Instructions and Prompt

ON FLIPGRID, TELL US YOUR NAME (GRIGOR C.) AND THEN ANSWER THE PROMPT:
According to our course materials, briefly explain how “Catharsis” leads to self-discovery.

After watching the short summary video on Antigone (Pronounced: Ann-Tig-O-Nee) explain how some people might side with Antigone and some people might side with Creon (Pronounced: Cree-On)

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Greek Drama
Greek Drama
While the Olympic Games were held only once in four years, theatrical performances in the city of Athens occurred twice a year. Like the games, Greek drama was a form of play that addressed the dynamic relationship between the individual, the community, and the gods. The ancient Greeks were the first masters in the art of drama, the literary genre that tells a story through the imitation of action. Recitation and chant, music, dance, and mime animated the enactment of myths that celebrated rites of passage or marked seasonal change. Ceremonial drama was designed to bring about favorable results in warfare, farming, and in ensuring the survival of the community.

LET’S TALK ABOUT THEATER IN GENERAL FOR A MINUTE.
This is where I usually ask my students about their experiences in theater or watching live theater. You may have seen a performance in college or high school, if not a professional show. But you can also think of a film or television show too, all the elements of theatre are present in TV/Film as well. Let’s talk about aesthetic distance in theater. I don’t mean the distance in length between you and the actors or the stage, but rather a metaphorical distance:Aesthetic distance refers to the gap between a viewer’s conscious reality and the fictional reality presented in a work of art. When a viewer becomes fully engrossed in the fictional world of a book, movie, TV show, live theater etc. the author has achieved a close aesthetic distance. Let’s talk about what that means… When we watch Romeo and Juliet for instance, and (spoiler alert) Juliet kills herself, we do not call 911 to report a dead body in our presence right? No, because we know it’s not real… that is our conscious reality, always present. We never feel as though someone is actually dying…but how do we make that distance so short that even though you know it’s fake, you still feel something very real?

Think about how happy you feel when the couple gets together at the end of the movie, or how sad you are maybe even crying when one of your favorite characters dies…  literally sobbed for a Grey’s Anatomy character who died a few seasons ago… how do they do that? How do they get a very real feeling from me, from an actor pretending? I know it’s not real…but when  become so fully immersed in that fictional world that I start believing in the words, believing in the actors, so much so that I share in the emotions that are happening on stage, then the combination of actors, directors, etc. have achieved that wonderful short aesthetic distance, and I am feeling Catharsis. Which we will talk about more in a bit.A short aesthetic distance is actually not that hard to achieve… we, as humans, feel extreme pleasure from imitation… think of how much we love movies, television shows, and a lot of us love live theater too. We love watching actors act out various scenarios. Extreme pleasure from imitation…why do you think that is? Well, it’s kind of hard wired into our brains. Walking, talking, eating, everything we learn as babies is by imitation, so in order to ensure survival of our species it’s written in our DNA to “want to copy,” want to pretend, want to imitate. And that feeling spills over into just watching someone else pretend, imitate, or in theater, what we call acting or storytelling. We go to the theater wanting to, and willing to feel that extreme pleasure from someone’s imitation. We don’t even need a lot. An actor can be sitting, and he could be anywhere, but if he places his hands on even an imaginary steering wheel, then we know he’s in a car. And the audience can be like “okay, this guy’s driving,” and we can imagine and guess where the scenario is going to go next.

But just that easy, we are with him; we are ready to go wherever that “car” takes him. We don’t need great big elaborate sets or fantastic costumes to put us in that world. All we need is for you to put your arms on something imaginary and we are there.The point is, is that ancient Greek plays, format wise, with the chorus and the staging, and the way they presented their plays, seem extremely unrealistic. But it didn’t matter. They still made thousands of spectators feel something very real from something very unrealistic.Theater seems to be in the blood, and there are signs of theater-like rituals, festivals etc. from even before the Greeks, but the Greeks were the first to perform theater in an organized way. First to build a grand stage. First to write scripts. There have been advances in theater since the Greeks, but the foundations that they created remain the same even today. Almost all modern theater of the western world is derived from what the Greeks originally organized and did. For this reason, they are considered classic theater. We can tell from ancient Greek theater that the playwrights aimed to achieve an aesthetic distance with their audience. They wanted their audience to feel sorry for their tragic characters, to perhaps cry, to feel what Aristotle called catharsis in his paper that defined drama called The Poetics.
ARISTOTLE’S THE POETICS

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher who studied all kinds of things from crustaceans to the cosmos to theatre. He was pretty well rounded. When his teacher Plato, wrote a treatise condemning theatre as groovy and interesting, but “too dangerous to be allowed in society,” Aristotle countered with a treatise of his own entitled The Poetics. The volume was lost for hundreds of years until rediscovered by European scholars in the 14th century. In it, Aristotle described what theatre, especially Tragedy, should contain and how it should be composed. Aristotle was, in the 14th and 15th centuries, instantly hailed as THE expert on theatre. His famous six elements have retained their importance through time, and only in our contemporary society have theatre practitioners begun to question whether or not they always apply. However, these six elements are still the most widely known and used evaluative tools and general rules for artistic theatre performances. His thoughts still reign supreme, despite current undermining by some contemporary scholars and theatre practitioners.In the Poetics, the world’s first written work on literary criticism, the Greek philosopher Aristotle, describes tragedy as an imitation of an action involving incidents that arouse pity and fear. Tragedy, which gave formal expression to the most awful kinds of human experience—disaster and death—invited the spectator to participate vicariously in the dramatic action, thus undergoing a kind of emotional liberation. This emotional liberation, or emotional response from us he called Catharsis. The pity and fear from the audience is how we feel pity, or sorry for the characters who are experience disaster and death, and the fear that we feel is when we think “what would I do in that scenario?” It’s when we start putting ourself in the character’s shows that we self- explore and self-discover.
HE SAID THAT A TRAGIC HERO MUST FOLLOW THESE RULES:
They should meet their tragic end by an error in judgment, or personal choice made by the individual
They should be better than the ordinary man, but also flawed.
They should get a punishment that arouses pity and fear in the audience.
THE POETICS FURTHER CLARIFIES THE IMPORTANCE OF PROPER CONSTRUCTION:
The play must have a balanced arrangement of parts (six elements)
the action of the story should be limited to the events of a single day.
The plot should consist of a single action (should be about one thing)
These concepts became known as “unities” of time and action; later, seventeenth-century playwrights would add “unity of place.”The six elements are only a small part of the much longer Poetics. However, they comprise some of the most vital aspects of theatre from the whole work. They are very useful in identifying the whys and what’s of theatre. His six elements included (and are in order from most important to least important):
Plot
Character
Thought
Diction
Music
Spectacle
PLOT
Plot is the first and, in Aristotle’s mind, most important of all dramatic elements.First, imagine a play with lots of really great characters, great scenery and stunning dialogue. Is that enough to be interesting? Maybe, but don’t you crave a story line? Don’t you want … well … something to happen? Of course, you do. If nothing happens, it is difficult to have a play.Nowadays, playwrights have started experimenting with plays without plot—with limited success.
CHARACTER
Aristotle ranked this element of theatre as second in importance. I suppose that as many have figured out, if a play or movie has a good plot, you can have the shallowest of characters to fill it. Still, many play goers and movie goers demand interesting and engaging characters.Characters that seem to have deep personalities and complex personalities are known as three dimensional characters. They may be good or evil, but if they are good, they probably have some failings. If they are evil, they may have a few redeeming qualities. These characters often must make tough decisions in which right and wrong are difficult to decipher. Plots that contain three dimensional characters and rely on them to work are often very interesting and work well. The reason many of Shakespeare’s plays are considered so fantastic is that they are filled with such characters. Think of characters like Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Othello, Henry V, Macbeth: They are all very complex characters faced with difficult challenges and choices.
THOUGHT
“What’s the moral of the story?” is a question that is often asked, even in theatre. It is a tricky question. Thought is often equivalent to the more used term (that I don’t care for very much): “Theme.” The thought of a play can be found by asking “What does it mean?”First, it is universal: it applies to many different people in many different circumstances. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, is very popular not only in England, American and Europe, but even in Oriental countries like Japan and China. Its themes are important enough and broad enough to be accessible to many, all over the world.Second, good art is individual: it is unique and unlike anything else. A play full of clichés and events that can be anticipated is probably not great art.Thirdly, good plays (and good art) contain suggestion: it isn’t readily apparent or extremely clear what the themes are. It doesn’t bang you over the head with some kind of message. This is in part because, as in The Tortoise and the Hare, good art can have several themes simultaneously, depending on how it is received by a particular audience member. It is also important to remember that good art often asks more questions than it answers.
DICTION
Sometimes in a play (or a movie) it’s not what is said, it’s how it’s said. This is diction: the words and language used in a play. Plays with “good” diction have language that is appropriate and often lovely. If a play has “bad” diction, it probably contains language that does not fit the characters or the tone of the play.
MUSIC
When Aristotle wrote his Poetics and outlined his six elements of drama, nearly all plays had music. Either the actors sang many of their lines, or they acted with musical accompaniment.In today’s theatre, there is sometimes a music soundtrack—this appears much more in movies—but Aristotle’s element of music is now said to be the sound elements of a play.
SPECTACLE
Remember this: Aristotle ranked this LAST! And yet, when one thinks of a Broadway show, this is what one often thing of: Spectacle. Remember: if you just pretend, you’re in a car, that’s all the audience needs. Spectacle is nice, but it’s not necessary. Simply put, spectacle comprises the visual elements of a play.
WHAT YOU SHOULD REMEMBER ABOUT GREEK THEATER
What I want you to take away from your text reading, and I mean literally take it with you and remember these points when we get to Roman theater later, is that:
Greek theater was born out of a very religious ceremony where actors and performances were all meant to worship Greek god Dionysus.
Most of the story lines were written after Greek myths
It is unknown if women were present at the theater festivals.
Since it was a religious experience, violence was implied and characters died but violence was never permitted to be acted out on stage.
Aristotle was the first philosopher to examine and breakdown the elements of theater and formally analyzes the tragedy genre.
He defined Catharsis: the audience’s emotional reaction to the play that allows the audience member to self-discover.
He defined the six elements of theatre

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