This project has been led at the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama), within the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. I have actively contributed to the existing activities of the faculty by attending seminars and delivering papers at academic events. My research work has included performance analyses, theatre workshops and organisation of conferences.
Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, I haven’t been able to attend performances or rehearsals. But I have been in conversation with performing artists, sharing my dramaturgical expertise and/or interviewing them. I have advised the two postgraduate students (Marcus Bell and Alison Middleton), who were directing the Oxford Greek play (Orestes, 2020). And I have been in conversation with Irish playwright Marina Carr, movement director Struan Leslie, American director Peter Sellars as well as with British director Ian Rickson and British poet Kae Tempest. The three latest are available as podcast or video recordings and accessible to the general public.
During the two years of the fellowship, I have organised six theatre workshops (either with postgraduate students in Classics, with acting students or with professional actors). We have explored the performance of war and violence on contemporary stages through theatrical exercises. These workshops have also given me the opportunity to develop further research methodologies about the translation and dramaturgy of ancient scripts. The key-findings of these workshops have been summarized in papers I have delivered at academic conferences and have been presented as performances open to both academic and general audiences. They will also be published in a forthcoming book chapter that I am currently co-writing with Giovanna Di Martino (UCL).
I have organised two major academic events. The first one was a two-day conference co-organised with Anne-Violaine Houcke (Paris Nanterre): ‘Poetics, Politics and the Ruin in Cinema and theatre after 1945’. It gathered scholars in theatre studies, film studies, cultural history, Classics, and classical reception. Together, we explored how, by reinventing antiquity through working with ruins both politically and poetically, artistic processes as well as works of theatre and cinema record the historical and artistic consequences of WW2 in Europe. The aim was to study these processes from 1945 to the present where these traces continue to be detectable in the works of artists in Europe.
I also organised a day-long conference with Silke Felber (Vienna): ‘Collective Trauma and contemporary crises in performances of Ancient Tragedies’ that gathered performing artists and scholars in Classics, Classical reception and Performance Studies. It included two round-table discussions and we also screened pre-recorded interviews with Peter Sellars and with Kae Tempest and Ian Rickson (available on the APGRD YouTube channel). This event challenged the notion that trauma is unrepresentable by examining the performance of trauma on contemporary stages.
During lockdowns, as I worked from home and was unable to travel and collect new data by watching rehearsals or performances, I focused on publications:
1/I worked on the monograph that grew out of my PhD thesis (Créer le choeur tragique, Classiques Garnier, 2021). This study explores how the concept of ‘commun’ – ‘what we have in common’ – is questioned through contemporary performances of the ancient tragic chorus.
2/ I prepared for publication a co-edited volume (‘Rater’ [=Special Issue, Agôn n°9], Estelle Baudou, Quentin Rioual and Aurélie Coulon (eds.), 2021). This volume explores how the concept of failure can be understood as fundamental in the practice and theory of the performing arts. It gathers chapters by academics and by practitioners as well as interviews with theatre makers and testimonies of artists.
3/ I worked on a chapter for Greek Tragedy and the Digital (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2022), edited by Angeliki Poulou and Georgios Rodosthenous, entitled ‘‘Inventing’ the Ancient Tragic Chorus with the Digital. Performing Communality in 1999 Oresteias by Katie Mitchell (NT, London) and Georges Lavaudant (Odéon, Paris)’. This chapter analyses how digital technologies contribute to the ‘invention’ of the tragic chorus on contemporary stages.
4/ I worked on the translation into French of Marina Carr’s play, Hecuba, with Cécile Dudouyt (forthcoming 2022).
