind this contention lie the currently neglected insights of 'writing process' theorist, James Moffett. By focusing upon the roles of playwright and director rather than that of actor alone, this paper re-assesses how theatre, ancient or modern, functions as a site of action.

R.A. Goodrich teaches in the School of Communication & Creative Arts at the Melbourne Campus of Deakin University. A co-editor and -convenor of "Double Dialogues" journal and conferences, he has also contributed articles and reviews in arts theory and practice to a range of publications, most recently "Literature & Aesthetics," "Journal of Aesthetic Education," "International Journal of Arts Management," "Double Dialogues," and the like.

Email: godric@deakin.edu.au

Dr Adrian Guthrie

University of South Australia (Aus)

Agamemnon - Bloody Thought (version 3), a solo performance

The private and the public grief of war are reflected in Aeschylus’ classic text, Agamemnon. It struck me quite personally, working in Britain in 1999 as NATO bombing systematically disassembled the civic infrastructure of the remaining portion of the state known for most of the 20th century as Yugoslavia, that Agamemnon served as a meditation on that grief.

I had visited various parts of the Balkans during the previous ten years of civil war, and felt I knew something of the complex, irreconcilable differences that fuelled a conflict born generations earlier. It prompted me to prepare a free verse English text of the play with encouragement from Canadian literary critic and classicist Lynette Bailey; and it was staged at Chester in 2000. This was a very physical performance with a rich vocal score by the composer Ben Broughton.

More recently I have thought of this as a recital work, and perform it solo like the shimai of the noh stage. It is a formal presentation with steps and text; it implies the full values of staging while being uncompromised as a telling of the narrative.

Director and playwright Adrian Guthrie teaches at the University of South Australia.

Email: Adrian.Guthrie@unisa.edu.au

Dr Jane Montgomery Griffiths

Monash University (Aus)

Performing Electra and the Space of Memory

This paper will explore the ways in which Sophocles’ Electra manipulates, and in turn, is manipulated by, the space of memory. Taking as its starting point the examples of Melrose’s reading of Deborah Warner’s 1988/9 RSC production of Electra (Melrose 1994), it will argue that, in both its fictional world and its theatrical incarnation, Electra operates within the disconnected realm of memory theatre (Malkin 1999). Just as the characters in the play recreate the past to build a present that is full of the hauntings and echoes of what has gone before, so too, in the mechanisms of understanding the play, the actor and critic reframe the past to contextualise it in an ever mutating interpretative context. Memory intrudes and extrudes, constructing the rememberer in a present that is, just like ‘the text’, full of ghostings and encrustations; constructing the play in a space that has less to do with the physical dimensions of the venue, than the imaginative possibilities of the memory.

Dr Jane Montgomery Griffiths has combined a career as an award winning actor and director in the UK with academic teaching and research in the UK and Australia. As an actor, she played Sophocles’ Electra for Compass Theatre Company’s UK tour. She has also directed Trojan Women and Sophocles’ Electra for the Triennial Cambridge Greek Play and has been the Judith E Wilson Fellow in Drama and the inaugural Leventis Fellow in Greek Drama at Cambridge University. Her current research is on the relationship between the experiential of performance and Greek tragedy in modern reception.  Jane is currently a lecturer in the Classical Studies Program at Monash University.

Email: jane.griffiths@arts.monash.edu.au

Professor Lorna Hardwick (keynote speaker)

(Open University, U.K.)

Cultural Spaces in the recent translation and performance of Greek Drama

This paper examines the relationship between ancient and modern play-texts, staging and theatre environment in shaping the cultural spaces in which performance is created and through which meaning is communicated and mediated. I discuss examples of the praxis associated with theatrical space as something that allows us access to what we see, hear and visualise during performance and suggest that theatrical space both informs and is complemented by the cultural space framed by ancient and modern spheres of reference. It is the overlap and sometimes collision between ancient and modern cultural spaces that electrifies performance and fuels its transformative capacity in contexts in which the spectators are increasingly seen as the realisers of meaning. Recognition of forgotten or marginalized spaces and the creation of new ones can disrupt linear or historical time frames and assumed geographical conjunctions and can involve the exploration of unexpected migratory paths.

In these processes Greek drama serves as a field in which different cultures can meet, contend, and create shared experiences, as well as understanding difference (‘commonality among the different’).

I shall test some possible models for mapping cultural spaces with reference to recent stagings of translations and adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, Ajax and Women of Trachis.

Professor Lorna Hardwick teaches at the Open University, UK, where she is Professor of Classical Studies and Director of the Reception of Classical Texts Research Project (www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays). Her publications in this field include Translating Words, Translating Cultures (2000), New Surveys in the Classics: Reception Studies (2003) and articles on modern receptions of tragedy and epic, especially in post-colonial contexts. She is currently working on a study of the relationship between classical receptions and broader cultural shifts.

Email: l.p.hardwick@open.ac.uk

Yvette Hunt

University of Queensland (Aus)

From Treading the Floor to Treading the Boards – the influence of ‘in theatre’ requirements on Pantomime’s reception in antiquity

Pantomime developed as a form of mime in classical society and shared its position in the Greek world as a sub-dramatic performance. I am proposing that a major contributing factor to the classification of dramatic or sub-dramatic performance is whether or not the genre of performance was mostly “in theatre” – that is requiring a theatre building for it to be staged properly – or “ex theatre” – that is not requiring a theatre building for its performative requirements.

This paper will discuss the idea of “in theatre” and “ex theatre” spatial requirements for performance and how these ideas influenced the classification of dramatic genres, especially pantomime. Pantomime changes from being a purely “ex theatre” to an “in theatre” genre in Rome, and I will discuss the influence this change has on the development of pantomime, both in a performative and social sense throughout both the Greek and Roman worlds.

Yvette is a PhD student writing her thesis on pantomime and imperial policy towards it and other forms of public entertainment in imperial Rome, and has been presenting papers on the topic at various conferences.

Email: y.hunt@uq.edu.au

Dr Ivar Kvistad

Deakin University (Aus)

The Atomic Bomb as Dea Ex Machinâ: Heiner Müller’s Medea

Heiner Müller’s Medea plays collectively offer one of the most radical modern reworkings of Euripides' canonical tragedy and the classical theatrical space. This paper examines Müller’s transformation of its Euripidean prototype, focussing on its formal innovations and political implications. Informed by his distinctive, theatrical methodology of ‘the theatre of images,’ Müller’s Medea plays are comprised of disjointed, visual and textual representations that are also fragmentations of theatrical space and narrative time. As well as being suggestive of the fractured nature and alienating effects of modernity, the fragmented form reinforces Müller’s politicisation of the gamut of failures to which modern alienation is integral to, and a product of: political corruption, imperialism, sexual inequality and environmental degradation.

While, like the work of Müller, the politics of Euripides' Medea have been subject to much contention, this paper will be arguing that this classical narrative lends itself to adaptation to address modern concerns: Müller’s Medea plays are yet another example of this. To commence its illustration of this point, the paper will compare the poetics of Euripides' dénouement with Müller’s climax. Euripides' play ends with a dea ex machina episode, where Medea transforms from a human character into a god-like figure in the chariot of Helios. Müller’s narrative ends with an atomic explosion: the mushroom cloud that has become iconic of modern atrocity. The paper will use this comparison as a point of departure for examining the various ways in which Müller transforms the spaces of Euripidean theatre. 

Ivar Kvistad teaches Literary Studies at Deakin University. His PhD, Radicalising Medeas, examined modern, politicising adaptations of Euripides' tragedy.

Email: kvistad@deakin.edu.au

Monika Läänesaar

University of Tartu (Estonia)

Repeated places

Throughout history, set design and scenography have repeated and recreated ancient theatre spaces. Based on the ideas of Vitruvius, an Italian Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio created the longest lasting convention in the history of theatre offering three basic types of sets. The conventions of his time called for actors to play on a narrow stage platform in front of a two dimensional perspective pictorial backdrop. Stage environment and theatrical person existed independently of each other. An important change in the relationship between theatrical person and stage environment was introduced by the 19th century and the “into the picture” or performing in the interior. Stage environment was no longer presented as a picture but constructed as a three-dimensional space, which included theatrical person.

The 20th century offered new approaches. Another possibility to create stage world was added to the scheme of creating reality inherited from the previous century: projections were integrated with the three-dimensional stage environment that created a unique co-existence of two places. Situation, where the theatrical person would be simultaneously in the stage world (three-dimensional stage) and out of it (projection in the three-dimensional space) often occurred. Therefore it can be maintained that the stage space created by projections re-introduced Serlioan stage aesthetics in a reformed language of expression. On the other hand, the instigation of projection lead to the growing obscurity of the term real place, for suddenly a physically non-existent place might strike as more real than a tangible one.

Monika Läänesaar has been a member of OISTAT (Organisation Internationale de Scénografes, Techniciens et Architects Théatre) History and Theory Commission during 1996-2006, and a member of FIRT (International Federation for Theatre Research) since 1997. She also serves as a managing director of Estonian Drama Agency and lectures in theatre history and scenography in the University of Tartu and Tallinn University. Currently she works on her PhD dissertation which concentrates on the question what is the impact of the changes in the visual thought of mankind on the theatrical conventions of different periods.

Email: mona@kul.ee

Assistant Professor Ellen Mackay

Indiana University (USA)

Fishes in the Archive: The Impossible History of the Naumachia

This paper explores the vexed relation between the real ground of theatre history and the textual records that chronicle that history. My subject is the sea spectacle or Naumachia, an entertainment that is often held up as the apotheosis of Roman decadence. When, for instance, Tigellinus devises a floating banquet in the midst of a basin that is stocked with “marine creatures of the Ocean” and “fancy boys” (Tacitus), the effect of relating such an episode is to remember its excess. My paper will explore the way this sort of offhanded report exceeds the realm of technical plausibility, rendering the anecdotal archive of Roman theatre history at odds with the material, archeological remains of the Roman Empire. What happens to the theatrical past when, say, Martial’s account of the quick change from a naumachia to a more earth-bound munus contravenes against the limitations of ampitheatrical plumbing? In other words, what do we make of a form whose textual record baffles any attempt at reconstruction? I argue that the historiographic problems that emerge from the naumachia are indicative of its phenomenology, for it seems to me no accident that the naumachia orchestrates its recollection as a matter that defies plausibility, practicability and verifiability, leaving us to struggle with a site in which the scholar’s method of rational witnessing cannot be sustained.

Ellen MacKay is an assistant professor of renaissance drama in the English department of Indiana University. She earned her PhD from the Theatre / English interdisciplinary doctoral program at Columbia University. She is currently completing her first book, Persecution, Pestilence and Fire: Anti-histories of the Early Modern English Stage. This paper comes from her second project, on Sea Spectacles from Nero to Wagner, which she is writing with the support of a Mellon post-doctoral fellowship from the Cornell University Society for the Humanities.

Email: emackay@indiana.edu

Associate Professor Platon Mavromoustakos

University of Athens (Greece)

Skénè v/s scena: producing ancient drama and reshaping performance space

Transformation of theatrical space is a central factor both for the developments in the art of directing and for the modern productions of ancient Greek drama. In performing ancient drama different models of theatrical space have been used with reference to the initial model of the open-air ancient Greek theatre. Exploring the possibilities offered by this initial model new demands aroused concerning all aspects of artistic forms determining the style of theatre performances and heightening the public interest. In this paper some dominant directing attempts will be examined through some major European productions in order to show under which circumstances this continuous dialogue, which centered on an exchange of views between theatre artists (i.e. directors and stage designers) and researchers (i.e. classics and archaeology), has led ancient drama performances in modern times from the traditional model of the Italianate performance stageto the model of the ancient Greek theatrethat resulted in the reshaping of theatres and performance spaces in recent theatre practices.

Platon Mavromoustakos has a degree in Law (University of Athens), Postgraduate degree and PhD in Theatre Studies, Institut d’Etudes Théâtrales, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III (1987) - supervised by Bernard Dort and Stathis Damianakos and he is a Professor at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens. He has collaborated with many theatres in Athens and has directed several research projects on the history of Modern Greek theatre, on the reception of Italian Opera and on ancient drama performances in modern Greece. He is member since 1997 of the coordination committee, of the European Network of Research and Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama Performances. From 1984 over 150 of his articles, essays or critics were published in Greece and other countries. He has published or edited several books and he is general editor of Moliere’s Complete Works in Greek. His most recent book Theatre in Greece 1940-2000: A survey, has been published in 2005.

Email: platon@theatre.uoa.gr

James McCaughey

Director (Aus)

The Oresteia at the Pram Factory, Melbourne, April 1974: a dialogue in the construction of theatrical space

The three plays of the Oresteia each represent a different form of theatre, and hence suggest a different relationship of audience to action. The challenge of presenting the trilogy in the Pram Factory, a long narrow space, was therefore not only one of the dialogue between it and the original Greek theatre, it also raised questions for the use of the modern space (which, unlike its ancestor was flexible) - the theatre taking three different shapes in the course of the evening in response to the needs of the three different plays.

Email: redfinch@netspace.net.au

Associate Professor Ann McCulloch

Deakin University (Aus)

Contemporary Tragedy: Is it a possible Art Form: Do we Deserve it?

Ann McCulloch is an Associate Professor and Associate Head of School at Deakin University in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. Mc Culloch's first book on Patrick White and Nietzsche set the stage for interests that continue to be dealt with in her writings: Tragic Theory; Philosophy and Literature and Psychological representations in literary texts. She has written extensively on the Life and Work of A.D. Hope including her recent book Dance of the Nomad (2005) which looks at his notebooks in the context of philosophy, aesthetics, poetics and biography. Ann Mc Culloch is the executive editor of the on-line journal Double Dialogues and along with Paul Monaghan and Dr. Ron Goodrich (co-editors) has edited, since 1996, seven issues on Arts Discourse (Theatre; Dance; Visual Arts; Writing). She has written, produced and directed documentary films and numerous theatrical productions including two of her plays: Orpheus Enflamed and Let Gypsies Lie.

Email: athena@deakin.edu.au

Kate McCulloch

University of Melbourne (Aus)

Classical Spaces in Contemporary Frames: Maintaining the heroic in the Representation of War

This paper will examine the use of theatrical space in War museums. It will explore the extent to which contemporary global politics veil the politics of revenge and violence within the classical tribute reserved for the heroic type. Representations of war whether paintings, dioramas, large sculptural displays and icons of the battle itself (tanks, weapons et al), are nevertheless conceived within a spacial relation that finds its source in Classical Tragedies. Drawing on Nietzsche's study of the birth of tragedy, in particular the dionysian and appollonian divide that came in the wake of socratic thought, this paper will demonstrate that the contemporary representation of war focuses on a misrepresentation of honour and heroism due to the cerebral nature of its construction. Furthermore it will examine the ways in which the theatrical constructions, although alluding to classical notions of honour in death, do not include elemental meanings of classical tragedy: enigma, values, and suffering that lead to enlightenment. This paper will focus on the Australian War memorial.

Kate McCulloch's honours thesis (University of Melbourne) included a study on photography and 9/11 with an interest in the way in which these artefacts approximated the sublime. Her current thesis is concerned with the representation of war in museums with an emphasis on The Vietnam war. McCulloch academic research works alongside her artistic practice as a photographer. She has exhibited her photographic works in three exhibitions and given lectures at the National Gallery of Victoria on her photography; a number of her photographs have been published in Art history journals and in the popular press. McCulloch is the director of DigitalProof. She also teaches in the School of Communication and the Creative Arts at Deakin University in Art Theory, photography, and 'Image and Text'.

Paul Monaghan

University of Melbourne (Aus)

‘When I look into space I see my imagination’: The tragic body in space

This paper takes the form of a series of thoughts and provocations about the possible performance style of Greek tragedy in antiquity. Starting from the dual challenge of, on the one hand, the danger of projecting our own understandings into the symbolic practices of another culture (let alone one partially lost in the past), and on the other hand, the warning from Nietzsche that ‘you can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present’, my discussion focuses on what Bert States calls ‘the word/scene ratio’ in performance. By this he means the symbiotic relationship between what the aural field (determined principally but not exclusively by the word in Greek tragedy) generates in the listeners’ imaginations, and what is manifested materially in the visual field. The ‘space of action’ in ancient tragic performance, I will suggest, was more in the mind than in the physical performance space (of whatever shape), and tragedy was written in antiquity more for the excitement of the ears than the eyes (as Aristotle tells us in his famous denigration of opsis).

The heightened physicality of the actor in this kind of performance style is nevertheless essential, for an ordinary body tends not to generate ‘action’ and associations in the minds of the spectators. Evidence for the physicality of the tragic body in antiquity is usually sought in the texts themselves, daily life, and vase paintings, but these locations are least likely to prove productive. Rather one must seek the tragic body in the requirements of masked performance and in the highly physical nature of 'the performing body' in Greek culture (including rhetoric, war and athletics).

Hysterical Realism and Beyond – Greek Tragedy on the Australian Stage

In this paper I offer a reading of the general trajectory of the production styles of Greek tragedy in Australia. I begin with a broad historical sweep from the mid nineteenth century to the early 1980s, a period dominated by ‘visitations’ to Australia by overseas stars. As an example of the lingering dominance of that context I analyse a 1984 production that exemplifies what I call ‘hysterical Realism’, a more or less realistic staging of canonical tragic text that rests on post-Hegelian assumptions about character and drama, and that has, by definition, little regard for a less realistic, more ‘poetic’ performance composition incorporating the physicality, choral dance and music of Greek tragedy. I then analyse in more detail three connected and highly physicalised productions, under the title of A Vision of the Void, by IRAA Theatre whose work exemplifies what I call ‘body-theatre’, that is, theatre in which the heightened and highly physicalised actor’s body is the principle carrier of theatrical experience and meaning. Finally I offer a brief analysis of a 2005 production called Black Medea, an Indigenous Australian adaptation of Euripides’ play. Although an impressive production and important from both a theatrical and postcolonial point of view, in some ways this production seemed to return to the dominant (colonial) model of ‘hysterical Realism’.

Paul Monaghan worked in professional theatre for many years before returning to the University. His research interests lie principally in the area of Greek and Roman theatre in performance, in both the ancient and the modern world, and Australian contemporary theatre practice. Paul is co-convenor and co-editor of the Double Dialogues conference and journal (http://www.doubledialogues.com), and co-convenor of the Dramaturgies project (http://www.realtimearts.net then go to 'Dramaturgies Now'), which examines dramaturgical practice in Australian theatre. He is currently combining these various interests in a major project on the reception of Greek tragedy in Australia.

Email: pmonag@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Patrick O’Sullivan

University of Canterbury (NZ)

Geographical and Political Space: the Idea of Sicily in Euripides' Cyclops

Satyr plays are typically set in distant (from Athens) locales and Euripides’ Cyclops is no exception. The Sicilian setting of this play of just over 700 lines is referred to at least 14 times, while Homer’s Odyssey 9 — Euripides’ main source for the tale of Odysseus’ blinding of Polyphemos ­— nowhere stipulates the location of the monster’s home. This paper explores ways in which Euripides makes the ‘Sicilian-ness’ of Polyphemos a key feature in his characterization for an Athenian fifth-century audience. Despite the sophisticated Hellenism of Sicily, Euripides makes the location carry overtones of despotism, tyranny, and even cosmic monstrosity in ways familiar to his audience. Sicily was known as a home to a number of sixth and fifth-century tyrants, including the infamous Phalaris; and Typhon, the great enemy of Olympian order, was finally imprisoned under Mt. Etna. The cannibalistic Polyphemos evinces many of these despotic and monstrous traits. As an ogre typical of satyric drama, who keeps the followers of Dionysos enslaved at the foot of Mt. Etna, he is thus far removed from the democratic Athenian polis on more than one level.

Patrick O'Sullivan is a graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge Universities, and is Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His chief areas of interest are Archaic and Classical Greek intellectual history, Greek drama, ancient aesthetics and psychological theories. He has published on Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Greek and Roman art, Pindar and Greek rhetorical theories, and is working on a commentary (with translation) on Euripides' Cyclops and major fragments of satyric drama to be published by Aris and Phillips.

Email: patrickosullivan@canterbury.ac.nz

Dr Kathleen Riley

The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Oxford (UK)

The Heroic Psyche as Tragic Space: Modern Manifestations of Euripides’ Herakles

Euripides’ Herakles remains one of the least familiar and least performed plays in the Greek tragic canon. Yet its impact on the history of ideas is undeniable, both as a compelling exploration of the irrational and a thought-provoking exploration of the heroic.

Contrary to its original essence, adaptors of the text since Seneca have tried to ‘reason’ or make sense of the madness of Herakles, often in terms of contemporary thinking on mental illness. Consequently, Herakles’ condition has been diagnosed according to Hippocratic humoral theory, psychoanalysis, and case studies in post-traumatic stress disorder.

This paper will consider several modern adaptations of Euripides’ Herakles between 1902 and 2005, and specifically their exploration of psychological space, what Hugo von Hofmannsthal termed ‘the uncertain cavernous kingdom of the ego’, through changing physical spaces (i.e. historical and theatrical settings).

The proposed time frame encompasses the first modern revival of Euripides on the European stage in the nervous climate of fin-de-siècle Vienna and a rock-and-roll musical, Hercules in High Suburbia, conceived a century later in New York’s Lower East Side.

Kathleen Riley has recently been appointed a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She is also a Postdoctoral Research Associate of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama. Her doctoral thesis, ‘Reasoning Madness: The Reception and Performance of Euripides’ Herakles’, is currently being prepared for publication in the Oxford Classical Monographs series at OUP. She is also editor-in-chief of Dionysus Recast: Ancient Drama on Modern Stages, a volume of essays being prepared for Legenda. In 2004 she published the authorized biography Nigel Hawthorne on Stage and is presently at work on a new theatre history on Fred and Adele Astaire.

Email: kriley@exemail.com.au

Meredith Rogers

La Trobe University (Aus)

Being Intimate in a Public Place

The directness and personal intimacy in the address of many of Euripides’ protagonists may seem at odds with the staging conditions of the theatre for which he wrote. It might be tempting to imagine he was writing, like Strindberg, for a theatre that didn’t exist yet: or even for a medium, since the infinite magnification of the smallest, most intimate gesture is something cinema takes in its stride.

In fact issues of scale are always to the fore when thinking about staging Euripides’ plays. Sometimes the agonising awkwardness of the fit between the specificity of the human emotions expressed and the largeness of delivery required in a theatre for 15,000 people must be the point.

Contemporary stagings seldom take place in theatres with such capacities. How then should we vary the focal length of our playing? What is the nature of the intimacy enacted? What occurs in the emotional space between actors and audience? And how might that space best be configured in contemporary circumstances? The discussion will focus on some actual and/or possible contemporary stagings for scenes from several plays including Hippolytos, Iphigeneia in Aulis and Alcestis.

Meredith Rogers is a director ,designer and sometime performer. She received the 2002 Ewa Czajor Memorial award for a woman director and her production of Breath by Breath in 2003 was nominated for a Green Room Award for best Production, Fringe. She teaches theatre and performance at La Trobe University and her current research project is focused on the transformational relationship between actor and chair on stage.

Email: m.rogers@latrobe.edu.au

Professor Suzanne Said

Columbia University (USA)

Athenian Space in Greek Tragedy

The purpose of this paper is to place Athens and Attica in the mental map of Greek tragedy. It focuses on the Attic plays which are located in Athens (second part of Aeschylus’ Eumenides), in Attica (Euripides’ Heraclidae [Marathon], Suppliants [Eleusis], and Sophocles ‘Oedipus at Colonus), but also in Delphi (Euripides’ Ion) for the sake of comparison.

Athens will be defined as a scenic space as well as an off stage direction to be comprehended in its relation to the other places that are part of the imaginary space of each play. I distinguish the plays where the local deme is more or less obliterated by the city (Heraclidae) from those where the deme has a well defined identity (Suppliants) or nearly obliterates the city (Oedipus at Colonus). I also oppose the symbolic portrait of Athens as a welcoming city in the Suppliant plays to the autochthonous Athens of the Ion and its hostility to foreigners.

Suzanne Said is a Professor in the Department of Classics at Columbia University. She received her doctorat d'etat in 1979 from the University of Paris-Sorbonne. She taught as a tenured associate professor (1969-1980) at Sorbonne. She was also professor at Universities of Grenoble, Strasbourg, and Paris -Nanterre. She has written books on Greek tragedy (la faute tragique, 1978, Sophiste et tyran ou le problème du Prométhée enchaîné, 1985), Homer ( Homère et l’Odyssée 1998), Greek mythology (Approches de la mythologie grecque 1993), She has published many papers on philosophy and Greek literature (archaic and Hellenistic poetry, tragedy, comedy, history and ethnography).

Email: ss94@columbia.edu

Professor Frank Sear

University of Melbourne (Aus)

The shape of the ancient theatre

This paper reviews the changing views about the shape of the orchestra in the Greek theatre and argues that there is a lack of archaeological evidence for the circular orchestra in the 5th century BC. It also looks at the question of the raised stage and when it first appeared. It argues that Polycleitos the Younger may have designed the theatre at Epidauros around 350 BC. The shape of the Greek theatre is contrasted with that of the Roman theatre. In conclusion a brief mention is made of the Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza and the Teatro Farnese at Parma and how the shape of Renaissance theatres rapidly changed from the Roman type of theatre on which the were originally based.

Frank Sear is a graduate of Cambridge University, where he also took his Ph.D. He was scholar at the British School at Rome and Cotton Fellow before becoming Lecturer and later Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide. He was appointed Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Melbourne in 1991. He is a former Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His books include Roman Wall and Vault Mosaics, Roman Architecture and Roman Theatres.

Email: fsear@unimelb.edu.au

Helen Slaney

University of Melbourne (Aus)

Murders and Monsters and Thunderbolts: Seneca in performance

The performability of Senecan drama has often been a contested issue. Concentrating on Medea and Phaedra, this paper will outline some of the difficulties identified in staging and interpreting these plays, and the solutions already inherent in the scripts. Both tragedies present significant challenges for a transition from written text to live performance, but nothing for which a representation could not be devised.

Firstly, I will consider the options for staging these plays in their ancient context, focusing on how the texts anticipate the range of available venues, their restrictions or resources, the stylistic conventions available to a director and the expectations of an audience. I will then compare the equivalent options open to a twenty-first century company, taking as a case study a recent production of the Phaedra. Although the two contexts present radically different constraints, Seneca’s scripts are nevertheless equally congenial to both, as they already incorporate a flexible definition of performance space and of what might constitute a theatrical event.

Helen has almost completed Honours at the University of Melbourne. For the past three years, she has been involved in running a student theatre company specialising in ancient drama.

Email: h.slaney@ugrad.unimelb.edu.au

Dr Peter Snow

Monash University (Aus)

Antigone in Australia

Antigone in performance has a rich history as a site of political resistance (Hall, Macintosh and Wrigley 2004). A recent production in Australia, adapted and directed by Peter Oyston and performed at the Alexander Theatre at Monash University by the new Graduate Ensemble of the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, used the treatment of refugees as a focal point. Julian Burnside QC introduced the opening night performance by speaking about “unsafe laws” and listed several recent examples in Australia. I will present a performance analysis of this production, concentrating on spatial and other visual accommodations in the mise-en-scene. These were determined partly by the parameters of the performance place, partly by the exigencies of the company, partly by the shape and dynamics of the adapted text, partly by the embodied fictional spaces introduced by the scenographer, and partly by the directorial vision of mediatised representation as a choric device. I will present selected images of the production, in the form of video extracts and/ or photographic stills, in support of the analysis.

Peter Snow is a theatre artist and academic. Since reading Medicine and then Philosophy and Psychology at Oxford, he has worked on over 60 professional productions in Europe, Asia and Australia. He recently performed in the Embrace project in Kolkata, wrote and directed a version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for performance in Dresden, and made a new work Four Grand Narratives for Melbourne and Sydney. Recent research projects include TheatrePerformsCulture, an ARC study of artist-audience relations. He has also written articles on embodiment, contemporary theatre, methodologies of performance making and directing.
Peter is currently Head of the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University.

Email: Peter.Snow@arts.monash.edu.au

Giulia Torello

University of Nottingham (UK)

Titanic resilience: immobility and use of scenic space in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound

In a conference that examines the ‘spaces’ of ancient theatre, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is undoubtedly an exemplary case study. Arguably, the presence of Prometheus throughout the play affects the perception of space at various levels. First of all, it determines Prometheus’ own relation with the space around him, as much as his interaction with the other characters. Secondly, Prometheus’ immobility has dramatic consequences, for it compels Aeschylus to insert dynamic scenes in his story line. Thirdly, his static presence restricts, so to speak, the acting space by converging the attention of the audience to a focal point. Moreover, the theatrical space also bears geographical connotations. The protagonist is confined to the edge of the world, in a no man’s land that transcends space and time. My analysis of the ‘spaces’ in Prometheus Bounds terminates with a brief reference to Prometheus Enantiodromon (Prometheus Retrogressing), a cinematographic version of the playby Greek director Kostas Sfikas. As I shall illustrate, Sfikas’ original reading of Prometheus Bounds lies in his conceptualisation of the tragic space by means of cinematographic techniques and visual imagery.

Email: julit2001@hotmail.com

Dr. Dmitry Trubotchkin (keynote speaker)

Head, Historical Sociology and Economics of the Arts, State Institute for Arts Studies; Head, Scholarship and Research, Russian Academy for Theatre Arts, Moscow (Russia)

‘Close relations’ between antiquity and the avant-garde: transformations of the classical theatre space in the twentieth century

In this paper I would like to examine the fact that the most notable and successful performances of ancient drama in Russia (and also some countries in Europe) in the twentieth century were produced not by the “mainstream”, but the avant-garde theatre tradition and nearly always implied experiments with the performance space. Thus, the twentieth century well established an interesting and paradoxical affinity between the classical theatre (Greek and Roman) and directors/designers with the reputation of “non-classical” or even “contra-classical”. The main reason for this is the general feeling of the twentieth century that ancient classics easily eludes the grasp and therefore it is not simple to approach it: it requires experiments, investigation, non-traditional spatial practices etc.

The history of the performances of Greek and Roman drama in Russia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is quite suggestive to understand the transformations of classical space in modern theatre. So the paper is based on a few characteristic examples from the Russian theatre theory/practice to show how famous theatre practitioners – Meyerhold, Tairov and others – interpreted the ancient theatre space in their experiments and productions. I shall also take into account some recent productions and the results of my work with theatre designers and directors at the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts during the term dedicated to ancient drama.

Dmitry teaches History of Ancient Culture and Art, and History of the Greek and Roman Theatre. His research interests include the ancient theatre, classical arts and literature, theatre theory, and the reception and interpretation of the classics through the ages. He has presented at conferences around the world on the reception of Greek and Roman theatre in Russia.

Email: theatron@rol.ru

Bronwyn Tweddle

Victoria University (NZ)

Terrorism and Democracy: the Oresteia in recent cultural 'spaces'

German theatre director Peter Stein's productions of classic plays successfully comment upon contemporary social situations precisely because he resists gimmicky updating of the text. He is committed to finding an appropriate 'space' for the actor-audience relationship to encourage a deep engagement with the plays and the messages they have for us today.In this paper, however, my focus will be on how the 'place' of performance is broader than the architectural relationship of performer and spectator, but is rather the wider culture of the country in which the play is mounted: philosophical attitudes, theatrical traditions and values. Stein's Oresteia productions of 1980 in Germany and 1994 in Russia will be compared to explore how the 'place' of both geographical location and historical timing affect the way the actors and director collaborate and the meaning the meaning audiences may attribute to The Oresteia in light of their socio-political environment.  

Bronwyn is a theatre director and dramaturg, who has been a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington since 2001. Her research and teaching interests include: physical theatre methodologies; theories of acting and directing; and 20th century German-language performance. She is a core member of the teaching staff on the Masters of Theatre Arts in Directing co-taught by VUW and Toi Whakaari:NZ Drama School. Recent professional directing credits include: Frank Wedekind's Lulu (2005) and Heiner Mueller's Quartett (2006). Bronwyn has dramaturged several professional productions and has created three bilingual play adaptations. She has been an Executive Board member of Playmarket: NZ’s Playwrights' Agency and Script Development Service since 2002.

Email: Bronwyn.Tweddle@vuw.ac.nz

Dr Ashley Wain

Director (Aus)

A World Full of Gods: Experiencing Archetypes and the ‘Second Plan’ in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon

This paper describes elements of a production of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon I directed with acting students at the University of Ballarat. My approach drew on ‘Active Analysis’ and the actor training and rehearsal methods of Maria Knebel, as well as archetypal identifications in the neutral mask, associated with the French acting tradition originating with Jacques Copeau. Knebel’s methods emphasize the ‘second plan’ – the entire realm of experience that lives in ‘the zone of silence’ beneath the words of the play. In the Greek theatre, the second plan is ‘full of gods’; archetypal principles and personas are living forces in the inner space of the actors/characters. This paper describes how I used the neutral mask to mediate deep and specific experiences of archetypal principles, as well as the physical and spatial exercises through which the actors came to experience these archetypes as meaningful forces constellating both the inner space of the play and the physical space of the Greek theatre. I discuss the dynamic relationship that emerged between physical and imaginal space, and how this affected the actors’ psychophysical experience. The presentation may include the opportunity to participate in a spatial constellation involving Aeschylus’ characters and particular Gods/archetypes.

Ashley Wain trained at VCA and with Leonid Verzub (a long-term student of Maria Knebel). He has worked as an actor, director and teacher in professional theatre since 1994, performing many major roles for The Hole in the Wall in Western Australia. He trained for three years with Stanislav Grof, one of the founders and chief theoreticians of transpersonal psychology. His recently completed doctoral thesis used transpersonal theory to examine how the techniques of the Stanislavski and Copeau traditions orient actors toward experiences of essence, presence and archetype. He is currently Lecturer in Acting at Charles Sturt University in NSW.

Email: awain@csu.edu.au

Professor David Wiles

Royal Holloway, University of London (UK)

Arguments about space – what are the underlying issues at stake?

My paper will reflect upon old arguments about the existence of a stage and the shape of the auditorium in the fifth century. My concern will be with why these questions matter, and how they affect our understanding of what the plays mean. I shall argue that archaeological reconstructions always reflect the taste of the present.

David Wiles is Professor of Theatre and Head of the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway University of London. His major contributions to the study of performance space are Tragedy in Athens: Performance Space and Theatrical Meaning (1997) and A Short History of Western Performance Space (2003) - both published by Cambridge University Press.

Email: D.Wiles@rhul.ac.uk