Unveiling Euripides

Spring 2009 5 Unveiling Euripides Melinda Powers Since the time of the fifth century BCE, when the ancient Greeks defeated the invading Persian Empire, works such as Aeschylus’ 472 BCE Persians and Euripides’405 BCE Bacchae1 have constructed an idea of the Orient that persists in the West today.2 Regarding these plays, Edward Said in his 1979 book Orientalism notes, “[t]he two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography.” Said defines this process of constructing an imaginary idea of the Orient as “orientalism.” He argues that the West, from the time of ancient Greece, has marginalized and feminized the Orient by promoting “difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).” Orientalism “tries to show that European culture [or the ‘self’] gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient [or the “other”] as a surrogate and even underground self.”3 Examining xenophobia in an ancient Athenian context, classicist Edith Hall has argued that “the polarization of Hellene and barbarian was invented in specific historical circumstances during the early years of the fifth century BC, partly as a result of the combined Greek military efforts against the Persians.”4 Such xenophobic inventions persist today, and some contemporary directors of Athenian drama, conscious of this danger, have challenged the East/West polarity by deconstructing the divide inscribed in the original plays.5 In this article, however, I discuss Bill T. Jones’s 2001 workshop The Bacchae Project, which, rather than avoiding East/West binaries, instead reinscribes this division, despite the director’s attempt to do otherwise. While the meaning and terms of East/West in an ancient and contemporary context are distinct, Bill T. Jones’s workshop demonstrates that the current division is nothing new, but rather a repetition, revision, and reinforcement of an ancient, classical model. Jones’s work6 , a student workshop7 produced at the University of California, Davis, in May of 2001, is significant. The choreographer/director staged it just prior to September 11th of that same year and characterized the chorus of Dionysos’ bacchae as “of the Islamic fundamentalist persuasion.” In Euripides’ day, the Muslim-East/Christian-West religious distinctions did not yet exist, but Jones’s Melinda Powers is anAssistant Professor in the Department of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Prof. Powers’s teaching and research interests include ancient drama, historiography, performance theory, and especially the performance ofAthenian drama on the ancient and contemporary stage. She has published an Oxyrhynchus papyrus of Demosthenes XIX as well as articles and reviews on contemporary adaptations of the classics. She is currently working on a book project with University of Iowa Press titled “The (W)hole Story of Athenian Performance.” 6 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism production contemporizes the play by costuming the chorus in what Jones refers to as chadoor,8 the black cloak revived in 1970s Iran under theAyatollah Khomeini but which is also worn by women in Islamic communities elsewhere. Jones describes his chorus as dressed in chadoor, and in doing so, he generalizes the garment by divorcing chadoor from its specific socio-cultural context. Implicitly suggesting chadoor is akin to any veil (e.g. burqa, boushiya, niqab), Jones uses the garment as a generic veil to evoke in his U.S. audience a fear of the other. Chadoor, in this case, becomes a metaphor for the other, a metaphor which develops in the production into a reiteration of the contemporary orientalist motif of unveiling, an image with a strong colonialist history and one that persists in the post 9/11 world.9 Jones is a dancer and choreographer, so his artistic bias, his interest in bodies and their movement, has largely influenced his decision to unveil the chorus. He says that “there is nothing quite like undertaking a great Western classic and asking it ‘Where are the bodies, where is the sexuality, where are the elemental forces of gravity and time, force in the text?’”10 Jones wants to dignify the chorus’s bodies through their dancing, and in doing so his...