EWPWE · Europe at War in Post-war Europe. Performing Greek Tragedies, Comedies and European Identity.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2019-09-01 → 2021-08-31
- EU contribution
- €212,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Europe at War in Post-war Europe. Performing Greek Tragedies, Comedies and European Identity.
This project has examined the multiple ways in which contemporary western European theatre directors have staged and continue to stage war with the help of ancient Greek dramatic scripts from the WW2 onwards. In western European countries, which were very differently involved in the two World Wars and which have not experienced major military conflicts within their borders since, the subject of war has regularly been scrutinised in performance since 1945. During political or economic crises, European dramatic artists have tended to rely heavily on Greek plays to evoke war. In a globalised world, ancient culture is usually considered a shared international heritage. However, it is undoubtedly the case that it enjoys more cultural capital in western Europe, which may well explain the reason why Greek theatre has particularly provided post-war Europe with the requisite distance to deal with war on the contemporary stage. For this reason, the lens of this project focused on a narrow geopolitical scale, presuming a specificity to western Europe that needed in this instance to be highlighted: how does the use of ancient theatre in order to depict war contribute to the building/ undermining of European identity? As there has been no open conflict within these countries’ territories during the period under consideration, representing war on stage necessarily questions the position and responsibility of both the individual nation states and Europe as a whole on the world stage at this time. In the context of the pandemic, and of the multiple crises it has exacerbated, it seemed particularly relevant to study how the use of ancient tragedy by contemporary performing artists contributes to forging new national and European identities and how they may respond to critiques of eurocentrism.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
This project will examine the multiple ways in which contemporary western European theatre directors (in the UK, Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland) have staged and continue to stage war with the help of ancient Greek dramatic scripts from the WW2 onwards. I will argue that such performances question and try to understand European identity. The three strands of this interdisciplinary project (in between Classical Reception Studies and Theatre Studies and mixing practice and theory) will cover past, present and prospective dramatic approaches of this question: 1/ academic research (archives, libraries, interviews) to analyse past performances; 2/ observation of contemporary productions in rehearsals; 3/ creative labs with students from Oxford, Paris and Liège to highlight how young Europeans are dealing with those materials. This will allow to propose a history of war on stage in post-war Europe, told through productions of ancient plays that seek, sometimes consciously indeed, to build a distinctly European identity. The fellowship will take place at the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Faculty of Classics, UOXF) that is the best environment to manage such a project given its world-class database and archive of performances of Greek and Roman Drama that I will use and contribute to. This indisciplinary project will grant me the opportunity to work with some of the best researchers in Classical Reception Studies in the world (particularly with my supervisor Fiona Macintosh), strenghtening my academic network. I will improve my skills in this field and also in general European research management to become a mature researcher in Classical Reception Studies (since I have a PhD in Theatre Studies). Moreover, since I already have an extended experienc as a stage-director, this research-as-creation project will bridge my academic and artistic carreers and put me at the forefront of Theatre Studies.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE CHANCELLOR, MASTERS AND SCHOLARS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD · OxfordCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union