Problems in Performance: Failure in Classical Reception Studies

In 1996, the Chinese National Jingju (Beijing Opera) Theatre and the American New York Greek Drama Company collaborated on a cross-cultural production of Euripides’ Bacchae which was presented in both China and the United States and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities with its largest grant ever given up to that point.

The paper will use two modern productions of ancient Greek Drama to explore what constitutes a ‘failed’ performance and how, in retrospect, some such performances have been recast as a success.

This paper examines The Birds of Aristophanes (1846), a Victorian classical burlesque by James Robinson Planché, which was unique for being the only burlesque to directly parody Greek Old Comedy. It also marked an unexpected failure for the playwright whose earlier classical burlesques, notably Olympic Revels (1831) and The Golden Fleece (1845), had been smash box office hits with remarkably long runs.

This paper explores the unsettling impact of classical reference and allusion on the commedia dell’arte of seventeenth-century Rome. Recent studies of Baroque theatre have drawn attention to the interconnections of contemporary politics and performance (Burke 2012) and with the court culture of dissimulation (Snyder 2009), and to its dependence on an aesthetics of effect producing emotional and bodily affects in the audience (Fischer-Lichte 2012).

This presentation takes up the poet and dramatist H.D. through the lens of her engagement with Euripidean drama. Specifically, I offer a reading of H.D.'s 1917 "Notes on Euripides" in order to illuminate H.D.'s ambivalent relationship to the failed avant-garde desire, as Peter Burger polemically describes it, to "restore art to life."

In this paper I will highlight a possibility, already fully exploited in a performance by Dutch theatre company Aluin (Utrecht), to interpret the well-known and fascinating scene between Medea and Aigeus in Euripides' Medea as a fine example of seductive pragmatics.