Reaching Athens Performing participation and community in Rimini Protokoll's Prometheus in Athens

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Conventionally, classical scholars consider Cleisthenes' reforms of 508/7 BC as the birth year of democracy.

² The following account of the performance is based on my visual memories and on a translation of the script into English, which the company gave me a few days later.

³ The three extra performers represented illegal immigrants living in Athens, unaccounted for in official statistics, but estimated to be over 100,000.

⁴ In the fifth century BC, acting was not fully professionalized. Actors were recruited from theatrical families where they would have been trained from childhood. This was not true for the chorus, however, which was made of citizens who had not necessarily received professional training. See Hall (2002: 3–38).

⁵ In ancient Athens, the chorus would have been interpreted by male citizens, and never by foreigners, women or slaves. However, the characters they played could have been women, foreigners or slaves.

⁶ I later learnt that Ms Kouneva could not be physically present on stage because she was still in intensive care. Her role was therefore interpreted by her friend Effi, who was wearing the mask and was in live telephone contact with her throughout the performance. Ms Kouneva had recorded an introduction and a monologue which were played on the night.

⁷ By placing the term ‘democratic’ in inverted commas I want to problematize the current narrative that links contemporary democracy with the form of government that, perhaps confusingly, had the same name in ‘classical’ Athens. I want to draw attention to the fact that in fifth-century BC Athens, ‘democracy’ meant a form of male-dominated and ethnocentric oligarchy, despite the fact that these narratives have elevated Athens to the status of a utopian city. I also want to stress the fact that democratic governments today are often covertly elitist and totalitarian, and this was particularly evident in the way the recent financial crisis was handled by European governments and the international community.

⁸ For a reflection on how the myth of Athenian democracy influenced the European Constitution, see Canfora (2006: 7–20).

⁹ For the idea that the West constructs its own history as myth, I am indebted to Settis (2006).