Dionysus Resurrected: Performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae in a Globalizing World by Erika Fischer-Lichte (review)

Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Dionysus Resurrected is a thoroughly researched examination of performances of Euripides’ The Bacchae since 1968. Her work usefully supplements textual reception with penetrating performance analysis to demonstrate how recent productions of The Bacchae illuminate globalization. Fischer-Lichte contends that Dionysus—god of theatre, wine, ecstasy, communion, and destruction—embodies complex and contradictory trends of globalization, and her study of performances, contexts, and receptions pushes readers to critically rethink how ancient drama speaks to our contemporary world. Three interrelated consequences of globalization provide the framework for Fischer-Lichte’s analysis: the creation of new communities after traditional communities fragment; the erosion of stable local and individual identities; and encounters among cultures that may be productive exchanges or destructive clashes (xiv). Each performance examined illuminates one (or more) trends, but Fischer-Lichte cautions that differing local conditions, year(s) of production, and national contexts make for heterogeneous samples. Methodologically, she says, “[t]his scenario renders any kind of generalizing or homogenizing approach counterproductive, which is why I will base my arguments on individual case studies” (xv). The book’s three sections each focus on one consequence of globalization; each section has three chapters, each examining one performance or adaptation of The Bacchae.

Arguing that Dionysus breaks down divisions, Fischer-Lichte claims that adaptations can stage Bacchic excess to perform “liberation from all kinds of barriers and pressures, be they political, social, moral, or psychological, and either the affirmation of an existing community or the uniting of the participants into a new one” (26). The case studies—Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Euripides, and Teat(r)o Oficina’s Bacantes—each sought new communities, with varying degrees of success and permanence. Schechner and the Performance Group utilized ritual to build community both among performers and between performers and spectators, but the wild abandon of the performance risked destabilizing any identity, individual or communal (34). Soyinka’s adaptation is appropriately subtitled A Communion Rite. Fischer-Lichte blames poor decisions—reflecting neither Soyinka’s Yoruba aesthetic nor Euripides’ Greek aesthetic—during the premiere performance for its failure to establish communal formations (60). In her assessment, Teat(r)o Oficina’s Brazilian adaptation was the most successful of these three at building community; by using the collective celebration of Brazilian carnival forms to disrupt normal social order, “the performance succeeded in transferring the spectators into a state of liminality and transformation” (77).

In the second section, Fischer-Lichte emphasizes Dionysus’s destabilizing impact on contemporary identity, pushing the transformative boundaries of reception. In the Antiquity Project at Schaubühne—Theodoros Terzopoulos’s The Bacchae, and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s The Bacchae—“the prevalent collective identity was dismembered … without any possibility of restoration” (92). The Berlin-based Antiquity Project directly confronted romanticized, middle-class German notions of an authentic descent from Hellenic culture. Through fragments and a fractured text, the show “performed a sparagmos of the cultural identity of the educated middle class” (112). Similarly confrontational was Terzopoulos’s 1986 production in Delphi, which challenged traditional assumptions of what Greek plays should look like. According to reviewers, the performance minimized the Greek language, utilized a Japanese aesthetic, substituted ritual for tragedy, and abandoned the meaning of Euripides’ text (123). All of this challenged traditions privileging Greek access to Attic drama. Warlikowski’s production undercut Polish exceptionalism as the show “opened up the possibility for a dialogue with other European cultures, emphasizing what Polish culture shared with them instead of highlighting its ‘otherness’” (144). During the 1990s many Poles nationalistically embraced Polish culture as a reaction to centuries of conquest, division, and occupation; against this backdrop, engaging with other European cultures seemed risky and unpatriotic.

Cross-cultural encounters are, however, Fischer-Lichte’s third consequence of globalization, and the third section engages intercultural theory, arguing for the difficulty in overcoming cultural prejudices to achieve intercultural stagings...