Analogous to the sporting event the Olympic Games, the Great Dionysia Festival was a competitive theater festival held as a national religious ceremony in ancient Greece. With this new work, which recently had its premiere at The Paris Autumn Festival, young French theater director Maxime Kurvers proposes new approaches to sharing the essence and structure of the Greek tragedy, a genre that could be characterized as the stronghold of Western theater.
The single actor on stage begins to recount possible “births of tragedy” in the manner of telling a subjectified history. 2500 years ago, the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens was a place where over 10,000 citizens gathered to discuss the ethos and ideals of the city-state, through plays based on history and mythology. A reenacted memory of tragic literature and a history of western scenic art emerge from the actor’s portrayal of these events, conjured from the first known tragic work, The Persians by Aeschylus. In 2018, what is the significance of telling an audience the story of the Persian army’s devastation in their defeat by the Greeks? This deceptively simple, radical performance will stimulate audiences’ minds, bodies, and emotions, prompting empathetic and intellectual reflections on the basic mechanisms and conditions that birthed theater as theater, and on the role of theater itself.