Divine Witnessing and Dramatic Performance in Ancient Greece
Thursday, November 7th@ 5:00PM
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专STRACT
Theaters are ubiquitous pieces of monumental architecture in the ancient Greek landscape.听 They dominate landscapes, take advantage of sweeping vistas, and leave a tangible impression of ancient performance venues through their easily apprehended forms.听 Despite their ancient (and modern) popularity, however, they have frequently been left out of critical accounts concerning the articulation of sacred space.听 When they do appear in such studies, it is generally a cursory treatment or simple acknowledgement that some sort of performance took place in or adjacent to a sanctuary.听 On the other hand, accounts of ancient festivals involving dramatic performance, such as the Great Dionysia, or studies of Mediterranean-wide theoria networks, often leave the physical venue of performance in the background, as a static entity in which the dynamic ritual occurred.听 In both cases, the theater itself becomes a mere backdrop or footnote, unchanging, achronological, and uncomplicated.
It is perhaps the relatively simple architectural form of the theater, with its tripartite division of theatron (or cavea), orchestra, and skene, that belies its ritual and performative complexity.听 But within this straightforward schematic is a more dynamic space than generally acknowledged.听 Through an investigation of viewsheds and movement patterns, this paper demonstrates how theaters functioned as active participants in the ritual-architectural events that dominated the religious life of ancient Greece, thereby shaping the nature of dramatic performance and generating the expectation of divine witnessing on the part of the audience.听 Viewed in this light, theaters become complex and critical spaces of ritual, reflection, and transformation, for both their actor and spectator participants.听 Ultimately, such an approach, by centering theatral space within religious performance and knitting together threads of architectural and textual analysis, facilitates a more nuanced and deeply contextualized account of dramatic performance in ancient Greece.