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The Digital Auteur: Technology, Transmission, and the Re-Invention of Greek Tragedy

Speaker
George Rodosthenous
Venue
The Pavilion, St Hilda's College & Online
Date
Professor George Rodosthenous (University of Leeds) will deliver the guest lecture at this year's Joint Postgraduate Symposium on Ancient Performance and Reception, but all are welcome, attendance at the symposium is not required to join the guest lecture.
 
If Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy established the director as auteur, the digital era demands recognition of a new figure: the digital auteur, for whom technology is not a scenographic supplement but a structural, dramaturgical, and performative force. The ancient Greek stage deployed its own technologies (the mēkhanē, the ekkyklēma, and the guilds of technitai) as perception structures shaping audience understanding. Contemporary directors now mobilise real-time video, immersive sound, and digital scenography as their functional equivalents. Yet, these tools intensify the ethical question posed by The Bacchae: as we witness suffering through screens and virtual mediation, do we become, like Pentheus, guilty voyeurs? By juxtaposing ancient technē with digital avatars and real-time mediation, this keynote suggests that the central technology at stake is not the crane or the camera, but perception itself, and invites reflection on how digital spectatorship might shape our experience of empathy, attention, and ethical engagement.
 
George Rodosthenous is Professor of Theatre Directing at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds. His research interests are theatre directing, actor training, creative robotics theatre, verbatim theatre, contemporary adaptations of Greek tragedy, theatre as voyeurism, the body in performance, refining improvisational techniques and compositional practices for performance, devising pieces with live musical soundscapes as interdisciplinary process and British musical theatre. He has edited the books Theatre as Voyeurism: The Pleasures of Watching (Palgrave), Contemporary Approaches to Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury), The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches from Snow White to Frozen (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury), Twenty-First Century Musicals: From Stage to Screen (Routledge) and co-edited Greek Tragedy and the Digital (Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury). Professor Rodosthenous has directed 13 new adaptations of Greek tragedies and other theatre pieces of verbatim and musical theatre in Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, UK.