Digital Tragedy-Towards Greek Drama as Noughts and Ones
Digital Tragedy-Towards Greek Drama as Noughts and Ones
Dramatic tragedy in performance in ancient Greece was a medium that explored what it means to be human in a world in which only partially identifiable and ultimately unknowable forces limit human understanding and agency. Moreover, when the gods squabble, and laugh, humans die by the scores. Greek Tragedy achieved this perspective by locating the live human actor at the centre of the performance. And for almost everyone in at least the Sixth and Fifth Century BCE, Greek tragedy existed as performance rather than as written text. But the actor was masked, and the effect of this, while remaining enigmatically difficult to pin down today, may well have been to bring long-dead Bronze-Age heroes into the here-and-now as if they were alive in the present time and space of the ancient Greek outdoor performance locations, where also living divine beings were immanent and influential.
Module 6 explores the extent to which the central insight of Greek tragedy is compatible with a depersonalizing trend in contemporary performance which culminates in a posthuman placement, firstly, of the live actor inside predominantly digital environments, and secondly, the total replacement of live actors on the tragic stage by digital entities. This Module raises, in a heightened form, many of the issues considered during earlier modules of the course. For in the ancient world, all endeavors relied on – and entire world-views centred on – the human body and what it could achieve unaided by machines, even if there were available to the Greeks some technologies of a rudimentary kind. Communication between human individuals primarily occurred by means of the spoken word, with the only other “social media” available being the written word (on wax or soft clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, or later codices, and inscriptions in stone) or the various media of material culture (coins, sculpture, vase or wall paintings, architecture, and so on). So by examining a medium such as Greek tragedy, which relied so strongly on the body of the live human actor, in order to discover how it is being reconceptualized in the digital world, this Module goes to the heart of a course that is focused on the reception of the Classical World in Digital Popular Culture.
Module 6.1 examines the nature of the medium that was Greek tragedy in Athens in the late sixth, fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Beginning with a consideration of the lenses we necessarily look back through in our effort to “see” the medium of Greek tragedy in performance, including the nature, broadly speaking, of theatre as a medium, 6.1 then lists the extant tragic plays, and considers the language of tragedy, its delivery in performance, the masked tragic actor and chorus, the physicality required and generated by masked acting, and the fact that dance and music were central aspects of tragic performance. The nature of “the tragic” in Greek tragedy is then briefly considered; t