Author Archives: pmoon

So far at Epidaurus!

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Good day everyone!

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

Τρίτη, Tuesday the 19th!

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Γεια σου! (Ya su)

 

So I finally fig­ured out how to get the Greek key­board work­ing after fid­dling with my iPad for a while. “Γεια σου” is what many of us have been using at the start of the post. It means hello or goodbye.

 

 

We had act­ing class today when we con­tin­ued to per­form scenes from var­i­ous Greek plays that we have been study­ing. Since yes­ter­day, the class moved into a big­ger room at the CYA build­ing. While it was nice to have the extra space, today we had a few addi­tional peo­ple join­ing our class..the con­struc­tion work­ers. CYA is cur­rently hav­ing some ren­o­va­tion work, so the work­ers were mov­ing things in and out dur­ing the class. It was some­what dis­tract­ing, but as Michael men­tioned in class, it could def­i­nitely add to the comic ele­ment of some of the plays. Inci­den­tally, we did some fruit­ful work in class today. Tim led the warm up today. He did some breath­ing exer­cise with us, where we had to breath with our diaphragm and hum out sounds. Through the exer­cise, we found out the most nat­ural sound that our body make. Few of us, like Kanoa speak with a higher voice, while oth­ers, like Lily, speak with a lower voice. 

 

 

After the warm up, we went straight to per­for­mance of scenes. I per­formed the scene that I pre­pared for, which was the open­ing scene in Eumenides. It had been a while since I last per­formed. Though I was some­what ner­vous, the great works I saw from the rest of us, as well as the enthu­si­asm for the­atre inur group, made me feel almost excited. I man­aged to mem­o­rize the whole speech and said every word of it in my first per­for­mance, so I was fairly happy. But I was even more happy to get the feed­back from every­one. The feed­back gave me ideas and sug­ges­tions for improve­ments for the sec­ond draft. By the end of today’s class, every­one has pre­sented the first draft the scene they want to work on. Start­ing from Thurs­day, we have to bring in new scenes as our sec­ond piece. Many of us chose to work with tragic plays as our first piece. How­ever, we had two comic scenes from tragic plays today from the group: Rachel, Sean and Mary Lou per­form­ing Agamem­non and Mary Lou her­self per­form­ing Liba­tion Bear­ers. So maybe, we will have more comic scenes per­for­mances later this week?

Later on in the evening, a hand­ful of us went up to Λυκαβιπός –the hill near our hotel with a beau­ti­ful white chapel at the very top. Though the hike up was def­i­nitely not an easy one, the view we saw on the hill was def­i­nitely worth the effort. We could see the Panathi­naiko sta­dium, Acrop­o­lis, Pelo­pon­nese, Likavipos the­atre… For those who brought their cam­era, there is no doubt that half of their camera’s mem­ory card is now full of pho­tos taken there. We watched the sun set behind the hills, as we talked over var­i­ous movies we saw. Not hav­ing seen most of the Amer­i­can movies –since I grew up in Hong Kong, I was pretty lost for most part of the con­ver­sa­tion. For me, this sem­i­nar is not only an expe­ri­ence to learn about the Greek cul­ture, but also a time to learn about the Amer­i­can pop cul­ture. Although I have just spent a full year in Amer­ica, there are still sur­pris­ing many things that I have not come across with. I guess it is indeed true to say that we have only been in the Prince­ton bub­ble. It is there­fore, won­der­ful that we have Global sem­i­nars at Prince­ton that take us abroad and give us the oppor­tu­nity to really explore the world!


Happy Tues­day,

Po