Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides The Bacchae in a Globalizing World

Before the late 1960s, Euripides’ The Bacchae had almost no performance record on modern stages. Since then, the play has been staged many times in the United States, Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia. Drawing parallels between the elements of transition, transformation, and violence in the second half of the Twentieth Century and the plot of The Bacchae, Fischer–Lichte argues that the play’s reflection on features identified by modern day viewers as globalization allowed the performance to accomplish what the ancient viewers believed Dionysus, the protagonist, brought about. In this sense, the author contends that Dionysus resurrects as the god of globalization, rendering the tragedy a contemporary play. By analyzing and contextualizing these performances worldwide, Fischer–Lichte reveals the reasons behind the resurrection of this much discussed, but until recently, rarely performed tragedy.

Acknowledgements Preface Introduction Rediscovering The Bacchae Part I Festivals of Liberation – Celebrating Communality Introduction to Part I Chapter One The Birth Ritual of a New Theatre – Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69 in New York (1968) – Chapter Two Celebrating a Communion Rite? – Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides at London’s National Theatre (1973) – Chapter Three Sparagmos and Omophagia – Teat(r)o Oficina’s Bacantes in São Paulo (1996) – Part II Re–Negotiating Cultural Identities Chapter Four On the Strangeness and Inaccessibility of the Past – The Antiquity Project at the Schaubühne Berlin (1974) – Chapter Five Performing or Contaminating Greekness? – Theodoros Terzopoulos’ The Bacchae in Delphi (1986) – Chapter Six In Search of New Identities – Krzysztof Warlikowski’s The Bacchae in Warsaw (2001) – Part III Productive Encounter or Destructive Clash of Cultures? Chapter Seven Dismemberment and the Quest for Wholeness – Suzuki Tadashi’s The Bacchae in Japan and on world tour (1978–2006) Chapter Eight Transforming Kathakali – The Bacchae by Guru Sadanam P.V. Balakrishnan in Delphi and New Delhi (1998) Chapter Nine Beijing Opera Dismembered – Peter Steadman’s and Chen Shi–zheng’s The Bacchae in Beijing (1996) – Epilogue Dionysus – God of Theatre, God of Globalization Index of names Index of subjects

Erika Fischer–Lichte is Professor of Theatre Studies at the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft at the Freie Universitaet of Berlin and Director of the International Research Centre “Interweaving Performance Cultures”. She has published extensively on the history of the theatre and on the reception of Greek tragedy. Her most recent publications include Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual: Exploring Forms of Political Theatre (2005), The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics (2008), and Performance and the Politics of Space: Theatre and Topology (edited with Benjamin Wihstutz, 2012).