The curse of one world: the evil wind blows
Soldiers drill, shouting slogans, the clinking of iron chains falling to the ground
They are on their way to death
The spirit of the invader Darius is still there
This is the ritual of modern warfare
The feast of another world
Drinking, falling asleep in ecstasy
Dancing, waking from dreams
Dionysus, the god of wine, brings a little madness to domesticated humanity
It is a ritual with ancient secrets
The barren land
The eagle's neck is broken by a vulture
Once a queen, now a prisoner
A mother enduring endless humiliations
The lush mountains and forests
Furious Dionysus inflicts a small punishment on arrogant humans
He casts spells and allows the frenzied worshippers to mutilate the king's body
A mother tears her son to pieces
I, in multiple worlds
Half in dreams, half awake
Unaware of whether it's day or night?
I leave the theater in a thunderstorm
Screaming, jumping, anticipating a greater lightning strike
These fragments of memories are from my visit to "Mount Olympus," a 24-hour theater production by Belgian director Jan Fabre, based on several ancient Greek tragedies. The performance took place at the Berliner Festspiele in June 2015. It began at 4:00 PM and lasted until 4:00 PM the next day, spanning an entire day and night with open access for the audience. From the start of the performance, I was drawn directly into the play. As time passed and the scenes progressed, I found myself oscillating between wakefulness and drowsiness, gradually shutting off my brain and losing all sense of time. I slept on the stage alongside the performers until they woke up and reawakened me with their physical energy. Their transcendent dance and boundary-breaking movements overwhelmed me, transcending worldly moral concepts. The impact was multifaceted, raising questions not only about how classical texts are incorporated into a performance but also about how one deals with reality and life. Seven and a half years later, the words that once accompanied me resonate once again:
"Performers are beautiful fighters
Tears without pain are not beauty
Nightmares change the world."
Hans-Thies Lehmann
These were the words of Hans-Thies Lehmann, the German theorist of postdramatic theater, who influenced contemporary avant-garde theater practitioners. He served as a guest dramaturge for "Mount Olympus" and spoke these words during a lecture on the work in 2017, which I had the privilege of live interpreting. In July 2022, Lehmann passed away after a prolonged illness, and the publisher of the Berlin-based Alexander Verlag sadly noted that "he had yet to complete an important theoretical work." "Mount Olympus" likely became Lehmann's final completed project. Meanwhile, we have been plunged into a pandemic, witnessing endless casualties and migration caused by the Russo-Ukrainian War and protests against the regime in Iran. The collision between civilizations, systems, and values has grown increasingly intense. Today, against this significant backdrop, we must revisit "Mount Olympus," gain new insights into what Lehmann said, and rediscover the significance of the entire performance for us.
"Mount Olympus" unfolds on a simple stage, consisting of a prologue, fourteen thematic chapters with corresponding tragic characters, the ritual of the wine god, and dream sequences, followed by an epilogue. More than twenty hanging lamps and the interplay of light and shadow transform the scenes and their atmosphere in a flexible manner. Director Jan Fabre's creation transcends the boundaries of theater, performance art, painting, and installation art. He does not follow in the footsteps of tragedy and mythology, nor does he mimic the form of the chorus. Instead, he explores and reinterprets the buried and forgotten treasures of ancient Greek civilization for the present: the ancient culture of prophecy, divination, worship of the wine god, and the secret rituals that preceded Christianity as a moral judgment. The director and the production team have deconstructed the literary texts of the three great Greek tragedians from over 2000 years ago and reconstructed them for the text of the performance in today's context, encompassing everything on stage: the way the performances of the actors relate to the stage space, the changes in lighting, and the musical soundscapes structured and organized over 24 hours. The text de-dramatizes or even dissolves the plot and drama of the tragic story, thus highlighting the individual, the group portrait, and the essence of tragedy - the redeeming god of wine, Dionysos. The 24-hour tragedy created by the production team goes beyond the interpretation of the dramatic text, a characteristic feature of postdramatic theater, where literature is only one component of the entire performance text.
"Mount Olympus" brings together more than a dozen main characters from ancient Greek tragedy, including the god of wine, the prophet, the philosopher, the king and queen of the city-state, and their sons and daughters, the heroes of the Trojan War. The production team uses the archetypes and frameworks of characters and events as a basis for new interpretations that address today's geopolitics, world economy, wars, and escapades in words, gestures, and facial expressions that we can identify with. The words of the performers are not literary rhetoric but rather penetrating, direct, and poetic thoughts emanating from their unique voices. Especially in the monologues, the performers speak directly to the audience in their native languages. Even if the audience sometimes doesn't understand the words, doesn't know the entire context of the story, and may not even know the names of the characters, the moments of sadness, despair, arrogance, coldness, struggle, determination, ecstasy, and supplication of the people on stage are so familiar to us that they ignite our imagination. At this point, I would like to describe one of the performance elements of "Mount Olympus" from memory, focusing on a scene - the theme of Medea, who is abandoned and banished by her husband, Jason.
In the song sung by Maria Callas, who once played Medea in Pasolini's film, the lyrics go: "I am at the end. I have let joy seep out of my body...." Medea stands at the front of the stage for a long time, holding a dagger, motionless. The intertextuality between past and present, reality and fiction, the inseparable connection between the mythical Medea, Callas's personal fate, the Medea she once portrayed, and the present-day Medea is hinted at here. On the empty stage, Medea tells in her monologue of her determination to kill the children she had with Jason and of her pain and struggle. When Medea reappears on stage in the following scene, she stands there again for a long time, now with the dagger already stained with blood. Then, Medea and Jason face each other, one silent and calm, the other thundering:
Jason:
"You hateful slut!
You are hated by me, by all people, and by all the gods.
You have cut the throats of your own children
and left me childless in a bottomless cave.
You never accepted my culture, my land, and the way we live here.
You remain a foreigner, a refugee from a barbaric land
with a wild religion and wild instincts.
You never want to fit in here.
And even that is not enough.
Because just to prove to me that you never belonged here,
you kill your own children!
Go to hell! I want you to die now!
But thousands of arrows of shame cannot touch you.
You are not human."
Medea:
"Do you think a woman feels nothing when her husband takes another into his marital bed?
Does a woman feel nothing?
Do you think love is... what?
An inconvenience not worth any pain?
Is that a custom in your so-called culture?
Are these the blessings of the so-called civilized West?"
Through the ancient archetypal story of love, betrayal, and revenge, the production team highlights the disparity between a man who acts out of self-interest and betrays his love, and a woman who follows her husband to his homeland out of love, conveying an image of the violent clash between colonizer and colonized, between man and woman, between two different civilizations. In today's world, still dominated by Western value systems, we can all find a lot of meaning in our own experiences. This applies when I recall Oedipus, the one reviled by all inhabitants of the city-state, and his question:
"I am the source of the plague
and you are just innocent spectators.
What makes you so neutral, so detached, so free from any guilt?
......
Is my life an act of fate or a manifestation of will?
It may be the pleasure of the gods.
That we all, yes, and you too,
have offended them long ago."
After experiencing the pandemic, can we not be confronted anew with such a question? In my opinion, this is another characteristic feature of "Mount Olympus," that is, of postdramatic theater. By juxtaposing images and words live to the audience, it points to our time and the crisis we collectively find ourselves in, challenging the audience to gaze directly into the darkness. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben says, "Darkness is not a negative concept—because darkness expresses an activity or a unique faculty... Darkness is something that turns more directly and uniquely to contemporary man than light. Contemporary man is the one whose eyes are struck by the dark waves of the light of his own time."
Why has this Mount Olympus stayed in my memory for so long, albeit in fragments? I believe that the 24 hours of intensity, the length of the performance, indeed revives tragedy—the essence of transgression—a culture far removed from our atomized, efficiency- and prosperity-oriented lives. A culture that focuses on the origin and the contemporary. "The origin is the contemporary that accompanies history and never ceases to act within it" (Giorgio Agamben). The performers are the most crucial medium in this regard. Their performance blends tragedy and comedy, where monologues are directed straight at the audience, choral scenes are interwoven, and confrontations between individuals and the collective are merged. I view these performers as creators of performances and athletes in one, not representing their characters, but awakening them with their own charisma, intensity, and understanding of life, thus bridging the gap between mythical classics and today's audience. Simultaneously, the physical endurance and extraordinary body control of the performers during exercises, wrestling, running, and ecstatic dancing place the audience in a state of forgetting, irrationality, almost ecstasy, shouting and jumping, freeing themselves from the shackles of gravity, time, and space. What a gift it was for us! I vividly recall the afternoon of the second day of the performance when the theater was full of people, and I was a little tired from sleep deprivation. At that time, six pairs of performers appeared in a ritualistic manner, and each pair applied olive oil to each other's naked bodies. I woke up and smelled the strong scent of 12 glistening bodies on stage, standing before us. The music began, and six pairs, each consisting of a woman and a man, started wrestling with each other. The music heightened the intensity of the battle, the falls, the shouting, the gasping, the olive oil, sweat, and dust covering their bodies on the stage. The performers fought like wild animals until exhaustion. The music subsided, and they slowly fell to the ground, embracing each other like innocent Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and fell asleep. The music resumed, and instantly, they were back on their feet, and a new round of wrestling began. The cycle repeated again and again. I was awakened by this beauty. Lehmann says, "Fabre often praises his performers as 'beautiful fighters,' and he sees their self-revelation, even at the risk of making themselves look ridiculous and humiliating, as a sacrifice. Even when the performers wear clothing, they are essentially naked. Fabre revives the experience of those who are the origin of the relationship between humans and animals. He views tragedy as the tragedy of the body. He reminds us of the dark side of our civilization's perfect commercial body image, the negation of the real body, which consists of sweat, odor, urine, feces, trembling, weakness, wild desires, illness, defects, sexuality, and deviations from the norm."
Why should or had to the performance Mount Olympus last 24 hours? Even 12 hours are beyond the norm. I believe it challenges the audience to leave behind the routine of everyday life, to abandon the comfort zone of moderation, and to participate in the process of transgression, profanation, and emptying, which leads to strength, transcendence, and purification. It's not a search for Apollonian harmony, wisdom, and light, but an experience of Dionysian excess, wildness, and darkness. To escape the illusion of sublime beauty and embrace the power of suppressed instincts. This can mean "being able to perceive a light in this darkness that is infinitely far away and always coming towards us." (Giorgio Agamben) I am sure that every viewer had a different experience in these 24 hours, but what unites us all is that the performance became a moving event, a celebration that all attendees shared. This is another important characteristic of postdramatic theater.
Nothing expresses better what tragedy means for today than Lehmann's quote: "Tragedy is a rare phenomenon today and in the past. By its nature, tragedy is transgression. At its core, tragedy transcends every moral concept and simultaneously embodies a radical affirmation, a passionate affirmation of life, despite the inevitability of death and the suffering that life can bring. Because ancient Greek culture viewed the inevitable pain, conflict, and failure of life with so much pessimism, it had to invent tragedy and give the figure of the sun god the experience of the abyss of the wine god. In a world abandoned by the gods, we encounter ourselves only when we share solitude, confusion, emptiness, and death, as in the theater."
Hans-Thies Lehmann has entered another world and leaves us in this one with the words: "Do not allow others to take happiness from us!"
Here is an excerpt from the wonderfully dreamy text of Mount Olympus in memory of Hans-Thies Lehmann:
"I want a life without interruption
This sleep
again and again
These little exercises
again and again
These poor imitations
again and again
This tedious banter
again and again
These uninspired rehearsals of death
so boring
I don't want to know
I want to sleep with open eyes
and sleep forever"
Note:
The texts of Medea, Jason, Oedipus, and the concluding dream, as well as the quotes from Hans-Thies Lehmann, were all translated by the author of this text from the original English.
(Published in the Chinese theater magazine "New Drama" in 2023)