The Performing Arts as podcast series is supported by taught as part of humanity's cultural programme.
Hello and welcome to the fourth episode in our Chameleon Performing Artist podcast.
And we're today here with Professor Fiona Macintosh. Thank you so much for joining us, Fiona.
And just to tell our audience a bit about Fiona. She's been absolutely integral to the production,
both in 2018 when we put on the first show and recently helping us do everything we can to get the show on.
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.
I got that out. We'll call it the AP Gilardi from now on, and we'll certainly be talking about that later.
And just talk a bit about Fiona's work.
Your most recent book that you published just recently is performing Epic were Telling Tales, which we're also going to discuss later.
I think you've generally written widely on the reception of ancient theatre.
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,
which is an interactive multi e-book about the history of Europeanism today, which is also something we'd love to talk about.
That book was done with the APHC idea,
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.
That and now what is it to someone who's never heard about it before? Hello, Shavitz.
Very, very nice to join you on this podcast.
And in some ways, you know, having had a number of conversations now, I hadn't realised they were quite such a long period.
It's really nice to join you in this this podcast series.
Yeah, the APJ very interesting. See how how many different ways people attempt to pronounce it.
But as you say, it stands for the archive of performances of Greek and Roman drama.
It's an archive,
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.
But people like us researchers really want to house.
And in Oxford, in the classics centre. We're very lucky.
We've got the spectacular study room, as we call it.
It's on the first floor. In a wonderfully welcoming, beautiful building.
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,
which means all different kinds of ways that the Greek and Roman tax have been received in the modern world.
So a really great library.
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.
So we're quite a big team in this research centre. We're lucky to have two archivists imposts,
one person who very much specialises Clare Kenward on on the interactive multimedia e-books, which we can look at later.
And Claire Barnes, who some of you may well have met at various points, and Claire works with us.
I mean, she's a researcher. She's doing a doctorate and very exciting doctorate on on reception of.
Well, mostly contemporary performance poetry and especially focussing on Kate Tempest.
But on Monday and Tuesday, we're very lucky to have her holding the fort, making sure that our databases, which sounds terribly dull,
but actually the way anyone can find out, you know, what production of Medea happened, say, last year or the year before or so,
for example, your wonderful Baim Madea production is not only recorded on the database,
and while all artists and every member of the creative team will be recorded there for everyone,
everywhere internationally to access now and in the future, as we hope.
But also Claire will be the person, obviously not during the pandemic,
that Bonds would be the person who would greet you if you wanted to consult anything in our archive that wasn't yet digitised.
And some of those things may well be, TypeScript. So we have play scripts by very distinguished poets over the years.
So we've got quite a bit of material, say, by Tony Harrison, and we even have rehearsal scripts.
So obviously for researchers, that's really interesting. They can watch the transformation.
And, you know, you've been there and in the studio when a text begins in one way and ends up, of course,
on the opening night and even during the course of the run, looking and sounding very, very difficult.
We'll make sure to keep our rehearsal scripts. Would you love them?
That's exactly what we like.
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.
I think many people do, as it may be called the ancient. Oh, God, I can't remember that in the ancient archive.
Not ancient. The archive of of what seems like, you know, bygone ages.
But it's contemporary work you're doing. It's contemporary productions. It's contemporary people working on the classics.
And it isn't just, you know, academics sitting in an ivory tower.
It's people who are putting on plays who are actually actively interacting with the text as much as it's,
you know, plays from well over two millennia ago. It's it's real life now whether you're doing it, could you.
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.
And indeed, we even have a database which is very ancient, which tries to map, you know, performances in time in antiquity.
And in addition to the historical strand, which I have contributed to quite, quite a bit, we have the pleasure.
And it really is the pleasure and also the extraordinary learning capacity in our engagement with artists.
So a lot of work I've done has been in a rehearsal studio with some fantastic artists,
many of whom, you know, maybe began life as a professional dancer.
But our point of contact, for example, like worked a lot with Stern Leslie, who started the movement department at the RNC.
But he he really is such an interesting interlocutor person to exchange ideas with in relation to courses.
And so not only is he done workshops with us over a number of days with other choreographers and composers in the room,
but also Stern and I have kind of co-written staff, exchanged lots of exciting ideas.
And similarly, I've worked that before.
Ivan Bernstein, Irish Theatre had a great privilege to work with Marina Carr in quite some detail on hearing how her recent work,
a number of recent works, Hecuba and a much more recent kind of Oedipus project are developing.
So that part of the work, the NPG idea,
and that's before I've even talked about my colleagues and who they're working with and in some cases actually commissions,
you know, there was a time when we were even in a financially rather privileged position,
thanks to the Onassis Foundation, to actually commission new work.
So and, you know, we and I think the thing perhaps we're most proud of was when Helen Eastman was our producer,
someone who I think is going to appear on your podcast series at some point anyway.
And I know you know her well. And Oliver Taplin, who is very much associated with this as well,
when Oliver and Helen brought together with the Oxford Playhouse an extraordinary production
of the Oresteia East Gilliss or EIO trilogy called me Laura over from South Africa,
directed by a little known director as she then was, who now is an internationally known director, Yul Farber.
And we really believe that Millau in the Oxford Playhouse, where they took all the seats out.
It was completely reconfigured, was one of, you know, one of the great sort of highlights of what.
The AP JRD has done, and I also think the kind of model for us all who work in academia,
what academics can do when they're in conversation with artists.
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.
And it's something that a lot of people we speak to in favour of it confused by.
But what we're learning is that with incredible organisations like the APJ idea and the people that studies
that with with with academics who are really interested nowadays in becoming we're not even nowadays,
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.
That documented. As you well said, the costs and creators behind them.
Remember, for the task, but also that the work of doing the art of doing stays relevant to not only what you're studying,
but the way that we now relook at the receptions of these plays.
You know, they may be small, but they're being made alive every time they put on.
And it's worth remembering that just because they're old, that doesn't make them stuffy.
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,
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.
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.
And I learnt all of this from this wonderful interactive history of of Europeanism day.
And I encourage anyone and everyone will be linked. Next, the podcast Habitus through that book.
It's the most accessible any academic thing I write in in all of my studies.
And I would love to hear a bit more about, first of all, the idea of why an interactive e-book.
What does that mean? How did you convince people that that was the way forward?
I mean, it's still to me, I have an experience,
a lot of books in that kind of genre and that kind of mechanism of getting your point across to the reader.
But also later on, we can discuss a bit about Madea, that performance history and and what that meant,
putting it into this incredibly mean, incredible medium that I never experienced before.
So what is the story of this interactive e-book and how that came about?
Well, actually, the first book, the Research Centre,
the APJ idea published was a collection of essays called Madea and Reception of Madea Madea Performance History and from the Renaissance,
which now seems rather naive.
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.
And it was kind of bold and at the time and we believed quite innovative.
We brought together people from diverse disciplines to think about the figure of Madea and and also Madea in performance.
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,
which some of which had to be collecting data, because really in the early days, this was something to fall in between academic stools.
People unlike Shakespeare, who had always been studied through the performance history, Greek tragedy had never been studied in that way.
Today only been the preserve of serious classicists,
philologists who looked very carefully at and edits that had been done to the Greek text and commented upon them.
This is where really the pioneering work of Oliver Taplin, who I've already referred to, came in because for Oliver,
one of the first and definitely I think probably the first in the Anglophone world scholars who actually
reminded readers classicists in the first instance that these paintings were written for performance.
So in some ways, in 2000, when we published the first Madina book, this was kind of new cutting edge stuff.
People hadn't thought about Madina through time. And particularly Medea on the stage.
15 years later, we had published multiple books on multiple plays,
multiple figures and thought about opera, musical theatre, thought about Chorus's thought about dance.
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.
If I come into a rehearsal studio with you and so on, that is of knowledge exchange.
We weren't running actually a court or asked to to run and we ran it for the HRC,
a public engagement course where we got lots of young, brilliant graduate students reading doctorates and young early career.
Scholars and we called it communicating ancient Greece and Rome. And I ran it with my brilliant archivist, then Naomi Satchell,
who came out of the museum section with sector with lots of ideas about opening archives and learning,
teaching everyone, especially me, how to communicate in with new media and so on.
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.
We've got all of the kind of superstars who were classicists,
but now communicating in wonderful ways to come and talk to our students and kind of encourage them.
And they did brilliantly. And our students have gone on to do fabulous things.
I have to say, but I said to Naomi and our team research team, we need to up our own game.
Here we are sort of running these courses, but what are we doing?
And the obvious thing we needed to do was to think about not only opening our collection.
I mean, we already had an international team of researchers around the world who were contributing wonderfully, generously to our database.
But so much of the collection, as I said, was in the basement. We couldn't afford to digitise everything.
And Naomi, together with our then data developer, Tom Rubout, said, you need an e-book.
And I'm afraid at that point to me, that meant something flat one.
I said. Come on, hack it. Convince me. What do you mean?
And as Naomi said, let's go to museum sites, see what they're doing with objects.
See how you can manipulate objects. We can do this with bits of our Connectome book.
We can use film. We can use audio. We can commission new interviews.
We can go and work with new artists. And so.
Came about an application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for follow on funding.
We were successful. We were funded to do media and an Agamemnon's book and Tom Rubout and Claire Henwood, who succeeded,
and Naomi in the role, built the first book, the Madea book that you were referring to.
And Claire and I have built the Agamemnon book.
And not only have we bought those print publications. There is an Agamemnon's one as well up to date.
But we have had such delight in talking to people who are literally either on the cutting floor or even inviting people who.
We've always admired as performers and we think they would make a brilliant idea.
Let's get them to voice it or we were extremely lucky.
With the Madea book,
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,
we need, you know, that famous speech where Madea comes out of the house, the women of current speech.
We need that on camera. But we don't want it in sheets and [INAUDIBLE].
One, two girls. We want something that has a contemporary feel.
And Helen filmed that. And of course, she did. Some people will know as well brilliantly for the Agamemnon, where the Watchmen speech,
I think, on YouTube has had a phenomenal number of hits as it's shot at the top.
You know, somewhere down on the South Bank kind of thing, they've got, you know, at at at dawn,
they've got the watchmen from the Agamemnon and discovering the beacon over at Troy.
And it's some. So that's been such fun.
I mean, a big learning curve. Delighted that you found it so helpful.
We had to completely rethink it for me, especially as a as an academic.
I had to learn how to write. I had to also learn how to share my text, that kind of thing.
Again, that writers in the world beyond academia do all the time.
And I have to watch colleagues telling me that it doesn't work.
And I've learnt so much from people who pointed that out to me.
And very often, if it doesn't work, it's again, perhaps more like television.
It's because I realised that too many words. And it's really about writing for images because we're trying to make.
Are narrative really fit our connexion and therefore give a kind of.
Well, not just another layer, but a very different,
multi-dimensional approach to what might otherwise be quite a kind of dry academic area of interest?
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,
Media Performance History, and I'm sure with our listeners will be very interested to know it as well.
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.
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.
And I think what what comes across and what I definitely didn't know,
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,
contemporary, useful and really artistic uses for interpretations of of.
I mean, a play that was written twenty five hundred years ago. I find that baffling every time I think about it.
A really real play that's relevant in now 20, 21.
We're still talking about it. And that's the great thing about the book.
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,
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.
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
aren't so interested in just the raw academic history and don't know how to get their head around those kind of books,
but can really understand them. Use this interactive book in a way that that makes material that makes media accessible,
that makes Moodies relevance today so clear, because often I think that's also forgotten.
It's the story that so many people have told for so long for a reason.
And that's because it's a story that that still matters.
And I think that that's an incredible thing that the book that the book does get across to people.
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.
I am thinking about relevance and perhaps something I took away with.
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.
I think it was a production of show Pontiac's Midday Madina.
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.
And he turned out to be. Yes. I live in London.
So as often happens, you know, a friend of one of my neighbours.
And so I interviewed this psychiatrist who's saying lost his expertise was on why do women kill their children?
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.
And I had almost hung hung on every word, because at that point I realised.
In many ways, of course, the way classical scholars had interpreted this text,
you know, for people of my generation, I'm considerably older, the nation.
You know, we had really been asked by the women in the room who really resisted this to believe that,
you know, what we were watching was some kind of monstrous women.
And here I was having a conversation with a psychiatrist who was pretty much telling me what kind of conversation he would be having
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.
And I I found so if if if the e-book has allowed me as it has to have those
kinds of conversations and then for us to be able to share them with others,
as you say, I mean, I think that kind of conversation really does make Madea speak to us all.
You know, and what you know, the idea that this is a text from from, as you say,
two and a half millennia ago, and the only people who might engage with it would be rather dry and dusty.
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.
I mean, your most recent book I mentioned at the start performing at Paykel, telling tales.
I mean, you can certainly tell that. So tell our listeners a lot about it.
But just to give a bit of a framework, when I read the. But I haven't had the privilege reading the book yet.
But, you know, your time tonight is 20 percent better.
And the blurb at the end of the blogs is something really interesting, which is that epics of ancient Greece,
Andre, found to be particularly revealing and particularly telling the contemporary wider cultural sphere,
which the game at a glance is just how could something possibly about I would be relevant to some,
say, the contemporary by the conference there and what you know.
Tell us a bit about the book, but also about this idea. I mean, why the name?
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?
Well, during the course of work on the Greek plays and their afterlife on the modern stages,
we became very aware that from probably about 2010 onwards,
if not a little bit earlier,
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.
And it really was the sheer number and indeed the sheer quality of some of these extraordinary pieces.
And maybe unlike sometimes with the Greek tragedies,
when you knew that the major houses play houses around the world for a whole host of uncomfortable reasons,
from my perspective would feel they needed to put a Greek play into the repertoire just like they
would have Shakespeare or something to make them look like they were doing serious theatre.
What was happening with EPIC was very often happening on the margins and in
really exciting new work that was coming out very often from emergent artists.
And, you know, I'm thinking particularly, you know, some of the rap poets and performance poets in Wacking,
not only particularly in Britain, but also in France and elsewhere in Europe.
And then increasingly, we realised that this wasn't just a turn to epic because we've called it that,
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.
And I think, you know, we really this is a book about Greek and Roman epic primarily,
but it's also looking about ethnic traditions and storytelling in this wider context.
And so this is just divine, epic tragedy.
Why? This is an interesting shift. Well, the epic poets were the epic poems came before tragedy.
So the stories of tragedy had already been told.
And in the case of the Greek tragedy, they are mostly drawn, as people are famously told, from the banquet of Homer.
And so that the stories that we find in the.
Illiad of Homer and the Odyssey of Homer are in many ways the basis of the plots
of R extant Greek tragedies and so very often not in particularly in antiquity,
but very much through the modern world.
People have set epic as now we think of it as an aurally composed poem, originally probably composed by multiple poets.
And then. Eventually becoming a kind of canonical version.
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.
You know, Homer, one person who had written this extraordinary long 24 book long poem.
And so. There was in that sense, an idea of an oral long poem written in hexameter verse.
And you then think of that as being absolutely different from the play's tragedies, which, of course, this being Madea.
Absolutely. You know, have one.
Poet or bard, as they were called, who recites the poem and then at moments, of course, becomes the characters in the story.
But instead, you've got actors who take different parts.
And in the case of Greek tragedy, along with with with a chorus,
a group of singers and dancers as as as as I'm sure most people listening will Will will know very well.
And in the modern world, very often people who thought or tried to theorise theatre set epic.
And this thing called tragedy at loggerheads as made them very different things.
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.
And that is that that's a very false polarity. Epic and tragedy have so much in common.
And in recent years, we see the way in which.
Epic is being performed to have many kind of tragic elements, as indeed, you know,
one might be able to find many tragic moments in the epic poems themselves.
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.
And I think rightly understood that if you're talking about art that's made collectively through an oral tradition.
It means that there's a space there for you as an artist to create yourself.
And so suddenly, what looks like material that has been passed through generations is my material as much as your material,
my material here and now in, you know, wherever we're sitting and anyone else's material anywhere else around the world.
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.
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,
you know, very much writing the last draughts or as a we,
because I co-wrote this book with Justin McConnell, who's a wonderful colleague both at the AP IGAD,
but is now in comparative literature at King's College London.
We were extremely aware of the post Truth World, you know, a world in which politicians no longer lie.
But misspoke. A world in which no one in the world in which, sadly, we still reside.
The world in which fact didn't seem to count. But how we felt about our experiences mattered much more.
And we understood. And I think it's often been voiced by artists themselves that turning to the epic tradition
especially enabled them to access and indeed articulate emotional experience that.
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.
So the return of big narratives and big stories seemed very much to be part of this.
Epic, turned in a very real sense, was what emboldened us to write.
Why Epic mattered now and again.
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
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,
not only in this podcast, but through the other podcasts that we'll have with with other academics and thinkers about class.
It is that there isn't a there doesn't have to be the notion of an outdated and
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.
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,
I was away serving the first, you know, played around with the friedly put on in Cuba.
It was Madea. You know, it's such a remarkable history of these plays.
And you've pointed out not just even in the last 100 years, in the last 10 years,
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.
And obviously,
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.
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.
Old, but speaking to us about relevant topics that are changing day by day, even today.
The big question I know, but just as a sort of as a thought about why you think this is going coving,
having written this book and really explored what is going on,
probably more so than just about anyone about how the Greeks are acting, acting globally right now.
I think I hesitate to slightly because I feel even I mean,
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,
you know, abused, misrepresented. And that's something, you know, I work quite a lot on on the 20s and 30s, 1920s and 30s.
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,
a kind of privileged sculptural Greek beautiful body end up informing and underpinning, albeit distorted,
but written nonetheless in forming Aryan ideology, National Socialism and the Holocaust.
So this idea of Greece. And I think that's the most important thing.
It's its ideas about Greece. This is ancient history.
This is always distant in time. But every generation.
Wants to try and interpret it.
And at the moment, what I find most disturbing is that there are members, especially on the far right, who are using things ancient,
particularly ancient Greek things in order to justify serious attempts to
undermine democracy and to oppress large numbers of people who with whom we live.
And the role, therefore, of a classicists, including me, is to continue to examine the way that classic's has been used through time.
That's what Tasco reception is about and be particularly attentive to what's going on now.
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.
And therefore in turn allow our discipline.
I say our discipline. I mean, it's antiquity. It belongs to everyone and anything.
But there are still people out there, especially, as I say,
on the far right and particularly in North America, but very much here and in fact, everywhere across Europe.
Who who are determined to. Co-opt figures from antiquity, Greek and Roman antiquity into their thoroughly ignoble causes.
So, you know, if that's not a justification for continuing to study classics, it doesn't make me a little happy.
But it is one reason why we need to continue to do so.
I mean, it's an absolutely fascinating conversation. I know this is one that we will continue to have both privately,
but we will have public discussions and podcasts about this very topic because it's so interesting.
But the positive is there are books like yours,
interactive books like like David Geordies as our production and so many others that are actively now tackling
those ideologies and incredible organisations both here and in the states who are who are fighting this.
And it's going to be great to be platforming them here. But for now.
Thank you so much for being on this podcast. You've been an invaluable ally to us all.
Coming up on three years now, and we thank you for your constant support and thank you for joining us here today.
Thank you. And it's been a pleasure. And I look forward to the increasingly great things from him, from comedian.