Hello everybody, and welcome to the Aptos podcast.
I'm Claire Bonds. It's my very great pleasure to introduce our two speakers for today's episode, Leah Ellen and David Wiles.
Leah Ellen is a poet, author, actor, director, broadcaster and screenwriter winner of renowned competitions, including the Alvin Prize twice.
His work has been broadcast on radio and television internationally,
and he's held a distinguished visiting professorship at McMaster University, Ontario.
Poet in residence of Fairleigh Dickinson University and poet in residence at the Orange Tree Theatre.
Over the course of his career, he's engaged significantly with classical material,
including, but by no means limited to his book Greek Tragedy in the Modern World.
Also, the Greek Theatre in 1985 and the Day the Girls Came, 1998, called A Triumph by Melvyn Bragg.
Today, [INAUDIBLE] be focusing on his sell-out production of antiquity at the Greenwich Theatre,
which used his own translation as a means to consider the key question before us for this episode.
How much do we know about Sophocles? Is choreography and what do we do with this knowledge today?
David Wiles is emeritus professor of drama at the University of Exeter and a member of Wolfson College, Oxford.
He's also had a very long association with the APGAR. So we're delighted to have him as the island's interlocutor today.
His major areas of historical interest have been Greek and Elizabethan theatre, and key themes in his work have been festival, mosque and space.
His work on Greek tragedy includes Greek theatre performance, which is widely used by students mask and performance in Greek Tragedy,
which used modern performances to help understand acting in antiquity and tragedy in Athens, which examined Greek performance space.
Paying particularly close attention to the chorus and its physical relationship to the actors.
David has also translated and directed several Greek plays.
Thank you so much, both of you, for joining us. I will be quiet now and allow you to begin your conversation.
It's a great pleasure to be having this conversation with you.
Leo We last met some 30 years ago when you came to talk to me, to my students, and you've done many interesting things since then.
And I suppose a poet is the main your number one identifier, I think probably is, yes.
I think that probably is. To jump straight into the question of the way, let's talk about poetry in the body.
When you write as a as a poet,
how much do you see language being something that is down there on paper and how much is it something that is grounded in the body?
Well, to start with, I think it's a if I read a poem quietly, I'm reading something like a music school.
I mean, that musicians can sit down in an armchair and read a quartette or a symphony and hear everything in their heads.
And a lot of my quarrel with contemporary British poetry is that it isn't like that.
It's something to read off the page, like any newspaper article.
Yes. So I automatically think of performance.
And of course, once you think of performance, then you do think of the positions of the body.
Yes, of course. I mean,
the there is a and a and this comes out certainly if I'm if I was I've direct actors doing poetry and then but are they standing or
they're sitting down and this there's always a difference if you if you're standing up and therefore it's going to be more projected.
And that's fine if you're in front of an audience of hundreds, but maybe not far if you're actually doing radio.
I mean, radio, you do sit down for it and that makes a difference.
Yes. Yes. A very different term, very different discipline.
If poetry is in the in the body. Let's talk about poetry and the culture of dance.
Oh, yes. Do we live in a dance based culture or a woods based culture?
I've got in mind you, you were born in South Africa. You've got a lot of South African connections, particularly with with Zulu culture.
Do you think when we look back at Greece, we're looking at a culture that is more like us or more like the culture of Southern Africa.
I mean, in Africa, the idea that you could just read out a poem without animating the body just seems a completely new, you know?
Yes. Well, yes, of course. Zulu I mean, Zulu dancing is is thrilling.
It's a very interesting, you know, the kind of male dancing with involving the huge stumps and so on, stamping it with freedom.
And that is now being taught by girls as well. They they've kind of said, why can't we do it?
Because women dancing was rather dull by comparison.
And of course, also the interesting thing is that Zulu is a total language.
I mean, with Chinese and Thai and so on. You talk about high tone, medium term, low tone, falling tone and rising tone.
That's five tones with Zulu. The analysts give up a 12 and no grown up European could ever learn to speak quite as the Zulus do.
And the fascinating thing is about about the tonal total thing is that they're in south east Africa.
We have a tonal language. And next door to them, the Shona, that that group of languages, they're not tonal.
They're just like English. Interestingly, up in the northwest corner, Yoruba in Nigeria is tonal language.
And I had tried to have sort of conversations with Nigerians as to how it relates to Zulu.
And of course, also this is very relevant to well, try trained, go through possibly one of the greatest poets living.
Now, of course, he comes from Europe. And one time I met him, he was carrying a talking drum.
And apparently by changing the pictures of the talking drum, you can, in fact, send a basic message right across the huge distance.
I mean, there was a there was a brief moment when some white teachers at the Zulu University were trying to get my Antigone done by the Zulus.
But it was impractical. I mean, but was also apartheid was still on and the Civil War was still on.
The the really serious civil war between the ANC and the in go to Freedom Party and all of that.
So it didn't it didn't happen. But I thought, oh, yes. Wonderful to have have the war dances done by Zulus.
Yes. So you are taking us on to the the difficulty of transposing poetry in one language into another language.
What do you see as the challenges in trying to hear what ancient Greek poetry sounded like?
How do you try to fit? Yeah, Sophocles.
I think that I give my answer that people say we know so little about Greek music.
And in Oxford, there's almost Tongo, who is working over the actuality of the Greek music.
And as I have to say, it's a wonderful scholarship about him enormously.
But it's not going to get me terribly excited by that if we want to get Greek music into modern theatre.
We have to go back to the beginning because I see actually we've got huge knowledge
of ancient Greek music because we have the entire rhythmic score in front of us.
I mean, we've got the fact that lyric music was composed in many hymns and quartettes or whatever, half notes and quarter notes.
And therefore, if you've got the rhythm of a piece of music, you've got a huge amount of it.
And I've always felt that that was how we got into it.
And I mean, my feeling about the the production of Articulate Greenwich, which was I mean, landed on me.
And I had I had I was given a little bit of time to do the translation, but I did have three weeks rehearsal to get a full Southern thing together.
And I was absolutely determined we can discover what's going on simply by putting it to ourselves that it's, as you say, the body.
I mean, the body is is in ways, some ways unlimited, but in other ways it's very limited.
And the the how the body responds to, in this case, very vivid words,
particularly given the fact you've got the musical backing, the rhythmic musical backing, then you can go quite a long way.
I mean, it wasn't the whole point about the Greenwich production was that it wasn't.
And now I am going to do Sophocles as Sophocles did it.
But it was our job to do Sophocles. And in this this time, we don't we have this kind of musical empire in which we we live.
It's getting more and more complicated almost by the day. But we have all this to choose from, but we can still respond to.
I mean, Sophocles and actually, of course, this is this makes me realise that he is an incredibly great poet.
And of course, the other thing about it is that. That means so much in a scholarly world like Oxford.
They talk about Sophocles as the great, the great poet, which he is.
But he was also the best choreographer. He was Jerome Robbins more than he was T.S. Eliot.
And again, this 60 years of working.
So he was always working it out. And that's which is.
And he was running the Athenian treasury with him on a tour to clear the ground.
Before we get onto the technical stuff, to do the significance of Greek verse being based on length rather than stress?
Lay behind my question. You were talking about tonal and eternal languages.
How important is that? Well, I think it I think it's very interesting to think about the fact that the language of Sophocles was tonal, like Zulu.
And to me, it's obvious that the accents, which none of us can cope with.
Well, oh, maybe you can. I could put on by Alexandrian scholars in order to try and present the tones for people who didn't have tonal language.
Because I remember when I, I did I did quite a lot of work with the Selassie tapes.
There was a there's a nice guy who who had actually written he created a system of actions, actually,
not all that different from Greek, actually, just to show what what syllables were raised and what syllables would look.
And there's this wonderful record, the breathy tone, which I really must show it, so that the total you heard of the course makes a difference.
But I don't think we can get into the total.
Maybe some would eventually decipher the actions and we will discover the tones.
I think in terms of the fact we have the rhythm and we have we have a certain amount of correlation between the various rhythms and the various moods.
And I mean, there are these magnificently scholarly works like books by the to Webster's website and so on.
How these metres related to, to the, to the dance pictures.
But I mean of course the fact is they talked about metres which sounds terribly boring.
You talked about musical forms that suddenly starts to sound more exciting.
Well, let's cut through the technical bit and that's going to be at the centre of this conversation,
which is to do with the relationship of the trophy and the ancestry and how that
is your sort of golden key for unlocking the essence of the ancient choreography.
So you just want to set out in simple terms, what is a trophy system, what is a trophy and an analyst trophy.
In Greek lyric conventionally divided into systems, a matching pair of stanzas identical musically and I will say identical in terms of dance.
And I think it is the case that in the entire body of Greek poetry, there is no there are no systems the same.
They're all completely different and always it is.
What makes them clear is that the dystrophy balance is almost exactly the exceptions,
but almost exactly the music of the trophy and therefore the dance of this trophy.
And so what we are trying to do, but in approaching Sophocles from our centuries background or so on,
is to try and find a dance pattern which fits both stroke and dentistry.
So just to complete the the picture, then I'm writing in pairs of trophies and chest trophy is a Greek convention that
goes back to our earliest records of choral dancing and people like like Sappho.
The words trophy means a turning and an artist trophy would then be a turning back.
So if you think of early dancing, being secular dancing,
then obviously you're doing a trophy clockwise from the Ashes Trophy anti-clockwise or vice versa with seemly, which you both have lives behind.
You could agree with that logic. So given that structure,
a an argument that you've developed earlier in your book on Greek drama and you tested out in your 1971 production of Antigone,
was the argument that if the metre is identical, then the choreography must be identical.
Some people don't see the sense in that. I'm absolutely on your side and I.
Welcome your your your book when it appeared because I saw you were one of the first people to really articulate that idea and see its significance.
So what I hope we can do in this conversation is talk through some of the implications of that terrible premise that,
if you like, as I said, a common sense inference. We thought we would focus on integrity.
Your your production directed and translated by yourself went on at Greenwich in 1971.
And what you undertook was to translate the chorus so that the the rhythm of the English replicated the rhythm of the Greek.
Yes, that was a core decision. When you're a translator, you have you have many different choices about what to prioritise.
So you can make it very clear or you can make it wonderfully religious and mysterious.
Emphasise the word order,
you can emphasise alliteration and your argument is rhythm needs to be top of the list without surrendering beauty and clarity and so forth.
But rhythm is fundamental. That's the that's the premise.
That's from. Yes, we're going to focus on the first statesman of Sophocles.
I'm taking eight. That's a very famous a famous one to remind us of the context.
Went to the chorus sing the first Asimo the first song and dance, which the chorus sing once in the in the theatre happens.
We've already learned that that the body of politics has been buried.
And this is an affront to the governor, current governor of the city, Creon,
who has given orders that politicians should not have a ritual burial, which of course, is a terrible insult to the dead, not houses.
And then along comes the chorus.
And they sing, apparently, about the achievements of the human beings.
And it triggers this meditation about humankind and their limits.
Thank you. Yes, that's extremely well summarised. So what we thought we might do is to say you can grasp the principles that the listeners
can grasp the principle of strengthen and restore faith if they are reads the trophy.
I will attempt to replicate the metre with the antenna trophy and we'll just see how that and see how that works.
A miracle nature that a man rarest miracle nature owns.
Watch him crossing the seas, expanse, oceans grey with the winter wind road sail on deck,
tossing rulers beyond beyond the waves that in first of gods and womb of God's Earth, ageless, invincible earth years grinding out year after year,
shoving blow furrows into horse blood turning low in floods over light, which it's species chirping birds the new swirling he runs,
he traps hunts down beasts of the woods and tails drags sea fish in a swarming catch.
Those nets that well twisted rope work, that mastermind a man who rides with harness,
well devised wild beasts of the mountain obliges the men tossing stallion to
stoop to a collar that breaks him in yokes hill bull's untamed endure and good
a fun seventh let's talk that through a little bit about some of the the
symmetries between between those two and there's two verses that there is there
is very much a subsidiary climax in line six beyond beyond the waves and then
the mastermind a man and the first half of it is it I think takes it it's
a picture from the stove and the water because actually if you're hunting down
pieces of the woods and hills and dragging sea fish in a swimming catch,
you are making a movements which are low down in the body and they are fluid.
And also and I have to say that I've used this as it's put in workshops to to ask the audience to invent a choreography.
Almost universally, I think actually universally they say it has to be there has to be a lift on the word man at the beginning.
The miracle nature, then a man rarest miracle nature owns.
They've got he's got to jump up on the shoulders and very quickly be reached up one for Greenwich.
So the rising up mirrors onto the idea of bird.
But I mean, again, you know, very easily you do a gesture of which is triumph, but it's also catching birds.
And what I think your rhythm catches very beautifully is the the lilt that I associate myself with a flow of the waves and the going hunting,
going up and down hills. It's a very nice sort of lilt that that you caught.
And then the the the second half is much heavier because it's us.
It's taming wild beasts and it's pushing.
John, I think that you see you have this the second system means that you have to continue with the man
figure in in the lift that he's he she is supervising the the taming of the of the earth as well,
because we're going to need the man figure to become the city in the second system.
So in the in the second half of this this first trophy and that chest trophy that we read,
the second obvious level of symmetry is to do with these animals in this trophy.
You've given us the plotting of the horse, and we've got this.
But I like the way you slow down. I mean, it's starting to break,
but you've caught this slowing down in the final line for the plotting of the the horse that types on to the
the solidity of the bull that has somehow had a harness or an ox or something that somehow had a harness.
So we've got the horse and the ox. So choreographic flair then that's taking us into a plot, it's taking us into animal movements and,
and I think by reading it with in a lower tone, that is the way which as to someone reading it, you couldn't say what the dance would have be.
Yes. To have a go at the second part that's going to see what they would say, what to see,
what happens, and words and the winds of a plan and coach behaviour with rules.
All this he has talked to himself with us. Stone walls, rooms to arch skies away that threaten rain, sleet and hail only sufficient and sufficient.
Never caught off guard. No, never does dogs alone.
That one never lets you go. Although incurable disease has been treated, some wisdom, some technical sense beyond what a man can expect.
Progress can be evil, but can be noble.
When laws obeyed, contracts kept in awe of God's natural law such as and heard such illness away, away with you.
You love the wildlife for kicks you never shall share my horse nor ever share my thoughts,
my dreams, where such people that catch it on, I don't know.
And of course this is this gives certain Sophocles and things of that in on line five in all of God's natural law.
The decree that Professor Cato was so keen on is running through Socrates to that which I
translate natural law in the sense of we used it with capital letters and in modern thought,
though it's really more of a sort of Catholic philosophers anyhow.
The fact is in the trophy people are putting their hands above their heads to create walls and roofs and so on.
So natural law is not something which is free and easy.
It is something from which you hide from, because if you infringe it, you're in trouble.
But the real excitement of this one, I think interpretation of the play is that my pyramid of human pyramid of I dreamt about I
had about five at contributing to the pyramid is reaches its high highest point it line
six omni sufficient or citizen hood and then it start it crumbles quite quickly because
it's it's falling down and there is this awareness insufficient to have a court of God?
No, never death. Suddenly we're aware of death in line seven.
But then the if you read the the poem, it ends relatively happily.
Incurable disease has been treated. But in the end dystrophy it's this sitting this away with you.
You love the wildlife for kicks this who is this lawless figure who certainly is disturbing everything.
Okay, so let let's just talk through the some of the cemeteries here.
I mean, they illustrate fear that we read we read the kind of very regular sort of rhythm,
the passage that is all about people building houses quite systematically, which then maps onto people building laws and contracts and society.
And then we've got this extraordinary metrically, extraordinary run of short syllables, which you've translated, I think on is sufficient.
Insufficient never is the next stressed syllable cities.
This is a much harder one to translate.
Probably neither is easy citizen could city live away the Greek term is are police being city lists and I think that's a really interesting equation
that's very hard to render into as I thought how fast are we have death and then if you don't have a city that's a kind of metaphorical death.
So we're constantly moving from sort of the metaphor to the metaphor unpacked in different ways.
Those do I mean, I think I was taught that although short syllables means or is this Webster?
It means lots of very little footsteps. Is that how you, um, I'm not sure that I would be necessarily going with lots of footsteps,
but it's it's certainly it's certainly a sort of collapsing team actually giving given that Greenwich production,
I wasn't think I wouldn't have thought that lots of little steps would have conveyed what was needed.
It it's a tumbling down it's a breaking the the pattern which created by a pilgrimage.
As I said, I think I had five out of my eight dances were in the pyramid.
And then they started to break away because because obviously the attention is she seemed to be on the pyramid,
which is the city, which is the the triumph of man.
The the the emphasis is on this character at the side seems to be mostly at the side who is doing these really nice, exciting things.
What the [INAUDIBLE] is she doing? And it turns out it only you only get the odds when the self is ended and antigone's brought on.
But it's certainly a clumsy get. So what kind.
I mean what kind of representation.
And just the chorus of I mean on the spectrum from mimetic simulation to capturing an emotion, something abstract, something geometrical.
I mean, how would you describe the kind of bodily symmetries that logically they the structure with very, very good question.
But I think I found there was that there were issues.
Each song had subdivisions.
And what we're trying to do with all this, with all the songs in all Greek blues, is to get.
Sort of. It's almost formula for each bit so that we're abstracting it into figures in a on a stage or in an orchestra.
But figures which create an instant pattern for the audiences imagination.
I remember at one point when lecturing on this, I suddenly goes, I have this character called Fred.
This is to a angry audience. They possibly call him strips of his for a classical audience.
He's a farmer. He's up from the country.
He's more or less in the back row of a theatre audience, which is 14,000, possibly even 18,000.
And he's the brother of one of the jurors, because by chance, Fred's brother is on the jury.
And so these great poets have got to get their work over to Fred on the top of the stage as some of the of the audience.
And so they have there has to be a crudeness, because, I mean, I'm sure the audience of Sophocles was very aurally acute.
I mean, as individuals are much more orderly, acute than we are.
Because one thing, if you have a tone of language, you've got to you're almost said into music when you open your mouth.
But even so, I mean, imagine the complications of those those songs.
I know. Not going to get that over to Fred's in the background, but you've got to give him a picture to perceive the visual aspect.
I mean, in some cultures I'm thinking particularly of classic Indian theatre.
There is a learnt repertoire of gesture that allows the audience to decode the language of the body.
Do you think there was anything comparable to that? I think yes, I think so.
But because it was a language, we can't use it.
Yes. I mean, that was my starting point for for the for for doing the Antigone.
And I mean the rich. There's Pollock's, isn't he?
He's the one who has the the dictionary. And there are all these wonderful, wonderful images which you to the basket, which was one of his work.
How do you dance a basket? Who knows? But yes, of course.
I mean, they would have been helped by the gestures.
But it's so active that I don't think I don't think you could have stopped with these gestures.
I mean, you learned obviously as a dancer, you learn to use them when you need to.
But and of course,
that's a fascinating thing that is getting into the same sort of scholarship investigation that Armando Gore is doing with the music.
Wasn't my boss briefed myself at all that?
So the the argument that you're developing,
let's just see how you follow that through is is that the dance clarifies because as anyone who's ready for Greek tragedy will know,
the choruses are difficult. They're linguistically difficult and they're allusive.
And the arguments arise sort of by implication yet, and they're not easy to listen to for us.
I don't suppose they were that easy and it's equity growth.
So how does that dance make you listen better?
Well, I mean, it's partly because Sophocles is not only the greatest poet,
I think he probably is the greatest book of the age, but also the greatest choreographer.
I mean, we we tend to forget that this is this is a man who was who was who's picked out as the best dancer of his generation at the age of 15.
He's he's obviously he does this I tend to believe the stories that that much later
because as I think Peter Arnot out was very much a person for accepting the story.
He says why would they have been made up if if they weren't true?
So I tend to believe, yes, he got to he was the dance dance champion.
And also he had he didn't have a good voice, so he wasn't an actor.
So he he had to concentrate on directing and choreographing.
And he got terribly clever at choreographing.
So you did understand. And it's all a bit of a.
Miracle to us because they are very complicated and how they become less complicated for Fred.
Bye. By being Dunst. And that's that's part of the miracle of these places because your actors in
Greenwich had three weeks and Sophocles would have had six months or whatever,
which does help when you're trying to get them to get precision.
Well, I mean, it was it was interesting, the cast that I had.
I mean, I had ten, ten actors.
And one actor played the first act part, which was Antigone.
Terrific. Yes. And the messenger, the sort of the God, how the God speaks.
And and the man who was the second would have been the second actor played Creon.
And then the there were eight left to me, all who sang and danced.
And four of them came out to play.
The remaining parts of that. They just came out of the chorus had played them.
And the it was it was trying to to, to picture what what was going on.
There was one of them was an actor who wasn't a dancer, but he'd done martial arts.
And there's a place in the paradise.
The initial song when we have the this trophy is describing the the single combat between education, public nurses and the altruist.
Well, what happens is in the the first line of the second system in the for it is crack to the hard hitting earth.
He was hurled sent flying.
And so obviously this one was a case where you have the actor doing the dive back on the floor, which, of course, he could do fine.
But the interesting thing about the whole tell of the play is that the line in the unnoticed trophy,
which will have that the dive on the floor is the start of it.
Now he is run to his victory glory giver.
And of course, if you just get oh, she is run to his victory glory her you know, she is run too.
But no, it's he's he's on the ground. And that, I think, makes a very important point about about the meaning of the play.
And the other one that is which is it's significant because it was it was a failure.
If you if you look at the system, there is a mysterious and incredibly complicated siege lyric.
And it's it's got three stories in it.
And the first two are roughly makes sense.
As he spoke to you about Antigone being put in prison, put in a cave.
The Artist Trophy is about Lycurgus. It's making Antigone and Creon identical.
And then it gets very, very complicated indeed.
And in my three weeks rehearsal, it was patently obvious I would never be able to illustrate this with the dogs.
So actually what we did was at the end of the the scene just before,
which is Antigone's death, I got all of the chorus to surround Antigone in a circle.
So she sort of disappeared under the bodies by a piece of crafty stage management.
We had a big sort of furry, feathery robe which could go over her head, and so she emerged at the end.
You just had this musical interlude and she emerged just Irish.
Yes. Because one of the important things about that, Stutzman, is that we start off by thinking of Antigone and we end up by thinking of Creon.
And, in fact, the the second star, Simon is also it's a sort of lament,
but he actually is it makes us start to think of Antigone and then switches to Creon.
And all the time there are these switches we see.
I know we're not talking about Antigone, we're actually talking about Creon, and he's the one who has to to make the decision.
Yes. It's this world of connections, isn't it?
We do. We like to think of the world in sort of logical, linear tones.
And the religious Greek mindset is that everything is connected and one thing maps onto another thing and you're never and in isolation.
And the human always mirrors the divine in complicated ways.
I mean, you've made it also clear from your experience how difficult it is to do this.
I mean, just to end, I mean, why should people do it if it's difficult?
We live in the modern world. That was we don't know a bit about it.
It was so long ago. Why should people persevere on this project of trying to find a rhythm and working with HIV?
I'm thinking of people tackling a great play, not actually personally.
I think I have this a sort of quirk in me.
If I think of the Master of the Masters, I can't see the business of the business, but that is the man of all the person of all that I look up to.
Beyond Sophocles, beyond Homer, beyond Dante, beyond Shakespeare is Johann Sebastian Bach.
But for me, that is the sort of supreme artist to follow.
And he likes fugues and fugues, the same thing, which if you consider who, because the last thing he wrote and he failed to get the last, last bit in.
It's incredibly moving.
Once you once I it took me ages before I heard Angela Hewitt playing on the piano and then I heard an organist do it on the organ.
Margaret Phillips She was a brilliant organist. And it is there's a total mystery there.
It's because he's more mysterious, because it just as you get to the climax, it breaks up.
But it's I think there's some something in us.
It's it's quite irrational. We have no possible idea.
How did you find it? But I think it's it's a satisfying and I feel we now have a choice of everything from every century.
We are approaching that. That's where we just put on the machine.
And we can we can do whatever we like, have whatever we like.
Reaching for the irrational is, I think, what you're talking about.
I mean, that's the classical world divides into those who can see it being all about diagnosis and those who see it being nothing about diagnosis.
So your your work on choreography definitely puts you on diagnosis side of the equation, I think.
I think. I think. Stephan Yes. Yes. And he's pretty complicated to it.
Well, thank you to great conversation and let's hope it triggers thought and creative practice.
Act in action. Thank you, David.