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jamesdazell · 6 years ago

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Tragedy as the Joyful Art; or, The Ironic Art of Tragedy

I took this photograph in April of last year. This is the first permanent theatre ever built in the world, where some of my favourite plays were performed for the very first time. The original site where all the formality of what we know as theatre had its origins. It was also a civic art, created simultaneously with democracy, where public speaking and talking about their lives was so important. And the most important site during the festival of Dionysia. I went to Athens to read the plays sitting in the theatre seats that someone sat in watching these very plays 2,500 years ago.I think Greek tragedy is the greatest artform and the greatest approach to art there ever was. I’ve been studying and writing about it for ten years. Meeting with scholars and practitioners of theatre. Learning from so many books, talks, and documentaries. And testing out my understanding in writing my own work across stage, books, and poetry. As well as hiring art spaces out to staging some of my own performances.This is an artform that demonstrates the power of art. It’s an artform of immense passion for life, and demands its artist a great capacity for comprehending reality with all its good and bad qualities. Tragedy was no art of optimism, nor was it mere melodrama, and certainly it wasn’t grave liturgical passion plays. Tragedy is more than a genre, it's a world view. And so its technique has to be in-keeping with that world view.Over the centuries we have corroded the original meaning of tragedy. We associate tragedy with death, but not a single tragic hero dies in any of Aeschylus' best plays. And, with the exception of Ajax’s suicide, not one tragic figure dies on stage. There was no pleasure taken from death in this theatre. Its about a dilemma of existence. Its an art that's been misunderstood and has been misunderstood since Aristotle. Aristotle thought the objective was to arouse pity and fear, and produce a cathartic effect from being overwhelmed by them. This is a complete misunderstanding, of both its effect and how the work would arrive on the page at all.It’s evident that original subject matter wasn’t of much importance, since all the tragedians wrote plays on the same subject and characters. What the theatre-maker did with it was what was of importance; what they invested into it; what the play was doing not what it was about. And given these plays were written in the context of a festival competition, it would be befitting that they should write on the same subject, so that their works could go head to head, as competition was everything to the Ancient Greeks. “potter strives against potter, craftsman strives against craftsman, singer strives against singer” writes Hesiod in the Works and Days. “Strife is justice” writes Heraclitus.But even the Greeks lost their way. Euripides turned tragedy into mere melodrama, Aristotle misunderstood it and ruined an understanding for centuries. The Romans didn’t know how to handle it correctly. When the Christians revived theatre as instruction of the Bible to the illiterate they turned tragedy into its present meaning. Even Nietzsche blundered aspects of it with his loony Dionysian-Apollonian dichotomy. Shakespeare borrowed from conventions unGreek, such as the Christian medieval passion plays of Christ’s crucifixion which featured enduring suffering and death on stage. Roman tragedies of Seneca that were pathos of suffering and revenge. And the comedies of antiquity which he borrowed their oscillation between protagonist and antagonist. Even the idea of the fall of heights comes from a medieval concept of the wheel of fortune. And if you combine these with Aristotle’s misinterpretations and Euripides’ melodrama, given his work survives more than any other tragedian, then our general understanding is naturally inaccurate. All in all, we’re just missing the point, and our understanding doesn’t do justice or describe any of the examples of what is going on in any of the earliest extant works of tragedy by Aeschylus, whom even in his own time was considered the greatest of the three surviving tragedians. The comic playwright Aristophanes, just after the death of Euripides, wrote a play called The Frogs wherein the patron god of theatre, Dionysus, goes to the underworld to bring back one of the three playwrights because tragedy has fallen to a terrible standard since they’ve died. Sophocles umpires whilst Aeschylus and Euripides have a kind of literary criticism competition, lampooning each others works, and in the end Aeschylus wins.When we think of this art being created, the rules for this aren't coming from literary criticism. So the rules for these works were born from their culture. Real Tragedy rose and fell in its richest form, much like what happens with our popular culture. It doesn’t seem to have been based around hard and fast rules, as with Japanese Noh Drama that keeps to its tradition. These were not professional playwrights. Theatre had only just been invented merely decades earlier (albeit in the previous century). But it had reached a refined and sophisticated brilliance, much like cinema in the sixties and seventies had done merely decades from the birth of cinema. For the same reason that we have culture of the eighties, nineties, twenty-tens, etc, the meaning of art changes. This is little or nothing to do with progress, politics, or technology, except as being part and parcel of that same consequence. As the prevailing condition of human character changes, the disposition to the world by the artist changes, both artists and in audience. The change in tragedy came with Socrates. With Socrates came rationalism, and with rationalism came optimism, and with optimism came cheerfulness, with cheerfulness comes attitudes to life of consolation, with consolation comes defensive doctrine of morality. It was this new scientific attitude that took hold of Athenian culture that was the prime symptom of the demise of real Greek tragedy. An attitude that stands in opposition to the embryonic pregnancy of how tragedy can be conceived. Not only Socratic influence in the case of Euripides’ work, but this was the age of Plato, which it is agreed upon, is a philosophy that is wholly proto-Christian, and significant to the development of Christianity by Neo-Plantonist Jews who studied his works in the Library of Alexandria. This is not all too dissimilar from the Puritanical, rationalistic and scientific age of Enlightenment that followed the period of Shakespearean tragedy.The art of tragedy differs also from our very familiarity with the presentation of theatre itself. Not only was this not a naturalistic theatre, but more stylised than even the mannerisms of opera, more in fact like the movements of a puppet theatre, the dancing of African and Indian dances, and the music of medieval secular music and our popular music, to the degree that our Modern theatre cannot be used as a frame of reference at all. If an ancient Athenian were to sit in our theatres of tragedy they would either be wholly confused or roll about laughing. It’s important to remember that Ancient Greece was a culture that looked East, and were influenced by world views and religions of the East. How sterile and cold a Modern Western European culture feels when held next to Ancient Greece, with its almost colourfully Brahmic culture. Two-thousand years of Christian Europe has lead to a lot of misunderstandings.Pageant wagons depicting scenes from the Bible were the first cinema or TV screens. They would roll through the town like a float parade representing the whole universe of the Bible. They were literally a window to the world, which incorporated all the people of the world and beyond it, whilst the audience watched, removed from its settings.This was not what tragedy was doing. Tragedy was a superimposed performance into a very real world, which didn’t have a metaphysical beyond. Olympus and the Underworld are in this one and the same world. The performances themselves were of, not Athens, but of real cities. Their plays consisted of characters absent, conjured by theatre, but the rest of the world consisted of those in the audience watching and this very same real world. The characters were not rolled out, being born from trying to re-present the world realistically, but born from a realm of poetry, with only three characters on stage at one time. The necessity of characters merely to move plot forward by bringing in new information, not because that’s how the world looks. It’s believed the first tragedies would have been only one actor and a chorus of fifty singers. Although limited, this must have a powerful kind of poetry-performance-art-music-dance-drama. The speech is stylised and poetic. compared to our modern theatre, since we see the stage as a re-presentation of a window to the world, writers naturally concluded why don’t people in the play talk like they do outside our windows, and ordinary realistic speech was pushed onto the stage. But again, we’re just missing the point. This was not a projected window to the universe, nor was it to be held up like a mirror to ordinary life. This was a drama of poetry-music performance art. The poet was by nature also a musician in these dramas, and in the case of Choral poetry, which was so integral to tragedy, a poet-musician-dancer. But the Greeks were not pessimistic. The Greeks didn’t underestimate the power of poetry and music. The tragic heroes were not poets but they were endowed with poetic abilities. The model for a poet was Orpheus who could transform the world around him with song and music, could make birds sing, and fish leap out of water. Just as the poet suffered in life they were also considered to posses divine abilities by the effect of poetry on others, and subsequently were mythologised. This was not a re-presentation of the world. This was an art. The very drama of tragedy is born from the intoxicating rapture of music and poetry, not only in to a vision of scenes, but the drama and all it contains that unfolds. The choral separations between “acts” are to reenergise the drama with its original intoxication for the drama to then spring from. The drama springs from the music, the character embodied by the poetry. Breaking up apart from out civilised cultural self into our primal nature and rebuilding into a character who cab stand in a world of such a reality, in a cycle of creative destruction. Think of that two minutes as Friends begins followed by the theme song, narrating the themes of the show, and then the acting resumes. It’s not all together different from what happens there. A pop rock quiet verse, loud chorus, quiet verse, loud chorus. Or the use of the music of Morricone in Leone's movies, in a Tarantino or Scorsese picture. The moments of talk by a singer between songs. All this is closer to tragedy than opera which literally dramatises action, feeling, words into the music itself. Opera, which is truthfully merely poetry as music, and considered a high art because it was associated with high society, the vogue of intellectual rationalism, and church music - in short, all things which modernity considered to be of refined and sophisticated high class. Modernity is Socratic art par excellence.To understand an art you have to understand the condition of its pregnancy not by its affected reception. You have to view it in embryo and look for under what conditions this would be conceived. If you study it as an afterword there are all sorts of interpretations possible. But if you study it in conception then every interpretation must end with the work. Not how do we analyse the written text as an afterword, but how you go from a blank page to this written text. We need to analyse it as the author not the audience. It's not enough to analyse effects because often the process of creation is inverse to the desired effect they produce. You can have a innumerable interpretations as an audience, but whatever interpretations you have here, all end with this. And if you apply those rules to a blank page you should end with the work too. Until I can fake a Greek play, I haven’t understood it.Challenges are what make us grow, are what make us demonstrate our outstanding qualities, and create goals which give our lives meaning. How do you give life meaning when it's full of horrible things that are hard to comprehend? It's normal that we prefer to want to live in a world of a limited amount of perception about the nature of ourselves and the world we live in. Or live optimistically and pretend that negative consequences are not likely to happen, that in the end everything works out. We prefer, not to live in a world of those difficult realities, but a world that consoles us for those things. And we put blinkers on and black-out just enough of reality so we can enjoy living in it. That can't happen in tragedy. It demands you to take in all the difficult things to comprehend about the world as a reality of lifeIn a similar way to how a pop or rock singer will sing a lyric contrary to its written expression, joyfully singing a sad lyric. And how an actor playing a villain doesn’t play the role as the audience feels about the character, but how the character feels about themselves, so to play the role convincingly they have to play the bad guy as a good guy. Tragedy is an art of irony. And irony is the essence of all great art. It sets up its pessimism and overcomes it with art. Pain shuts down language. It is such an intransitive experience that it is near impossible to express in language. Pain is the flip-side to imagination, and as such then is pain overcome by pure creative force. Pessimism is overcome by the creative act of poetry, that has a diction too strong to succumb to the very subject of their expression, overcome by their musicality and metaphorical beauty. What was pain is overcome by the power of art. Art, which stands beyond the reach of intransitive pain and suffering. And yet has by the very nature of art sprung from them, affirmed that very aspect of life which contains pain and suffering. Pessimism in the audience is overcome by the experience of the plays, of beautiful lyrical speech, the ecstasy music and dancing, performing to a collected public audience not in the dark but in the midday spring sun when everything was undergoing regeneration, in the context of a festival of wine and sex, devoted to the god Dionysus who embodied ecstasy and liberation from gloomy cares and worry. By allowing an audience to revel and feel exhilaration in a scenario of this scope of reality and spectrum of being a human being. When pain and suffering is universalised in to a collective experience being human, and again overcome by a collective experience of art. Similar to a crowd listening to an anthemic rock song all singing at the same time, liberated and reunited with that primal human being that lurks behind the overbearing cultural citizen who exists in daily civilization.Unnaturalness is the essence of archaic art because it shows the defiance of art in the face of aspects of life that would ordinarily make us gloomy. Tragedy was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Some of the most similar examples of its technique are not from the renaissance, neo-classicalism, the opera, the Romans, but from the twentieth century. This was the pop culture of the American 1990s. This whole approach of popular culture from the 60s to the 90s. This was the art of Spain in the early twentieth century. This was some of the work of Italy and Japan. The rock music of England. The atmosphere of the Olympics, the superbowl, Glastonbury festival. Although tragedy and comedy were not mixed genres, there was no differentiation between high and popular art in Ancient Greece. Tragedy contained the popular arts we're familiar with today, and all the wisdom of Aristophanes' comedy was punctuated with fart jokes. Greek tragedy is high art popular culture.All great periods of art were during undesirable political times. The antagonism is a positive one. It shows the defiance in the power of art over aspects of life that make us gloomy. The whole objective was that pain and suffering, where a stimulant for overcoming, and therefore affirmed into the whole theatre of life, the whole horror of existence was overcome by art. This was an exhilarating joyful art. It was life affirming because it did not turn away from life. Not to use art to talk about the terribleness of the world but to use it as weights that test our strength for loving life even in that reality of the world. Like a weight lifter's strong arm that needs heavier things to test their strength. The Greeks used art to lift the heaviness of life. This was done in competition. This was the stage where the Greeks competed to demonstrate who loves life the most. That’s what I feel art is, the myth over the reality, an illusion we place over the world in order to love it more.

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