Hellenic Drama ‘down-and-under’: a Tradition for a DIS-placed World in Search of its Myth

Abstract

The ‘contemporariness’ of Hellenic drama internationally stems from the perception that ‘tradition’ in theatre-arts is a tradition of evolution. Hellenic drama recreates the icons of our own constant ideological struggle with self-afflicted woes by consciously re-casting the quintessential Hellenic dramatic personae on the world stage of human existence, and has them ponder critically the diachronic subjectivity of our perceptions regarding out humanity. This ever-contemporary need to keep examining our theatre tradition has become the focus of many drama practitioners who r-evaluate our perceptions of our world through the performing arts, thus, giving rise to the issue of responsibility in theatre practice in re-assessing what is a ‘theatrical experience’ fur our trans-modern and cross-modal contemporary audiences. Since 1994, the Hellenic Studies section of Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, has been fostering and nurturing research and study of Hellenic theatre culture and its evolution with the assistance of the performing collective FRAGMENTS, whose aim is the exploration of the dramatic dimensions of Hellenic theatre (both tragedy and comedy) through kinesiology and embodied ritual. The collective provides a cross-fertilizing ‘space’ for performers to resource the energies of their personal and collective bicultural and bilingual experience, (dis)placed and diasporic in nature. The collective’s current project An Evening with Hellenic Theatre:Elektas / Klytemnestras, Marching Lysistratas explores the notions of (in)-justice within the context of matriarchal-patriarchal struggle for dominance and control based on fragments of texts by Aischylos, Sophokles, Euripides, Marguerite Yourcenar, Heiner Muller, Aristophanes and Ionesco.