The Norwegian Institute invites all interested to its upcoming lecture by Dr. Robert Emil Berge (Postdoctoral Fellow, History / Classical Greek, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society) on Tuesday, 11 February 2025, at 7:00 p.m. (EST).
The lecture is titled “The Mimetic Ideal of Greek Drama: Engaging Actors’ Bodily Imagination with Poetry,” and will be held at the Norwegian Institute at Athens in a hybrid format, accommodating both in-person and online attendance via Zoom.
This event marks the second Annual Lecture of the recently established Athenæum Lecture Series. The Athenæum – Society of Friends of the Norwegian Institute at Athens is an association of academics and non-academics from Norway and beyond, dedicated to supporting the Institute’s mission. It promotes the dissemination of Norwegian-based research in the Humanities and Social Sciences relevant to both ancient and modern Greece while actively fostering young scholars’ research through funding opportunities for MA and PhD students from Norway. Membership is open to anyone interested in participating in the Association’s and Institute’s activities and supporting their initiatives.
Registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
To attend in person, please register at [email protected]
To attend online, please register via the following link: https://uib.zoom.us/meeting/register/zU-deCAURyShLqQ2w_YRkw
Abstract
How were the texts of Greek drama used in the productions of their performances? They consist only of the words spoken or sung during the performance. In their ancient form they had no stage directions or speaker assignments. They were composed to be performed at festivals in Athens, with the aim of winning one specific dramatic contest. This all suggests that the poet needed to be present to instruct the actors, both in who should say what and in the actions he had envisioned should take place on stage. Hence, he would not have much concern for how the text would be used after the first performance, either for readers or for re-performances. This is also the prevailing scholarly view.
In this lecture I will address some of the problems with this view and suggest an alternative interpretation of the role that dramatic texts had in the production of ancient performances. First, how is it possible that texts that were composed for one occasion only, containing only the verbal layer of a complex performance work, have been preserved and had such an impact on Western culture as they have had? Second, if the poets had no concern for future readers or performances, should we not expect the dramatic texts, spoken words severed from the non-verbal content on stage, at least at times, to fail to convey complete situations and stories?
My solution to these problems is to abandon the idea that dramatic poetry is purely occasional. By close reading of dramatic texts, I have seen that it is possible to determine who the speaker is at any time, without any speaker assignments or indications of change of speaker. It is also clear that this is a deliberate feature of the text. This means that the poets envisioned a future life for their dramatic poetry. Why, then, do texts not provide more information about the staging, for example by being accompanied by stage directions and speaker assignments? The answer to this is that dramatic poetry adheres to a mimetic ideal, where the lack of instructions opens up a creative room for the actors. The mimetic form of drama is an aesthetic device which incites actors to engage their bodily imagination to embody the characters they are representing, much in the same way that the literary device ‘show, don’t tell’ activates the imagination of readers. Although the dramatic text provides the information needed to understand what is going on in the situations of the drama, it minimizes the use of internal ‘stage directions’, where characters talk about what they themselves or other characters are doing, or how it is done. Such directions would allow the actors to take an intellectual approach to the acting, instead of being led to an immediate response to the words that should be uttered. The result, when successfully done, is a more authentic expression.
Biographical Information
Robert Emil Berge is a postdoctoral researcher at the MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion, and Society, where he is part of the EthiCodex project, researching the early history of the codex. He holds a Ph.D. from NTNU (2021) with a dissertation titled Embodied Mimetic Poetry: Text and Performance of Classical Greek Drama. In addition to his academic work, he has a background as an actor and theatre instructor.