Dionysus, the Dualist
and give a complete training to young and old, men and women, turning them into just the sort of people they want� When they crowd into the seats in the assembly,
or lawcourts, or theatre?
– Plato, Republic, 492a-b
***
Attending a play on Broadway these days, one does not feel like they are taking part in a political event. Paying up to a hundred dollars for a ticket, sitting in a dark room and passively watching as lights and sounds are thrown about before you, it feels a lot more like pure entertainment. Sometimes, there is enlightenment. Sometimes, there is emotional catharsis. Sometimes, there is nothing more than boredom. Rarely, however, does one feel that they are part of a nation, a revolution or a political forum when sitting in that hundred-dollar seat.
Of course, theatre has come a long way to get to Broadway, across an ocean and a few thousand years, from an ancient society whose culture is certainly different than our own but whose ideas may not have been that far. We’ve inherited much from the ancient Greeks, most notably democracy and, not a far second, the theatre. The endurance of these two institutions suggests that they are strongly connected, or at least they were at their inception and indeed, this seems to be the case. As Plato reveals in his Republic, the assembly, the lawcourts and the theatre all fit successively in the same sentence.
Studying the history of the Festival of Dionysus, however, the mind is not drawn to a scene of political convention. Honoring the god of wine, madness and theatre with a raucous party full of drunkenness, phallic worship and sexual abandon seems comparable more to Woodstock than to the General Assembly. Yet, definitions of the god Dionysus and his governing powers are more political than one might think. According to Rush Rehm, in his book, Greek Tragic Theatre, Dionysus came to be associated with a wide array of powers and interests, including the embodiment of contradictory tendencies and the fundamental paradox inherent in the world. He is life-giving but potentially destructive, lacks a consistent identity and often represents duality, contrast and reversal. Well, that certainly sounds like a god of politics to me.
In fact, much of the structure of the Festival of Dionysus, or “The City Dionysia” as it was called, indicates that it was indeed a politically driven event. The festival took place during the Greek month Elaphebolion (around mid to late March), shortly followed by annual elections of strategoi (military commanders) and the assembly meetings that would decide on military campaigns and strategies, or on initiatives for peace. The organizer of the festival, the Archon Eponymous, was one of nine annually selected city leaders, in charge of The City Dionysia, associated with secular matters and one of three senior magistrates. And, quite a stretch from our present-day producers, the ancient Greek “producers” or choregoi were wealthy citizens nominated to support the productions based on the Athenian institution of “liturgies,” a form of service based on noblesse oblige, by which wealthy individuals were selected to support specific public activities. Liturgies as a means by which citizens could gain social status and launch a political career and nomination was considered a high honor.
Ok, so the structure of the ancient Greek theatre festival seems to be organized and influenced by political thinking, but to an extent it seems that is unavoidable. When a society functions on a system of direct democracy, where all citizens are politically active and politically responsible, doesn’t every social event become an extension of that? According to historical biographer, Christian Meier, this was exactly the case in Athens. He writes:
It is surely clear that politics, when it becomes the very stuff of life for a citizenry, is not limited to its commonplace definition. Rather it becomes the realm of the universal, of higher things, beside which all else pales into insignificance. What the Greeks denoted as politics (ta politika) were literally the ‘affairs of the citizen.’
It seems the Athenians did not separate politics and life but rather viewed the former as a consequence of the latter. Because the people governed their own affairs, it was necessary for them to have control and organization within that government and thus social events were political events, political events were personal events and personal events were social events. The lines between individual and community were nearly indistinguishable because the community was made up by the individual and for the individual. Political affairs were not the concern of some distant other because each citizen was directly involved in those affairs.
***
My concept of the audience is of a public each member of which
is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind, and in this respect at least
the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them.
– Arthur Miller
What the Greek tragic system offers, then, is some insight into the artist-audience relationship that is so pervasive in our history and even explosive in our present culture. With the bourgeoning presence of mass media and the extension of “performance” from the theatre to the red carpet, the politician’s podium and the lives of “real people” around the world, this relationship seems more pertinent and more elusive than ever. In a society where leader and subject were supposed to be one in the same, how did the practice of performance function and what lines of control, consciously or unconsciously, were drawn?
When performers and audience members gather in a theatre, there exists a certain unspoken agreement. The two share the space, facing one another, consenting to engage in a kind of discourse- the performers have something to say, or rather to show and the audience engages willingly and (hopefully) attentively. Each role is necessary for the event to occur- without the audience the performers cannot perform and without the performers the audience is merely a group of people sitting in a room. This relationship is exclusive to the performing arts and particularly to theatre, as music always has a listener even if it is simply the musician.
When it comes to Greek tragedy, that relationship revolves around an axis called catharsis. It is a term referenced in Aristotle’s Politics and applied to theatre in his Poetics. In short, catharsis functions as a result of pity and fear- invoked by the actions of the tragedy’s protagonist in the minds and guts of its audience. It is a part of our modern movie-going vernacular, recognizable in the puffy eyes of sobbing women at the end of a romance or the high levels of testosterone among the audience of an action blockbuster. It is the vicarious process by which we as an audience are moved to feel without acting.
This is no small power when considering that the entire Athenian population, women, children, and slaves included, were present at the tragic performances of The City Dionysia, or that the tragic trilogies went on for three consecutive days. That seems like enough catharsis to last Athens through the year, and maybe that was the point. It’s one thing to experience the “revelation of mutuality,” to use Arthur Miller’s term, among fifty or even a couple hundred people in a modern day theatre, but it’s quite another to experience it with an estimated twelve to fourteen thousand of your fellow citizens out under the Athenian sky.
While it is unarguable that the tragedies were moving, horrifying and often entertaining, perhaps their most essential feature was that they were unifying. As modern Americans, we value the individual. It allows for our ability to stand out, and, undeniably, the possibility for us to get ahead of the next guy. If we are unique, there’s a chance we have something no one else has, and that gives us power- and with power, comes mobility.
In fifth century Athens, community and homogeneity were valued above all else. This is no surprise, considering that at least once a month, the entire Athenian citizenry gathered on the hill called Pnyx for the meeting of the Assembly, where speakers tried to sway the citizen body on any number of political matters. At these meetings, anyone was free to speak. Assembly was the means for formulating state policy, determined by majority vote. Imagine such a meeting without unity; it could go on for months, even years.
In a representative democracy, upon which our own society functions, such unity is less essential. Political decisions are made everyday despite a horde of differing and often dissenting opinions of the individuals within the society. While the control of the people making up the mass is somewhat diminished, the freedom of those people to maintain their own disparate, individualized opinions is widely available. In a direct democracy, however, where personal input is boundless, it seems communal control becomes increasingly necessary.
As a consequence, one could say that Athenian tragedy treaded a thin line between unification and manipulation. In fact, renowned theatre practitioner Augusto Boal says exactly this. In his book, Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal asserts that because tragedy’s principle aim is to provoke catharsis, its fundamental aspect is its repressive function. He writes:
Aristotle constructs the first, extremely powerful poetic-political system for intimidation of the spectator, for elimination of the ‘bad’ or illegal tendencies of the audience. This system is, to this day, fully utilized not only in conventional theater, but in the TV soap operas and in Western films as well: movies, theater, and television united, through a common basis in Aristotelian poetics, for repression of the people.
Boal digs deeply into the structure of Aristotle’s “coercive system of tragedy,” drawing a strong case for its inherent repressive function. It is a system dependent on the cathartic process, including the spectator’s experience of peripeteia (a radical change in a character’s destiny), anagnorisis (the spectator’s recognition of a character’s flaw as such and, by means of reasoning, the explanation of it), and finally catharsis (purgation of the tragic flaw- the only trait that is not in harmony with what society regards as desireable).
Whether you agree with Boal’s view of the Aristotelian tragic system or not, he raises an interesting and relevant point: the idea of conflict between an individual’s ethos and the ethos of his society. In Greek tragedy, it is this conflict (the legendary tragic flaw) upon which the drama depends. And furthermore, the tragedy uses that conflict to warn its audience against such flaws, which are easily recognizable even to a modern audience, today.
***
There was a time, the time of Greek Tragedy, when a whole city could come together
and the fragmentation of all the individuals who make up the city
would be transformed into a shared, intense experience
in which self is transcended.
– Peter Brook
When theatre is entertainment, it seems an audience welcomes a certain degree of manipulation. One often goes to the theatre to be moved, to be entertained, or to escape. There is a giving up of control implied in such terms, which refer to a sort of passive activity. Yet, when theatre exists for a social body as a form of communal reflection, manipulation takes on graver meaning. If the society governs itself directly, who is doing the manipulating? The playwrights? The producers?
As we have already established, the Archon Eponymous, who was supposedly delegated power by the people, selected the playwrights and producers at the City Dionysia. And, as this delegation proves, power cannot remain in the hands of all the people all the time. Just as an audience gives power over to performers when they take a seat in a theatre, so do a people give power over- even in a direct democracy.
In Greek tragedy, that power appears to be the power to define a society’s ethos- to establish the set of traits and behaviors that it deems desirable and consequently, to purge through catharsis any antisocial traits. Whether it is coercive, it is certainly anti-individualist. But, in effect, so is the direct democratic system because it cannot function if the individual is valued over the community. It may seem as if such a system exists without a central power, but in truth it requires the strongest possible center- that of a unified social ethos. If the citizens cannot agree on the definitions of right and wrong, just and unjust, essentially good and bad, then they have no basis for government.
WORKS CITED:
1. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Butcher, S. H. Internet Classics Archive. 1994-2000.
2. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. McBride. New York. 1985.
3. Brook, Peter. “Does Nothing Come from Nothing?” Ernest Jones Lecture. Published in The British Psycho-Analytical Society Bulletin, Vol. 34, No 1, London, 1998.
4. Meier, Christian. The Political Art of Greek Tragedy. Trans. Webber, Andrew. Johns Hopkins University Press. Baltimore, 1993.
5. Miller, Arthur. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller. De Capo Press. New York. 1996.
6. Plato. The Republic. Trans. Jowett, Benjamin. Internet Classics Archive. 1994-2000.
7. Rehm, Rush. Greek Tragic Theatre. Routledge. London, 1992.
