The Bacchae Performed: Art and Politics
Tuesday, November 23, 2021Online discussion
8:00 pm CET
Imagine Plato attending the first performance of Euripides’ The Bacchae. He would have been in his early twenties, living in Athens, and given what we know about the audiences of Attic drama, it’s likely he would have been in attendance. What was that experience like for Plato? About this, of course, we can only speculate, but it’s reasonable to assume that his experience of performed dramas at the Theater of Dionysus inform the speculations about tragedy that Socrates makes in the Republic.
The Bacchae was written for performance at a specific place and time, but in the two and a half millennia since, it has inspired countless new performances and adaptations. The Bacchae lives today both as a written text, as constituted and translated by scholars and poets, and as the source for new incarnations. While we can only speculate about Plato’s own experiences in the theater, the ongoing reception of ancient drama by contemporary artists presents us with new opportunities to take Plato’s example and to endeavor to be thoughtful spectators of drama in performance.
This event brings together BCB’s professor of theater Nina Tecklenburg, Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College Thomas Bartscherer, and composer Dylan Mattingly to discuss the relation between theater and the political. We will pose questions of performance and the political by looking at recent adaptations of The Bacchae by Ulrich Rasche, Lileana Blain-Cruz, and the music of Dylan Mattingly. In all of these very different engagements with Euripides’ work, the question of performance remains a crucial point of intersection. We will explore this theme in each adaptation and pose wider questions regarding the relation between art and politics today.
Prof. Dr. Nina Tecklenburg is a performance maker and scholar of theater and performance. Since 2002, as a performer, co-director and dramaturge, she has realized a host of projects with diverse artists and performance groups, among others Interrobang (of which she is a founding member), She She Pop, Gob Squad, Lone Twin Theatre, Baktruppen, Rabih Mroué. Works she has (co-)created have been shown at the Public Theater NYC, Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, The Barbican London, Wiener Festwochen, Esplanade Singapore, Heidelberger Stückemarkt, Kunsten Festival des Arts Brussels, Theatre de la Ville Paris, Sophiensaele Berlin, Volksbühne Berlin and many more.
Thomas Bartscherer is the Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College. His current projects include When the People Rule: Popular Sovereignty in Theory and Practice, which he’s co-editing with Ewa Atanassow and David Bateman for Cambridge University Press and the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s last book, The Life of the Mind, both of which will be published in 2022. His collaborations with Dylan Mattingly include Stranger Love, a six-hour opera that will premiere in Los Angeles in 2023, and a work in progress performance and film titled The History of Life.
Dylan Mattingly’s work is fundamentally ecstatic, committed to transformative experience. His music has been described as “gorgeous” by the San Francisco Chronicle, “transcendent” and “the most poignantly entrancing passages of beautiful music in recent memory” by LA Weekly, and “in the pantheon of contemporary American composers” (Prufrock’s Dilemma) and is often informed by his scholarship on Ancient Greek music and poetry. Mattingly is the executive and co-artistic director of the NY-based new-music ensemble Contemporaneous. Among the ensembles and performers who have commissioned Mattingly’s music are the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Berkeley Symphony, John Adams, Marin Alsop, and many others. Mattingly’s in-development 6-hour multimedia opera, Stranger Love, has recently been presented on the PROTOTYPE Festival, the Bang on a Can Marathon, the Day of Imagination, and will be premiered in Spring 2023. Mattingly was the Musical America “New Artist of the Month” for February 2013 and was awarded the Charles Ives Scholarship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016.
Email: [email protected]