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i do think a muppet version of a greek tragedy would get at something deep and essential about the way a character is created and understood on the ancient stage as a construct of costume rendered voiced by a concealed body, something that is perhaps impossible to capture within modern unmasked theatrical traditions

#we are externalizing the voice here. ok wait i know what i need to read tomorrow #puppets are interesting to me again but now as a matter of body and costume rather than agency and free will #cracking the tragic mask on the corner of the skene like an egg #the character's body not coterminous with the actor's body #mine #bodycostume

it's tangential to the stuff i'm currently working on but i find it absolutely fascinating how the maenad 'disguise' that pentheus puts on in the bacchae seems to mark this internal shift in him, the moment at which he comes completely under the control of dionysus, but it does that without ever actually functioning as a disguise. the maenads up on cithaeron don't for a moment mistake him one of them, they immediately recognize him as a man. pentheus putting on the maenad outfit effects some transformation of his inner nature but not of his outer appearance.

#it's really an incredible moment of partial recognition bc agave recognizes him as A man but doesn't recognize WHICH man he is (her son)#oh thesmophorizusae!agathon we're really in it now. directionality and causality of costume and mimesis and such.#this is actually also what happens with patroclus and the armor of achilles in iliad 16 and dionysus and the heracles costume in frogs #each manages to play someone else's role by wearing their clothes even without being mistaken for that person #and that's the fundamental basis of drama :)#mine #bodycostume #bacchae liveblogging

that said, sophocles in particular is so clearly interested in women's silence and the silencing of women! not, like, to the point where i would think that it might've had anything to do with the way he thought about or interacted with real women in real life, but in so many of his plays he's preoccupied with the point at which women stop speaking, and the ways that a (woman's) silent life is akin to death. i'm talking the classic "she exits silently into the house to die" of jocasta and eurydice and deianira, i'm talking the women who fall silent and let the men do all the talking when they're replaced by non-speaking actors halfway through their plays (tecmessa and ismene), i'm talking the women like iole and philomela rendered completely voiceless by the violence done to them and also structurally denied speech by the performance conventions that do not permit them a speaking actor.

#when euripides does stuff like this it borders on parody (alcestis and i suspect echo in andromeda)#vocal dislocation...........#mine #bodycostume #ch2

hmm the watchman in the prologue of aeschylus' agamemnon saying οἶκος δ᾽ αὐτός, εἰ φθογγὴν λάβοι, σαφέστατ᾽ ἂν λέξειεν, "this house, if it could find a voice, would tell it so clearly" and clytemnestra in sophocles' electra condemning agamemnon for sacrificing iphigenia and justifying killing him and then telling electra φαίη δ᾿ ἂν ἡ θανοῦσά γ᾿, εἰ φωνὴν λάβοι, "the dead girl would say so too, if she could find a voice". the house and the dead as voiceless in the same way. what a way to say that the way death turns a person into an object is by silencing them.

#a person is something that can speak; an object is something that cannot #a corpse is played by a mute extra. a ghost is played by one of the speaking actors.#[posts that are actually about iole and philomela]#different words for 'voice' but same difference i think #i would try to search the tlg for similar phrases elsewhere but we're still permabanned #mine #bodycostume #ch2

looking at death and doubled roles in greek tragedy and noticing a weird pattern of characters dying and their actors coming back as theseus specifically...

#which could mean nothing. but then again. Jusino 2019 The Metatheatrical Payoff of Splitting Theseus in the Oedipus at Colonus (CW 112.2)#need a citation on the hippolytus role distribution that isn't an experimental translation though.#mine #bodycostume #ch3

What are you writing your dissertation on?!

who even knows at this point??? I can't think too hard about what it's actually about as a unified whole right now otherwise I will get derailed from actually writing the individual chapters, but broadly speaking it's on Greek tragedy in its original performance context with a focus on metatheater and the body of the actor/character (although I am currently ambivalent about the language of 'metatheater'). featuring such things as limitations on the number of speaking actors, role-doubling, mute extras, on-stage corpses, actors changing masks/costumes/characters, and more!

#bodycostume #<-expansive tag i've been using for anything related to the dissertation project #lostintranslaation #mine #ask

ooooooooooh

#i think having the chorus pantomime the sacrifice of iphigenia has become pretty common for modern productions of agamemnon #(i don't think the ancient chorus would have done this btw)#but drawing the iphigenia-figure from the audience.......#WAY to implicate the audience in the performance!#i think i'm interested rn in ways of making the audience complicit rather than under (potential) threat #but this tracks with what i've been reading about blurred/absent boundaries between stage and audience #and the way the performance can reach out and entangle or endanger the audience #i'm also curious about the ways the audience can (or can but does not) reach in to the performance #its also super interesting to have this moment of implicating the audience be so early in the play #i've seen several moments at [redacted theater] that break the illusion of audience detachment but they're usually later in the play #like just when the audience is comfortable being safe and removed-- boom house lights up. or actor enters from behind the seating.#mine #bodycostume #<-the tags i guess #oresteiablogging

i think i've watched the donmar warehouse julius caesar seven or eight times at this point and there's always something else i get from it. predictably, given, uh, all my other interests recently, this year i am caught on caesar's mantle, the one that sort of stands in for and conjures up caesar's body in mark antony's funeral speech-- this antony puts it on near the end of the funeral speech and struts around in it reading the will, playing caesar, making caesar's gestures and wearing his mantle. and he continues to wear it. until after the last lines of the play, after octavius has stolen antony's line and brutus' body and taken over the closing speech, after the text of the shakespeare is played out but the perfomance isn't, antony reluctantly takes off caesar's mantle and he hands it over to octavius, but, like caesar at the lupercal, is very loath to lay his fingers off it.

#kingship! garment!#jade anouka is THE mark antony of all time btw.#caesar's mantle 🤝 robert icke oresteia red dressing gown #might be fun after all to have the same actor play caesar and octavius #(unkillable caesar)#mine #bodycostume #i'm also so struck this time by the expressions on the actors' faces as they listen to others speak at length #like there are points where one character is just letting another run his mouth and waiting for him to finish #because brutus and cassius especially know each other too well.#each knows he has to let the other go through it all on his own first #and brutus does the same with portia. he knows she has a whole thing she wants to do and he's going to humor her until she's finished #(until she gets to a point where he can't just let her keep going anymore)#and octavius stays quiet and lets mark antony make a fool of himself when it suits him

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