Staging Greek Tragedy in the Digital Era | Aggeliki Poulou
Lectures

An attempt to examine the reception of the Greek tragedy in the digital era. More specifically, the question is about the reception of Greek tragedy in the digital theatre. At this meeting, among the cultural derivatives of two different and so distant seasons, a game, a ‘come and go’ between identities and qualities is developed: audience/citizen, political/religious, time-space of myth/actual current time, presence/absence. Believers in their audiovisual alphabet find digital equivalents about the tragic chorus, the sense of community, the space, the mimesis. Finally, the tragic appears as performative phenomenon and a concept at the same time.
The starting point is the series of multimedia installations Polytopes of Iannis Xenakis, and in particular the Polytope Mycenes (1978), which is conceived as an attempt to recreate spatial relationships and qualities. Xenakis’ Polytopes are a patchwork of many places (topoi): topos of geography, topos of light, topos of history, topos of poetry and music. Like the ancient theater and the ancient Greek tragedy was. Moreover, Polytopes are a happening, an event, a dromenon, reclaiming the performativity and the rituality of ancient spaces.