battery opera's Oresteia
Monday, March 20th. PNE Amphitheatre. Sunrise, Noon, Mid-Afternoon, Sunset.
Danced to the music of MC Maguire by Alison Denham, Cornelius Fischer-Credo, Nixon Flynn Kingsley, and Paul Ternes.
Spring Equinox Performance Times for Monday March 20th,2023:
Sunrise – 7:15
Noon – 12:30
Mid-Afternoon – 15:30
Sunset – 19:00
Location: Pacific National Exhibition Amphitheatre
Music: S'Wonderful (That the Man I Love Watches Over Me) by M.C. Maguire.
Text adapted from Aeschylus via Robert Fagels
Text dramaturgy by DD Kugler
Intro:
Citizens!
Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, begins with Agamemnon's return from the Trojan war.
Some people say, Agamemnon was the King of ancient Mycenae. Aeschylus, in his Oresteia, places Agamemnon as King of the more contemporary and nearby Argos – at that time an ally of the City of Athens, Aeschylus' home.
Whichever the city may be, the King returns to his home. The House of Atreus. A home famously cursed for the many crimes committed under the shelter of its' roof.
Children sacrificed by their parents. Cyclical revenge for slights endured while the perpetrators were themselves children.
It's a story that everyone knows.
Within the audience of his time, Aeschylus assumed familiarity with the events from the past that his Oresteia describes. And also, familiarity with the family stories that precede and follow from the events the plays describe. Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, is a fragment from that longer, ongoing, familiar, family story.
To make that story comprehensible in the soon to be present future – within the present day asphalt stalls of this parking lot – we will attempt to force into discoverable existence, familiar elements from the past, to illuminate a temporal and eternal context for our reinterpretation of Aeschylus' Oresteia.
As we may remember, Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus, lost his wife, Helen, to Paris, a Prince of Troy.
In response, Agamemnon convinced all the neighbouring city states to form a great armada to invade Troy and recover his brother's wife.
The fleets convene at Aulis. The weather is against them.
Some people say, it's because Agamemnon killed a deer sacred to Artemis, a new god of the hunt, wild animals, the moon, chastity, and twin sister to the new god Apollo.
Whatever the cause, the Greeks cannot leave the shelter of the bay. Doubts and petty squabbles affect their ranks. Questions arise about whether a brother's cuckoldry is worth the undertaking of what is sure to be a great and bloody sacrifice.
If the wind doesn't change, the invasion will fall apart before it begins.
The priests tell Agamemnon that the only way to shift the wind, to get the ships underway – to relieve Greek doubts with action – is to sacrifice his eldest daughter, Iphigenia.
Agamemnon sacrifices his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. The weather changes. The Greek armada sails to Troy. The war lasts ten years.
While Agamemnon is at war, his wife, Clytemnestra, holds on to their estate and its patrimony with the help of her lover, Aegisthus, who has his own history with Agamemnon's family. The house of Atreus.
Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's two surviving children – Electra and Orestes – feel displaced from their home, and are not confident of their future.
The daughter, Electra, reduced to a servant in the home of her mother and her mother's lover.
The son, Orestes, exiled as a child for his – and everyone's – safety.
Troy is destroyed. Helen recovered. The Greeks return homeward.
This then is the moment, in the larger, familiar story, where Aeschylus begins his four play cycle, The Oresteia.
These four separate plays that form the cycle of The Oresteia were originally created, by Aeschylus, as a one-off all-day performance in 458 BC for the citizens of Athens at the festival of Dionysus. Dionysus is Bacchus. The new god of grapes, of wine, of fertility, and ritual madness. And also the younger twice born half-brother of new gods Artemis, Apollo, and Athena.
After being largely forgotten, for over two thousand years, The Oresteia, Aeschylus, and all things classically Greek, became popular again. Particularly so, in North America and Northern Europe, through their rediscovery and reinterpretations during the 18th and 19th centuries of our modern era – the age of reason. We still see these works through the frame of that rediscovery.
Seen through that frame, Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, contains not only the oldest written example of a trial by a jury of citizens, but also marks the human transition from individual and familial cycles of revenge to a civil and democratic exercise of justice.
The rediscovery of The Oresteia, through the frame of the age of reason, and our reinterpretation of that rediscovery, in these parking stalls in the soon to be present future, will, it is hoped, locate ourselves, within an elusive disequilibrium of those reimagined discoveries. A net of memories we might find ourselves securely trapped within.
Familiar words and family stories bringing context to the chaos that precedes and follows our temporary positions on these rain sodden seats overlooking the allotted slots of a parking lot within the confines of a fading provincial fairgrounds.
Thucydides called the time when Aeschylus wrote these plays "The golden age of Athenian democracy". But. Silver, unearthed by slaves brought wealth to Athens. Wealth from the mines of Laviron bought ships, which brought more slaves. From slavery below the earth came the Tetrhadrachmon coin, the dominant commercial currency on the seaborne trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean. Athenian citizens used these coins, along with the spoils of various conquests, to maintain their commercial empire, and to finance their grand cultural projects.
The Parthenon.
Gymnasiums.
Democracy.
Theatre.
Justice.
Juries.
Twenty seven years after the original performance of Aeschylus' Oresteia at the festival of Dionysus, the democratic city of Athens voted to start a war of conquest spanning the entire Mediterranean.
That war ended, twenty seven years later, with defeat, and Athens' surrender to tyranny.
The future of that past.
Today, in this asphalt parking lot, we will dance our reinterpretation of Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, within the twenty seven minutes of music that composer Michael Maguire created for his mother, Ruth.
Michael's music, entitled S'Wonderful (That the Man I Love Watches Over Me), is based on three Gershwin songs that were among the many his parents played at parties in their home when he was a half awake, half dreaming child.
Michael made this particular piece using, as a form, the Quodlibet.
A Quodlibet is a mash up of ideas. Fragments of popular ideas reconstructed to create a conversation from bits that everyone already knows. A Quodlibet is also a medieval musical technique – the integration of popular melodies into a piece as theme or countersubject.
In the twenty seven minutes of music for his mother, Michael's approaches – ancient and new – merge within a form ping-ponging through a familiar circle of fifths, combining with memories of old MGM dance sequences, revealing a natural cycle of two lovers' innocent infatuation – through picket fence hopes, to alcohol-drenched domestic quarrels and ranting megalomania.
– eternal to temporal.
The music's seamless transitions in these modulations create a weightless space between form and memory.
– an elusive disequilibrium.
Within this parking lot scheduled for imminent demolition – as our provincial fairground attempts to reinvent itself, yet again – it is hoped you might feel the echo, of the emotions of Michael's music.
Reflecting on Mendeleev's formulating of the periodic table, towards the end of the age of reason – when reason and science were emphasised over superstition and faith – Primo Levi remarked that you could feel the echo of the emotion that Mendeleev himself must have experienced by ordering the elements then known in this particular way. "Chaos gave way to order, the indistinct to comprehensible". It became possible – and Mendeleev did this – to create and number not only boxes for all the known elements, "but to identify empty slots that had to be eventually filled, since 'all that can exist exists'. That is, it became possible to do the work of prophecy, to force into existence unknown elements which later on are all punctually discovered".
The four plays of Aeschylus' Oresteia contain prophecies, pointing to a future present, from a past, reimagined – even in Aeschylus' time.
Prophesies, like families, like quodlibets, like chemistry, like justice, like memory, like fate itself requires complicity from the citizens who recognise, recall, re-enact or rediscover them.
Whatever our positions perspective is a relative.
The first play of Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, starts with Clytemnestra outside her home – The House of Atreus – waiting for her husband, Agamemnon, upon his return home, from his ten years of absence fighting the Trojan war.
Agamemnon arrives, carrying with him Cassandra – a war trophy from devastated Troy cursed by the new god Apollo to foretell the future, but never be believed.
Apollo is the new god of archery, music, dance, plague, politics, prophesy, and brother to the new gods, Artemis and Athena.
The people of Argos gather outside The House of Atreus, and wait to hear what has happened.
Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon, for the murder of their daughter Iphigenia. She also kills Casandra. Because she's there.
Casandra had foretold that she and Agamemnon would be murdered – if they entered The House of Atreus – but no one could understand or accept her warnings. She was powerless to change her fate.
Some people say, that man is the only creature who has foreknowledge of its death, yet lives in hope of forgetting it.
In the second play, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's son, Orestes, with encouragement from his sister Electra, and the facilitation of the new god Apollo, returns home from exile and kills his mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of his father, Agamemnon. He also kills Aegisthus. Because he's there.
For a moment it seems as if retribution and vengeance might have paved a way for everyone to live in an acceptable balance.
Then Orestes is driven mad by the guilt of his matricide. Hounded by Furies. The ancient pre-Olympian gods who unrelenting pursue the breakers of oaths. They punish the insolence of children to parents, of hosts to guests. Matricides.
To gods and men the Furies manifest as self-accusing guilt. Self-destructive vengeance.
A third play follows in the form of a comedic episode.
Menelaus, Agamemnon's cuckolded brother, is shipwrecked on his way home from the Trojan wars with his recovered wife, Helen, on an island full of Satyrs.
The text is lost, but it is assumed that Menelaus has to force a timeless shapeshifting prophetic demigod to reveal a way home, while trying to stop the Satyrs from fucking his wife.
In the fourth and final play of Aeschylus' four play cycle, The Oresteia, the scene shifts from The House of Atreus to Athens, Aeschylus' home. That's where the first trial of human bloodshed is staged. With a jury made up of twelve Athenian citizens.
The tie-breaking presiding judge, at this first trial of human bloodshed, is the new god Athena. Athena is the god of weaving, war, strategy, and the patron god of Athens, she is also related to Apollo. They have the same father, Zeus – she came out of his head – and she herself said, that push comes to shove, she always sides with her father.
The older gods, the Furies, demand justice, as is their ancient right, for the matricide. The killing of Clytemnestra, by Orestes.
The new god Apollo argues before the jury of twelve Athenian citizens, that in this case Orestes may be excused. Because, Orestes was in fact acting on the advice of the new god Apollo.
The jury votes by placing stones in an urn and returns a tie.
The new god Athena, breaks the tie in Orestes favour.
Orestes is free. His god, the new god Apollo, makes a swift exit.
On stage, the Furies rage because they feel this first trial by a jury of Athenian citizens was rigged from the start, and that we, as citizens, are complicit. They vow to eternally drown our world in blood.
To abey the wave of their all-consuming anger, and to persuade them to accept her judgement, the new god Athena offers to enshrine the Furies forever in the hearths of her citizens' homes, where they will harvest the rites of our birth, our marriages, and our death.
The Furies are persuaded.
"I enthrone these strong implacable spirits here and root them in our soil. Theirs, theirs to rule the lives of men. It is their fated power."
And with this verdict acting as an invitation to an inevitable procession, The Oresteia ends.
We, as citizens from the complicit past, carve this trial on our hearts and keep dancing.
In the ancient Athens of the new gods, Apollo and Athena – where Aeschylus created his four play cycle that is The Oresteia – everyone would have already known that the Skene, the structure at the back of the stage behind the shrubbery, there, the hidden area out of sight, – where we've parked our panel van – that was where all the action took place. In the dark.
Here, in the theatre foreground, nothing happens. People gather to hear stories they already know.
"The one who acts, must suffer into light."
Music.