Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor

241 Pages·2018·2.08 MB·English

by  Zachary Dunbar

ZACHARY DUNBAR
& STEPHE HARROP
GREEK
TRAGEDY
AND THE
CONTEMPOR ARY
ACTOR
Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor
Zachary Dunbar • Stephe Harrop
Greek Tragedy and
the Contemporary
Actor
Zachary Dunbar Stephe Harrop
Victorian College of the Arts Liverpool Hope University
University of Melbourne Liverpool, UK
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-95470-7 ISBN 978-3-319-95471-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958142
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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For FM and DW
A
cknowledgements
No one knows enough to write a book like this, and the enterprise
wouldn’t even have been attempted (never mind completed) without the
generous support of many colleagues and friends. At various stages, David
Balding, Gilli Bush-Bailey, Emma Cole, Kris Darby, Tony Fisher, Lucy
Jackson, Fiona Macintosh, Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Ben Naylor, Peter
Olive, Declan Patrick, Simon Perris, Jonathan Statham, Marchella Ward,
Thomas Wilson, Martin Wylde, and Yana Zarifi have all been valued
sources of advice, encouragement, and practical help.
In addition, many of the ideas and exercises contained in this volume
have been thought-through, talked-through, and worked-through with
our students at Liverpool Hope University, Rose Bruford College of
Theatre and Performance, The Royal Central School of Speech and
Drama, and Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne).
We’re grateful to all of them for their openness, energy, and insight.
Grateful thanks are also due to the companies of Delphi, Texas (2005),
The Ballad of Eddy Tyrone (2007), The Cows Come Home (2008), Alcestis
(2012 and 2013), Bacchai (2013), Ion (2014), Bird-Tongue Oedipus
(2014), Helen (2015), Andromache (2016), The Suppliant Women (2017),
AntigoneX (2018), and Iphigenia in Tauris (2018).
vii
c
ontents
1 I ntroduction 1
2 The Aristotle Legacy 27
3 The Stanislavski Legacy 53
4 Acting Sound 79
5 Acting Myth 115
6 Acting Space 149
7 Acting Chorus 185
8 Conclusions 219
Index 231
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In Greek tragedy, it’s important to know who you’re talking to. But it isn’t
always easy. In a theatre culture where all performers were male, and wore
masks, and where a maximum of three actors shared all the major charac-
ter roles, you couldn’t tell who you were looking at by sight. So, again and
again, tragedy’s characters have to make wary inquiries.
In Aeschylus’ play Libation Bearers (458 BCE),1 long-separated sib-
lings Electra and Orestes recognize each other by physical tokens: her foot
neatly matches his footprint, their hair is the same texture and shade, and
he carries a piece of fabric she wove as a child. Half a century later,
Euripides’ dramatization of the same mythic story in Electra (c.410 BCE)
pours scorn on this procedure; a woman’s foot would be smaller than a
man’s—this Electra argues—while siblings don’t have the same hair, and a
grown man doesn’t still wear a garment woven for a boy. Across a series of
plays dealing with the troubled children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
Greek tragedy powerfully, playfully highlights the importance—and the
difficulty—of reliably knowing who you’re speaking to.
In Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides, c.420–412 BCE), things are more
complex still. Here, a captive Orestes point-blank refuses to utter his own
name, meaning that Iphigenia (his older sister, long presumed dead) can’t
recognize the brother she last saw as a baby. Unable to fathom the stubborn
silence of this Greek stranger, Iphigenia asks, ‘Is it too big a name to tell?’
(trans. McLeish in Walton & McLeish 1997a, 138). Which is perhaps a
good way to think about the ‘actor’ addressed in the title of this book.
© The Author(s) 2018 1
Z. Dunbar, S. Harrop, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95471-4_1
2 Z. DUNBAR AND S. HARROP
Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor was initially conceived as a
volume to support students training at UK conservatoires: international
cohorts of young people studying the acting of Greek tragedy as part of an
emerging professional skill set. On this basis, the book set out to combine
historical surveys, discussions of contemporary theatre practice, and prac-
tical exercises which could be applied in the studio or rehearsal room,
seeking to weave together the disparate strands of knowledge—intellec-
tual, experiential, and embodied—which might add up to a professional
competence in the re-performance of ancient plays. However, like the
tragic siblings Electra, Orestes, and Iphigenia, the volume’s authors have
undertaken some major journeys since this beginning.
Today, we find ourselves working on different continents, in very dis-
similar contexts. And our sense of who ‘the actor’ is has expanded accord-
ingly. Some sections of this book emerge from work undertaken within
university actor-training programmes in Australia, which—like their coun-
terparts in the USA—have an active vocational emphasis; they aim to pre-
pare students to seek employment in the theatre, film, and TV industries.
To this end, such programmes often reinforce training traditions which
centre upon commercially focused psychological acting approaches
(although local cultures and practices may infuse and shape the range of
cross-hatched training on offer). However, other portions of Greek
Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor draw on creative explorations under-
taken with UK university students, whose approach to ancient tragedy
may be very different. Such students may plan to pursue professional
careers onstage, but they are learning within a culture where adaptation,
devising, storytelling, and site-specific practice are understood to be key
capabilities of the self-sustaining contemporary artist, and where the texts
and stories of Greek tragedy are more likely to be positioned as provoca-
tions for independent performance-making than as fixed scripts to be
acted.
Other elements of this volume develop from its authors’ own experi-
ments in professional theatre-making (both in Australia and the UK), or
their engagement with the work being generated by graduate companies.
And so, issues overlapping with directorial perspectives have also started to
infuse the project, giving rise to important new questions. How might
particular tragic encounters be staged in relation to a range of spaces and
places? How can the actor’s embodied, imaginative explorations of a text
or role potentially inform such choices? And what is the balance of creative
responsibility within a company or ensemble practically attempting to
INTRODUCTION 3
formulate responses to such questions? Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary
Actor is making its way into the world at a moment when the status and
authority of ‘the actor’ is under intense scrutiny. However, the discussions
presented here operate on the basis that the present-day (or emerging)
actor is an intellectually engaged creative artist, who may well be a skilled
and empathetic collaborator, but who does not automatically defer to the
inherited power structures associated (particularly in western theatre) with
the singular, authoritative figure of the director. According to this view,
actors are self-determining agents, and therefore—at least to some
degree—self-directing.2 As this volume will explore, today’s actors may
assume authority and creative authorship in ways which radically exceed
the expectations of previous generations, and Greek tragedy—rooted in a
collective, choral dramaturgy—offers a richly provocative opportunity for
exploring such potentials.
Across this range of settings and contexts, the variety of identities and
aspirations which might characterize the ‘contemporary actor’ is vast; it’s
almost (as Iphigenia suggests) ‘too big a name to tell’. And the range of
motivations which might spur such artists to explore tragedy is concomi-
tantly wide. But here are a few indicative possibilities. If you’re an actor-
in- training, seeking a practical grasp of how to act in Greek tragedies as
well as an intellectual understanding of the genre’s major challenges, this
book aims to introduce an essential body of skills, exercises, and ideas that
will help you become an informed interpreter of ancient plays. If you’re an
emerging theatre-maker, keen to explore how the texts of tragedy can
provoke imaginative revisions and re-appropriations, or how the skills of
acting tragedy can help shape ensemble practices and identities, this book
aims to offer inspiration, provocation, and practical support for your proj-
ect. If you’re a teacher or director, looking for new ways to make ancient
plays come alive, this book aims to equip you with a variety of practice-
based approaches to classroom or studio explorations, which you can mix-
and- match, or build upon, as your own situation and imagination suggest.
If you’re a curious reader, wishing to find out more about Greek drama
and dramaturgy, and contemporary approaches to these, this book aims to
provide an engaging—if necessarily partial—account of the ways in which
current artists interpret, adapt, and transform ancient theatre practices.
However, it also aspires to tempt you onto your feet, at least once, to
experience the performance potentials of ancient tragedy for yourself.
To all these readers, Greek Tragedy and the Contemporary Actor begins
by issuing a challenge—to abandon two fundamental assumptions, which