Time goes quickly; we are one week away from fin­ish­ing the sem­i­nar!

Since com­ing to Epi­dau­rus, we’ve spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time rehears­ing for our per­for­mance. Our hotel, Hotel Magda is 40mins away from the neari­est town. There is noth­ing nearby but a beach, the Aegean sea and a beau­ti­ful gar­den. As Tim aptly put it, we are on a “retreat”. We have plenty of space here for brain­storm­ing and reflection.

Indeed, Epi­dau­rus has def­i­nitely proved to be con­ducive for the­atre work. We have had many great the­atre per­for­mances pre­sented this week. This morn­ing we saw really good sec­ond drafts: Julia’s speech as Cas­san­dra, Juliete’s speech as Madea, Cather­ine and Mary Lou’s adapted scene from Frogs, Savan­nah speech as Clytarnes­tra, Cather­ine and Kanoa’s slang poem on Prome­bius Bound.

Later in the evening, we saw an adapted ver­sion of Clouds by the National Greek The­atre. Michael gave us an brief talk on the per­for­mance and com­edy before we went there. A few high­lights of the points he made:

–Unlike tragedy, ancient Greek com­edy always needs to be adapted to be understood.

–Clouds ridiculed Socrates and the play was thought to be one of the rea­sons that led to the trial of Socrates

–Com­edy was deemed less respectable to tragedy. This is in some sense still true today; Oscar best come­dian award is always given last.

–Com­edy and tragedy the­atre were thought to be really dif­fer­ent in ancient Greece. Young males had to take part in the cho­rus of a tragedy to become a man in the society.

–How­ever, nowa­days the Aristo­phanic spirit often creeps in, i.e. peo­ple have the incli­na­tion to turn a tragic play to a comedic one. Rachel has writ­ten a play on the house­hold of Menelaus and Helen in an urban set­ting after their voy­age from Troy. Annika has writ­ten a play on Menelaus after Helen left Sparta for Paris.

–A few quotes that Michael men­tioned: “Com­edy is tragedy in the long shot”, “This world is a tragedy for those who feel, com­edy for those that think.”

The Clouds per­for­mance was mag­nif­i­cent. The cos­tume and set were def­i­nitely more extrav­a­gant than what we saw in Oedi­pus the Rex. The clouds wore white dresses and tall hat, everyone’s faces were pow­dered in white,  Phidip­pi­des had a punky hair wig, Socrates also had wig of long blond hair tied up etc. Although we did not get most of the jokes that the actors made –since it was in Greek, we could tell from all the laugh­ters from the audi­ence that the plot was very enter­tain­ing. Some­thing that sur­prised some of us was the use micro­phones. The Epi­dau­rus the­atre had the best acoustics amongst other out­door the­aters, yet there were two micro­phones on stage that actors con­sis­tently used.

Tomor­row, the actors from Clouds will be com­ing over to our hotel to talk to us. So we will get to learn more about what we saw tonight!

Ear­lier this week, the cho­rus direc­tor of the National Greek The­atre, Tsala­houris Phili­pos, also came over and gave us a work­shop on the use of cho­rus in Greek tragedy. He talked to us a bit about how direc­toap­peased to think of cho­rus and told us that it ini­tially seemed like a big prob­lem to direc­tors because it is present on stage through­out the entire per­for­mance. How­ever, Tsala­houris said that there are actu­ally ways a cho­rus can help bring out the ele­ments in the play. By estab­lish­ing the role of cho­rus, we can fur­ther define a char­ac­ter through his rela­tion­ship with the cho­rus. The cho­rus can pro­duce sim­ple rhyth­mic sounds in the back­ground to set up the ten­sion or the atmos­phere of the scene. Since the cho­rus rep­re­sent a more or less  uni­form entity, their move­ments need to be uni­fied.  Tsala­houris taught us how birds were enacted in Aristo­phanes’ play Bird, as well as farm­ers and old war­riors in other plays. We learnt a lot in the work­shop and many of us have applied the tech­niques to the scenes we have been rehearsing.

Although we are near­ing the end of the sem­i­nar, our energy and enthu­si­asm have only increased! Our under­stand­ing of the­atre has deep­ened so much this week from rehearsals, feed­backs we get in act­ing class, the­atre per­for­mance we saw and meet­ing with peo­ple in the field. I look for­ward to next week and our meet­ing with the actors tomorrow!

Have a great weekend (Καλό σαββατοκύριακο),

Po