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The Performing Arts as podcast series is supported by taught as part of humanity's cultural programme.

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Hello and welcome to the fourth episode in our Chameleon Performing Artist podcast.

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And we're today here with Professor Fiona Macintosh. Thank you so much for joining us, Fiona.

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And just to tell our audience a bit about Fiona. She's been absolutely integral to the production,

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both in 2018 when we put on the first show and recently helping us do everything we can to get the show on.

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She's a fellow and held as a professor of classical reception at Oxford and the director of the archive of performances of Greek and Roman drama.

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I got that out. We'll call it the AP Gilardi from now on, and we'll certainly be talking about that later.

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And just talk a bit about Fiona's work.

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Your most recent book that you published just recently is performing Epic were Telling Tales, which we're also going to discuss later.

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I think you've generally written widely on the reception of ancient theatre.

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You've done some a lot of work on Irish theatre. And the book that started me off last year when rewriting the play was Madea Performance History,

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which is an interactive multi e-book about the history of Europeanism today, which is also something we'd love to talk about.

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That book was done with the APHC idea,

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and I think something that would be great to tell our viewers a bit about is what the APJ ideas and what you do as the director.

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That and now what is it to someone who's never heard about it before? Hello, Shavitz.

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Very, very nice to join you on this podcast.

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And in some ways, you know, having had a number of conversations now, I hadn't realised they were quite such a long period.

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It's really nice to join you in this this podcast series.

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Yeah, the APJ very interesting. See how how many different ways people attempt to pronounce it.

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But as you say, it stands for the archive of performances of Greek and Roman drama.

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It's an archive,

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which means it's a collection of lots of exciting pieces of paper memorabilia that often theatre companies like you don't have a home for.

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But people like us researchers really want to house.

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And in Oxford, in the classics centre. We're very lucky.

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We've got the spectacular study room, as we call it.

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It's on the first floor. In a wonderfully welcoming, beautiful building.

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And it's got a fantastic library. We think mostly the focus is on Greek theatre, but it's it's really all aspects of classical reception,

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which means all different kinds of ways that the Greek and Roman tax have been received in the modern world.

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So a really great library.

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But we have a collection, as I say, of bits of pieces of paper and film, of cuttings and reviews, all of which are kept in our store, in the basement.

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So we're quite a big team in this research centre. We're lucky to have two archivists imposts,

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one person who very much specialises Clare Kenward on on the interactive multimedia e-books, which we can look at later.

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And Claire Barnes, who some of you may well have met at various points, and Claire works with us.

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I mean, she's a researcher. She's doing a doctorate and very exciting doctorate on on reception of.

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Well, mostly contemporary performance poetry and especially focussing on Kate Tempest.

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But on Monday and Tuesday, we're very lucky to have her holding the fort, making sure that our databases, which sounds terribly dull,

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but actually the way anyone can find out, you know, what production of Medea happened, say, last year or the year before or so,

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for example, your wonderful Baim Madea production is not only recorded on the database,

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and while all artists and every member of the creative team will be recorded there for everyone,

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everywhere internationally to access now and in the future, as we hope.

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But also Claire will be the person, obviously not during the pandemic,

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that Bonds would be the person who would greet you if you wanted to consult anything in our archive that wasn't yet digitised.

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And some of those things may well be, TypeScript. So we have play scripts by very distinguished poets over the years.

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So we've got quite a bit of material, say, by Tony Harrison, and we even have rehearsal scripts.

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So obviously for researchers, that's really interesting. They can watch the transformation.

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And, you know, you've been there and in the studio when a text begins in one way and ends up, of course,

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on the opening night and even during the course of the run, looking and sounding very, very difficult.

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We'll make sure to keep our rehearsal scripts. Would you love them?

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That's exactly what we like.

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I think what's remarkable about this and I think a misconception that I just found out I had just in the conversation with you before the podcast.

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I think many people do, as it may be called the ancient. Oh, God, I can't remember that in the ancient archive.

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Not ancient. The archive of of what seems like, you know, bygone ages.

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But it's contemporary work you're doing. It's contemporary productions. It's contemporary people working on the classics.

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And it isn't just, you know, academics sitting in an ivory tower.

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It's people who are putting on plays who are actually actively interacting with the text as much as it's,

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you know, plays from well over two millennia ago. It's it's real life now whether you're doing it, could you.

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Absolutely. And I mean, obviously, you know, that's not to say that there isn't a very strong and important kind of theatre history angle.

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And indeed, we even have a database which is very ancient, which tries to map, you know, performances in time in antiquity.

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And in addition to the historical strand, which I have contributed to quite, quite a bit, we have the pleasure.

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And it really is the pleasure and also the extraordinary learning capacity in our engagement with artists.

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So a lot of work I've done has been in a rehearsal studio with some fantastic artists,

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many of whom, you know, maybe began life as a professional dancer.

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But our point of contact, for example, like worked a lot with Stern Leslie, who started the movement department at the RNC.

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But he he really is such an interesting interlocutor person to exchange ideas with in relation to courses.

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And so not only is he done workshops with us over a number of days with other choreographers and composers in the room,

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but also Stern and I have kind of co-written staff, exchanged lots of exciting ideas.

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And similarly, I've worked that before.

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Ivan Bernstein, Irish Theatre had a great privilege to work with Marina Carr in quite some detail on hearing how her recent work,

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a number of recent works, Hecuba and a much more recent kind of Oedipus project are developing.

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So that part of the work, the NPG idea,

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and that's before I've even talked about my colleagues and who they're working with and in some cases actually commissions,

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you know, there was a time when we were even in a financially rather privileged position,

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thanks to the Onassis Foundation, to actually commission new work.

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So and, you know, we and I think the thing perhaps we're most proud of was when Helen Eastman was our producer,

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someone who I think is going to appear on your podcast series at some point anyway.

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And I know you know her well. And Oliver Taplin, who is very much associated with this as well,

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when Oliver and Helen brought together with the Oxford Playhouse an extraordinary production

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of the Oresteia East Gilliss or EIO trilogy called me Laura over from South Africa,

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directed by a little known director as she then was, who now is an internationally known director, Yul Farber.

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And we really believe that Millau in the Oxford Playhouse, where they took all the seats out.

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It was completely reconfigured, was one of, you know, one of the great sort of highlights of what.

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The AP JRD has done, and I also think the kind of model for us all who work in academia,

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what academics can do when they're in conversation with artists.

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I think that's so interesting to us, because as people will slowly realise, as the podcast phrase comes out, we're very, very paired with academics.

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And it's something that a lot of people we speak to in favour of it confused by.

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But what we're learning is that with incredible organisations like the APJ idea and the people that studies

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that with with with academics who are really interested nowadays in becoming we're not even nowadays,

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but by the sounds of it, a really long time becoming very, very practical and helpful about making sure that these these stories are heard.

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That documented. As you well said, the costs and creators behind them.

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Remember, for the task, but also that the work of doing the art of doing stays relevant to not only what you're studying,

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but the way that we now relook at the receptions of these plays.

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You know, they may be small, but they're being made alive every time they put on.

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And it's worth remembering that just because they're old, that doesn't make them stuffy.

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That doesn't mean they don't have to be moulded. And this kind of work, I think, is the key, because the only reason that, you know,

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we feel so able to do the media is because there is this such a wealth of years and years of people putting on media.

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Years and years of people in diaspora, pretty formative years and years of people who are part of diverse communities using media as a mouthpiece.

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And I learnt all of this from this wonderful interactive history of of Europeanism day.

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And I encourage anyone and everyone will be linked. Next, the podcast Habitus through that book.

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It's the most accessible any academic thing I write in in all of my studies.

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And I would love to hear a bit more about, first of all, the idea of why an interactive e-book.

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What does that mean? How did you convince people that that was the way forward?

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I mean, it's still to me, I have an experience,

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a lot of books in that kind of genre and that kind of mechanism of getting your point across to the reader.

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But also later on, we can discuss a bit about Madea, that performance history and and what that meant,

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putting it into this incredibly mean, incredible medium that I never experienced before.

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So what is the story of this interactive e-book and how that came about?

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Well, actually, the first book, the Research Centre,

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the APJ idea published was a collection of essays called Madea and Reception of Madea Madea Performance History and from the Renaissance,

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which now seems rather naive.

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And we're all rather sort of well, I don't actually know whether we precise I think we might said fifteen hundred to two thousand.

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And it was kind of bold and at the time and we believed quite innovative.

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We brought together people from diverse disciplines to think about the figure of Madea and and also Madea in performance.

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Now, some years later, you know, fifteen or so years later, it became apparent that a lot of the work we did at the beginning,

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which some of which had to be collecting data, because really in the early days, this was something to fall in between academic stools.

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People unlike Shakespeare, who had always been studied through the performance history, Greek tragedy had never been studied in that way.

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Today only been the preserve of serious classicists,

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philologists who looked very carefully at and edits that had been done to the Greek text and commented upon them.

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This is where really the pioneering work of Oliver Taplin, who I've already referred to, came in because for Oliver,

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one of the first and definitely I think probably the first in the Anglophone world scholars who actually

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reminded readers classicists in the first instance that these paintings were written for performance.

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So in some ways, in 2000, when we published the first Madina book, this was kind of new cutting edge stuff.

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People hadn't thought about Madina through time. And particularly Medea on the stage.

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15 years later, we had published multiple books on multiple plays,

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multiple figures and thought about opera, musical theatre, thought about Chorus's thought about dance.

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The time we everyone has been think about something called Knowledge Exchange, which is the kind of academic way of describing what we were saying.

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If I come into a rehearsal studio with you and so on, that is of knowledge exchange.

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We weren't running actually a court or asked to to run and we ran it for the HRC,

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a public engagement course where we got lots of young, brilliant graduate students reading doctorates and young early career.

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Scholars and we called it communicating ancient Greece and Rome. And I ran it with my brilliant archivist, then Naomi Satchell,

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who came out of the museum section with sector with lots of ideas about opening archives and learning,

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teaching everyone, especially me, how to communicate in with new media and so on.

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And I said to Naomi, after four years of loving these various wonderful courses, I mean, I have to say we got people like Bethany Hughes in the room.

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We've got all of the kind of superstars who were classicists,

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but now communicating in wonderful ways to come and talk to our students and kind of encourage them.

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And they did brilliantly. And our students have gone on to do fabulous things.

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I have to say, but I said to Naomi and our team research team, we need to up our own game.

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Here we are sort of running these courses, but what are we doing?

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And the obvious thing we needed to do was to think about not only opening our collection.

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I mean, we already had an international team of researchers around the world who were contributing wonderfully, generously to our database.

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But so much of the collection, as I said, was in the basement. We couldn't afford to digitise everything.

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And Naomi, together with our then data developer, Tom Rubout, said, you need an e-book.

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And I'm afraid at that point to me, that meant something flat one.

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I said. Come on, hack it. Convince me. What do you mean?

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And as Naomi said, let's go to museum sites, see what they're doing with objects.

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See how you can manipulate objects. We can do this with bits of our Connectome book.

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We can use film. We can use audio. We can commission new interviews.

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We can go and work with new artists. And so.

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Came about an application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for follow on funding.

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We were successful. We were funded to do media and an Agamemnon's book and Tom Rubout and Claire Henwood, who succeeded,

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and Naomi in the role, built the first book, the Madea book that you were referring to.

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And Claire and I have built the Agamemnon book.

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And not only have we bought those print publications. There is an Agamemnon's one as well up to date.

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But we have had such delight in talking to people who are literally either on the cutting floor or even inviting people who.

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We've always admired as performers and we think they would make a brilliant idea.

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Let's get them to voice it or we were extremely lucky.

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With the Madea book,

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especially because we were able to commission the first of Helen Iceman's barefaced grippe films because we had this funding and we said to Helen,

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we need, you know, that famous speech where Madea comes out of the house, the women of current speech.

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We need that on camera. But we don't want it in sheets and [INAUDIBLE].

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One, two girls. We want something that has a contemporary feel.

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And Helen filmed that. And of course, she did. Some people will know as well brilliantly for the Agamemnon, where the Watchmen speech,

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I think, on YouTube has had a phenomenal number of hits as it's shot at the top.

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You know, somewhere down on the South Bank kind of thing, they've got, you know, at at at dawn,

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they've got the watchmen from the Agamemnon and discovering the beacon over at Troy.

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And it's some. So that's been such fun.

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I mean, a big learning curve. Delighted that you found it so helpful.

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We had to completely rethink it for me, especially as a as an academic.

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I had to learn how to write. I had to also learn how to share my text, that kind of thing.

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Again, that writers in the world beyond academia do all the time.

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And I have to watch colleagues telling me that it doesn't work.

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And I've learnt so much from people who pointed that out to me.

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And very often, if it doesn't work, it's again, perhaps more like television.

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It's because I realised that too many words. And it's really about writing for images because we're trying to make.

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Are narrative really fit our connexion and therefore give a kind of.

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Well, not just another layer, but a very different,

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multi-dimensional approach to what might otherwise be quite a kind of dry academic area of interest?

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I think that's what Sage Sammy not only give too much away about them from, we because we will have another broadcast on this wonderful book out,

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Media Performance History, and I'm sure with our listeners will be very interested to know it as well.

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But what I got from reading but is not only is it accessible as someone who hadn't studied classic classics before, I understood all of it.

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You know, it was. Nina Gardner's performance and a ballet of media and recordings of Madeira or Evars and seeing how media had been depicted.

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And I think what what comes across and what I definitely didn't know,

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and I'm sure a lot a lot of people who aren't exposed to the field don't know is a lot of active,

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contemporary, useful and really artistic uses for interpretations of of.

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I mean, a play that was written twenty five hundred years ago. I find that baffling every time I think about it.

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A really real play that's relevant in now 20, 21.

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We're still talking about it. And that's the great thing about the book.

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And I'm sure I haven't read the Agamemnon and I certainly should that it's going to be the same idea because with this interactive format,

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those of us who don't just sit and read and academics, but I'm sure there are many, you know, academic tomes about Madeira and performance history.

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But this is a way that I'm sure that messaging can be so much more successful and so much more accessible to those who maybe

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aren't so interested in just the raw academic history and don't know how to get their head around those kind of books,

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but can really understand them. Use this interactive book in a way that that makes material that makes media accessible,

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that makes Moodies relevance today so clear, because often I think that's also forgotten.

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It's the story that so many people have told for so long for a reason.

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And that's because it's a story that that still matters.

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And I think that that's an incredible thing that the book that the book does get across to people.

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Well, I I'm very, very pleased to hear that, and I'm sure our funders would be even more delighted to hear that we.

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I am thinking about relevance and perhaps something I took away with.

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I had the opportunity in the making of the media to interview not not anyone from theatre, but in fact, someone who had been consulting.

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I think it was a production of show Pontiac's Midday Madina.

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At that point, really a very little known early modern French opera that the E.A. were going to put on at the Coliseum in London.

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And he turned out to be. Yes. I live in London.

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So as often happens, you know, a friend of one of my neighbours.

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And so I interviewed this psychiatrist who's saying lost his expertise was on why do women kill their children?

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And it it was one of the most interesting interviews I think I've ever had, the pleasure and the privilege to kind of listen to.

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And I had almost hung hung on every word, because at that point I realised.

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In many ways, of course, the way classical scholars had interpreted this text,

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you know, for people of my generation, I'm considerably older, the nation.

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You know, we had really been asked by the women in the room who really resisted this to believe that,

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you know, what we were watching was some kind of monstrous women.

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And here I was having a conversation with a psychiatrist who was pretty much telling me what kind of conversation he would be having

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with Madea in order to ascertain why she did it and what kinds of systems he would need to put in place to enable the healing process.

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And I I found so if if if the e-book has allowed me as it has to have those

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kinds of conversations and then for us to be able to share them with others,

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as you say, I mean, I think that kind of conversation really does make Madea speak to us all.

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You know, and what you know, the idea that this is a text from from, as you say,

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two and a half millennia ago, and the only people who might engage with it would be rather dry and dusty.

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Classic classical scholars. Is is is a view that we really need to, I think, to put to one side and I think continue on that.

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I mean, your most recent book I mentioned at the start performing at Paykel, telling tales.

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I mean, you can certainly tell that. So tell our listeners a lot about it.

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But just to give a bit of a framework, when I read the. But I haven't had the privilege reading the book yet.

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But, you know, your time tonight is 20 percent better.

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And the blurb at the end of the blogs is something really interesting, which is that epics of ancient Greece,

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Andre, found to be particularly revealing and particularly telling the contemporary wider cultural sphere,

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which the game at a glance is just how could something possibly about I would be relevant to some,

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say, the contemporary by the conference there and what you know.

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Tell us a bit about the book, but also about this idea. I mean, why the name?

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What is what are you trying to get out here, which is specifically about 21st century things, not about four six, but BCE, but about the modern day?

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Well, during the course of work on the Greek plays and their afterlife on the modern stages,

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we became very aware that from probably about 2010 onwards,

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if not a little bit earlier,

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that they were almost in some years as many productions based on the ancient Greek and Roman epics as there were on the Greek tragedies themselves.

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And it really was the sheer number and indeed the sheer quality of some of these extraordinary pieces.

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And maybe unlike sometimes with the Greek tragedies,

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when you knew that the major houses play houses around the world for a whole host of uncomfortable reasons,

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from my perspective would feel they needed to put a Greek play into the repertoire just like they

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would have Shakespeare or something to make them look like they were doing serious theatre.

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What was happening with EPIC was very often happening on the margins and in

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really exciting new work that was coming out very often from emergent artists.

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And, you know, I'm thinking particularly, you know, some of the rap poets and performance poets in Wacking,

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not only particularly in Britain, but also in France and elsewhere in Europe.

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And then increasingly, we realised that this wasn't just a turn to epic because we've called it that,

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that had in any kind of European kind of focus, but actually was a term much more broadly to epics from all over the world.

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And I think, you know, we really this is a book about Greek and Roman epic primarily,

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but it's also looking about ethnic traditions and storytelling in this wider context.

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And so this is just divine, epic tragedy.

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Why? This is an interesting shift. Well, the epic poets were the epic poems came before tragedy.

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So the stories of tragedy had already been told.

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And in the case of the Greek tragedy, they are mostly drawn, as people are famously told, from the banquet of Homer.

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And so that the stories that we find in the.

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Illiad of Homer and the Odyssey of Homer are in many ways the basis of the plots

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of R extant Greek tragedies and so very often not in particularly in antiquity,

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but very much through the modern world.

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People have set epic as now we think of it as an aurally composed poem, originally probably composed by multiple poets.

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And then. Eventually becoming a kind of canonical version.

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That in turn gets written down. But it is would have been a performed poem, which, again, scholars very often forgot when they saw this genius.

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You know, Homer, one person who had written this extraordinary long 24 book long poem.

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And so. There was in that sense, an idea of an oral long poem written in hexameter verse.

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And you then think of that as being absolutely different from the play's tragedies, which, of course, this being Madea.

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Absolutely. You know, have one.

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Poet or bard, as they were called, who recites the poem and then at moments, of course, becomes the characters in the story.

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But instead, you've got actors who take different parts.

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And in the case of Greek tragedy, along with with with a chorus,

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a group of singers and dancers as as as as I'm sure most people listening will Will will know very well.

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And in the modern world, very often people who thought or tried to theorise theatre set epic.

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And this thing called tragedy at loggerheads as made them very different things.

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What we argue in the book that is and in a way, it's not a particularly original argument, but it seemed a very necessary one to make.

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And that is that that's a very false polarity. Epic and tragedy have so much in common.

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And in recent years, we see the way in which.

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Epic is being performed to have many kind of tragic elements, as indeed, you know,

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one might be able to find many tragic moments in the epic poems themselves.

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But I think one of the reason why. Young artists around the world seem to be excited by this material, is that they have understood.

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And I think rightly understood that if you're talking about art that's made collectively through an oral tradition.

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It means that there's a space there for you as an artist to create yourself.

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And so suddenly, what looks like material that has been passed through generations is my material as much as your material,

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my material here and now in, you know, wherever we're sitting and anyone else's material anywhere else around the world.

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And, you know, if you talk to young artists like Kay Tempus, the fact that Homer was everyone's and nobody's was remarkably liberating.

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And so we're very interested in that. And then maybe the final reason why we feel that epic is speaking to the present moment as we were,

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you know, very much writing the last draughts or as a we,

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because I co-wrote this book with Justin McConnell, who's a wonderful colleague both at the AP IGAD,

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but is now in comparative literature at King's College London.

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We were extremely aware of the post Truth World, you know, a world in which politicians no longer lie.

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But misspoke. A world in which no one in the world in which, sadly, we still reside.

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The world in which fact didn't seem to count. But how we felt about our experiences mattered much more.

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And we understood. And I think it's often been voiced by artists themselves that turning to the epic tradition

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especially enabled them to access and indeed articulate emotional experience that.

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Was telling. Picking up on the word that you mentioned before in ways that the surface truths of the here and now very often seem to be denying to us.

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So the return of big narratives and big stories seemed very much to be part of this.

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Epic, turned in a very real sense, was what emboldened us to write.

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Why Epic mattered now and again.

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What we see here that I think is so interesting is that we're talking about Homer and we're finding relevance to exactly what's

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happening at an art that's being made today and something that I think I hope view is a sort of realising as it is a really big link,

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not only in this podcast, but through the other podcasts that we'll have with with other academics and thinkers about class.

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It is that there isn't a there doesn't have to be the notion of an outdated and

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set way of thinking about the classics and these books that are coming out, the productions that alongside ours, you know, Luis Alfaro in the States.

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There are so many examples. If people look at the book and read through the performance history that you offer of these tax being being so relevant,

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I was away serving the first, you know, played around with the friedly put on in Cuba.

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It was Madea. You know, it's such a remarkable history of these plays.

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And you've pointed out not just even in the last 100 years, in the last 10 years,

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we see the the way that these ancient epics and in plays boats are being used by people to talk about, to talk about what's happening.

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And obviously,

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that's exactly what what we want to do with Madeira and what we're about other artists are doing with with these incredible productions.

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And to sort of wrap up what would be interesting to hear from you is what you think about this idea that, you know, the classics is.

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Old, but speaking to us about relevant topics that are changing day by day, even today.

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The big question I know, but just as a sort of as a thought about why you think this is going coving,

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having written this book and really explored what is going on,

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probably more so than just about anyone about how the Greeks are acting, acting globally right now.

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I think I hesitate to slightly because I feel even I mean,

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today you just need to look in the newspaper and to read about discussions where Classic's has been and indeed continues to be misappropriated,

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you know, abused, misrepresented. And that's something, you know, I work quite a lot on on the 20s and 30s, 1920s and 30s.

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So in some ways, as people have argued, the trajectory from, you know, well, we can go way back to 18th century German ideas of a, you know,

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a kind of privileged sculptural Greek beautiful body end up informing and underpinning, albeit distorted,

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but written nonetheless in forming Aryan ideology, National Socialism and the Holocaust.

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So this idea of Greece. And I think that's the most important thing.

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It's its ideas about Greece. This is ancient history.

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This is always distant in time. But every generation.

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Wants to try and interpret it.

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And at the moment, what I find most disturbing is that there are members, especially on the far right, who are using things ancient,

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particularly ancient Greek things in order to justify serious attempts to

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undermine democracy and to oppress large numbers of people who with whom we live.

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And the role, therefore, of a classicists, including me, is to continue to examine the way that classic's has been used through time.

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That's what Tasco reception is about and be particularly attentive to what's going on now.

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And I'm very proud. I have serious colleagues who are intervening in these public events and hopefully we will not allow people to hold up, you know.

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And therefore in turn allow our discipline.

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I say our discipline. I mean, it's antiquity. It belongs to everyone and anything.

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But there are still people out there, especially, as I say,

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on the far right and particularly in North America, but very much here and in fact, everywhere across Europe.

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Who who are determined to. Co-opt figures from antiquity, Greek and Roman antiquity into their thoroughly ignoble causes.

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So, you know, if that's not a justification for continuing to study classics, it doesn't make me a little happy.

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But it is one reason why we need to continue to do so.

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I mean, it's an absolutely fascinating conversation. I know this is one that we will continue to have both privately,

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but we will have public discussions and podcasts about this very topic because it's so interesting.

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But the positive is there are books like yours,

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interactive books like like David Geordies as our production and so many others that are actively now tackling

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those ideologies and incredible organisations both here and in the states who are who are fighting this.

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And it's going to be great to be platforming them here. But for now.

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Thank you so much for being on this podcast. You've been an invaluable ally to us all.

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Coming up on three years now, and we thank you for your constant support and thank you for joining us here today.

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Thank you. And it's been a pleasure. And I look forward to the increasingly great things from him, from comedian.