Survival and Disobedience in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Drama
The 22nd Annual APGRD / University of London Joint Postgraduate Symposium on the Performance of Ancient Drama will take place on Thursday 30 June (in Oxford) and Friday 1 July 2022 (in London). This year’s theme will be: ‘Survival and Disobedience in the Theory and Practice of Greek and Roman Drama’. The symposium will be an in-person event, although the 4.30pm Guest Lecture, Antigone in Palermo: Survival and Disobedience in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s and Sutta Scupa's Antigone Power, by Dr Margherita Laera on day one will also be live streamed.
Register
To attend, please register by emailing: postgradsymp@classics.ox.ac.uk
Programme
Day 1: Thursday 30 June
Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, 66 St. Giles’, Oxford, OX1 3LU
11.00-11.30: Registration and welcome
11.30-12.15: Comedic survivals
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Orlando Gibbs (Cambridge) – ‘Reading Plautine Adaptation as Survival’
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Joshua Streeter (The Ohio State University) – ‘The Haunted Skene: A Practice-as-Research Case Study of Nikokhares’ Fragmentary Herakles Khoregus’
12.15-12.30: Break
12.30-13.30: Women, survival and afterlife
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Lena Grimm (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – ‘Barbara Köhler’s “Elektra. Mirrorings” and the Poetics of Survival’
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Vasiliki Avramidi (University of Bologna) – ‘The Afterlife in Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad: a gendered space for creation’
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Cecilia Burattin (University of Milan) – ‘Iphigenia in Tauris: finding survival in ritual disobedience’
13.30-15.00: Lunch
15.00-15.30: Presentation by British American Drama Academy (BADA)
15.30-16.15: Survival and trauma
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Matteo Barbiero (University of Southern California) – ‘Surviving Antigone in We are not Princesses (2018)’
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Chelsea R. Stolt (University of Maryland) – ‘Euripides’ Refugee Theater: Text Worlds Theory and the Reception of Trojan Women’
16.15-16.30: Break
16.30-17.30: Guest Lecture (also livestreamed)
Dr Margherita Laera (University of Kent): Antigone in Palermo: Survival and Disobedience in Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s and Sutta Scupa's Antigone Power
17.30-18.00: Break
18.00-19.15: Workshop Performance: Le Tigre Bleu de l’Euphrate by Laurent Gaudé
- Directed by Dr Estelle Baudou (APGRD)
- Performed by James Aldred and Fanny Bloc
- Music by Alex Silverman, performed by Edwin Hughes
- Translated by Claire Barnes, Estelle Baudou and Zoë Jennings
19.15: Informal supper
Day 2: Friday 1 July
Caryl Churchill Theatre, Department of Drama, Theatre, and Dance, Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, Surrey, TW20 0EX
11.00-11.30: Response to Day One: Dr Emma Cole (University of Bristol)
11.30-11.45 Break
11.45-12.45: Survival of fragments, survival in fragmentation
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Lucy Ruddiman (UCL) – ‘Sparagmos as a starting point: fragmentation as a mode of engagement with extant Greek tragedy’
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Menelaos Karantzas (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) – ‘The world of sounds and music that emerges from the surviving fragments of Sophocles’ Ichneutai’
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Amanda Kubic (The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – ‘Sapphic Survival and Queer/Crip Performance in Olga Broumas and T. Begley’s Sappho’s Gymnasium’
12.45-13.45: Lunch
13.45-14.30: Bodies on stage 1: animating, haunting, remaining
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Marcus Bell (Oxford) – ‘The corpse of tragedy: inter(in)animacy and Gisele Vienne’s This is How You Will Disappear (2010)’
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Martino Parra (University of Bologna/Oxford) – ‘Dramaturgical considerations on Euripides’ Bacchae ending in comparison with Italian contemporary practice: who – and what – remains onstage?’
14.45-15.00 Break
15.00-16.15: Bodies on stage 2: archive and performance
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Francesca Ginevra Beretta (Yale University) – ‘Martha Graham and the Haunting Survival of Aeschylus’ Furies’
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Johanna Hörmann (Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg) and Tomaz Simatovic – ‘Performative Approaches to the Satyr as a Contemporary Research Figure’
16.15-16.30 Break
16.30-17.30 Response to Day Two: Prof. Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh/NYU) by video-conference, followed by Plenary
Download the Programme
A PDF version of the programme is available here >>
About the Symposium
This annual Symposium focuses on the reception of Greek and Roman tragedy, comedy, epic and other texts in performance, exploring their afterlives through re-workings by both writers and practitioners across all genres and periods. This year’s focus on ‘Survival and Disobedience’ takes as its starting point the question of what ‘survival’ or ‘surviving’ might mean in the context of the reception of the ancient past. We invite participants to consider any of the following questions: What constitutes survival, and what power structures enable it or hinder it? How is ‘what survives’ different from ‘what remains’ materially? In performance, must survival be held in binary opposition with the ephemeral? What is the relationship between survival and haunting? In particular, what happens when survival is errant, accidental, or figured as an act of ‘disobedience’? How might generic transgressions, counter readings, or other moments of ‘disobedience’ themselves enact survival?
The guest respondent on Day 1 will be Dr Emma Cole (Bristol), and Prof. Olga Taxidou (Edinburgh/NYU) will be guest respondent on Day 2. Day 1 will include a Guest Lecture by Dr Margherita Laera (Kent) and a bilingual workshop performance of Laurent Gaudé’s Le Tigre Bleu de l’Euphrate (in French and English) directed by Dr Estelle Baudou (APGRD).