The Art of Ancient Acting
By Nicole St.Pierre
Before great literature, the world was a stage. At USC College
classicists study how cultural performances shaped society long ago.
“Literature as we know it today, where you curl up on the couch with a
book, was very different in ancient culture,” says William Thalmann,
professor of classics and comparative literature. “In ancient Rome,
people made their career by making speeches. One can’t begin to
understand Greece and Rome without acknowledging the cultural influence
of public performance.”
In Thalmann’s seminar “Early Greek Literature,” poetic texts are
examined as one of the discursive practices of Greek culture during its
critically formative period from the late eighth century through
Ephialtes’ reforms in Athens in 460 B.C. Stu-dents ask questions like
what roles did performances of epic, choral and monodic song and
tragedy play within the process of the formation and evolution of the
polis.
“In addition to providing entertainment, the performances of ancient
texts were occasion for the convergence of class and gender discourse,”
says Thalmann, whose Ph.D. in classics is from Yale University. “These
texts played a key role within contemporary social and political
processes, especially early state formation.”
His colleague, classics professor Thomas Habinek, shares a similar interest.
“In the Roman world, there was little or no concept of literature as a
private experience of reading and writing,” says Habinek, who teaches
graduate seminars on topics about the Roman arena and performance and
genre in classical Greece and Rome. “We have a better appreciation and
understanding of these texts, when we back away from interpreting them
in a strongly textual and literal way, and instead approach them as a
cultural performance,” says Habinek, who is currently working on a
study on the role of song in Roman culture.
“The Romans ritualized language through the use of diction, melody and
meter. What we think of as literature today, was a social as opposed to
an individual practice,” says Habinek. His other research concerns
literature’s involvement in the construction of social authority and
distribution of power within traditional societies.
At USC College, one can catch a public performance reminiscent of the
Greek and Roman era. On sunny afternoons, students gather in Founders
Park to act out plays from Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
Recently, graduate students performed scenes from Aristophanes’
“Lysistrata”—a play about the Peloponnesian War where the women
withhold sex to get the men to stop fighting. It was part of a
worldwide staging of the bawdy ancient Greek anti-war comedy to promote
peace during the Iraq war.
Analyzing how texts were performed holds unique challenges for scholars
of Greek epic and drama. For instance, there is no written record of
exactly where and how Greek drama was performed in the fifth century.
In addition, key elements beyond the script of the play are inevitably
missed when studying only the text, such as scenery, inflection of
actors’ voices, actors’ gestures and postures, costumes and masks,
singing, dancing, sounds of the original language and its various
poetic rhythms.
One unique characteristic is that the writer of the classical script
was also the producer, says Thalmann. In ancient Greece, when the
writer’s work was approved for presentation at the state religious
festival in honor of Dionysus (the god of wine and fertility), the
state assigned him actors and a chorus. The author then had to perform
the additional tasks of training the actors and chorus and of composing
the music for the various songs and providing choreography for the
chorus.
Since women were not allowed to take part in dramatic productions, male
actors had to play female roles. As a result, masks with broad
variations helped the audience identify
the sex, age and social rank of the characters.
“Because the actors were masked and there was likely always someone
sitting very far away in the top row, the performances included very
broad, obvious effects and there are traces of this in the text,” says
Thalmann. For example, when a character was supposed to weep, he (or
more often she) would draw attention to the fact by saying in effect,
“I am weeping.”
“These descriptions make it easier to piece together details and
visualize how these ancient dramas were performed,” says Thalmann. “It
can still be frustrating, but the insight leads to a greater
appreciation of literature and drama.”
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