Hannah Gaff
Poor Theatre, Biomechanics, and Alienation - Oh My!: Bridging the Intercultural Divide in the Modern Performance of Ancient Greek Tragedy
A central challenge in modern productions of ancient Greek tragedy is that contemporary audiences do not possess the cultural competence that was integral to the original ritual context of Greek drama. This project explores how a contemporary audience can tap into its experience with ritual processes in order to inform its response to Greek tragedy. Scholarship on the reception of tragedy has been largely historical in the sense that scholars describe and interpret particular instances of dialogue between antiquity and modernity—how individual translators, theatrical practitioners, and artists interpret ancient Greek drama. By contrast, this project approaches that dialogue of cultures as an emergent process in the crucible of performance, the theatre itself. Drawing from physical approaches to performance proposed by theatrical practitioners who reinvented the actor-audience interchange (including Jerzy Grotowski, Vsevold Meyerhold, and Antonin Artaud), the project will generate a style of theatre that overcomes cultural dissonance between contemporary audiences and the original context of ancient Greek tragedy. The ultimate outcome of the project is the performance of an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Furies (created during the comprehensive workshop phase of the project), on December 7, 8, and 9 at Grand Valley’s Louis Armstrong Theatre. The project will then evaluate how successfully the intercultural strategies for producing The Furies, established a ritualized theatre environment in which the audience is engaged. A paper discussing the outcomes of the project will be presented at the American Society for Theatre Research meeting in November of 2007.
Faculty Mentors: Ian Borden and James Wells
UPDATE:
Hannah's project has been published in THE MERCURIAN, vol. 1, no. 3
Hannah presented at the American Society for Theatre Research Confererence November 15-18, 2007 in Phoenix, AZ.
Page last modified July 14, 2009
