TELLING THE DISASTER – CHORALITY AND TRAGEDY – ESCA

“All words remain short of our calamities.”
Dramatizing the epic. Make what we have seen visible. Narrate to bring things to life. How to stage the story and bring out a multitude of voices held within the “main” voice? How can we reflect the community in solitude, the collective experience in one’s individual story? How can the voice of an entire people resound in one being’s mouth?

I suggested to nineteen ESCA students to tackle this peculiar and textual material which, by nature, is initially a fundamental issue in our theater, mainly the opposition between the epic and the dramatic. It is about the stories of messengers in ancient Greek and Latin tragedies. That character is torn between two tension points: the drama and the story. Thus, its contradictions are interesting for the actress and the actor, as the character is neither protagonist, nor antagonist, nor member of the chorus, but without him, there is no action progress. This person carries a crucial and decisive message for the tragedy plot’s unfolding, but would have way preferred not to have the responsibility of delivering it. Thus, the character juggles between the distance of a reporter and the empathetic terror of the eyewitness. The drama doesn’t change him (he leaves the stage just like he stepped on it). Yet, he incarnates it and definitely change it. To cut things short, so many fascinating springs to explore on a set!

I selected 19 messengers’ stories taken from 19 different tragedies, one for each student: The Persians and Agamemnon by Aeschylus; Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus and The Trachinian Women by Sophocles; Medea, Hippolytus, Hecuba, The Madness of Heracles, Andromache, The Phoenician Women and The Bacchae by Euripides; Phaedra, Thyestes, Agamemnon, Medea and The Trojan Women by Seneca.