AGON
Based on Aeschylus' Oresteia. Five actors, 40 min.
The University of Chicago, 2007.

ABOUT
This project was an investigation of the intersection of the compositional methods of 500 Clown and Double Edge Theatre, hypothesizing that a marriage made between both will result in work that is as honest as it is imaginative, and as autonomous as it is collaborative; that is to say, I wish to explore and exploit the many tensions and oppositions built into the act of creating live performance (as articulated through the shared / similar vocabulary of both companies), in pursuit of a deeper understanding of how, why, and what to create.

I set out to examine the cultivation and culmination of absurdity, intimacy, resilience, and presence as a made manifest through rigorous physical and imaginative exercise.

There is one final comparison to be made between the work of these theatre companies and the work of visual artist Dianna Frid, by whom I was trained to engage in an especially rigorous cross-disciplinary consideration of the aesthetic elements of time, space, line, color, and shape. I find her critical vocabulary particularly useful in understanding and exhausting the creative possibilities offered by the presence or absence of an object in space. Moreover, this comparison is directly pertinent insofar as I find it directly applicable to the creative theory of theatre director Tadeusz Kantor. Kantor’s use of “poor objects” in his performances is akin to Frid ’s material transformations in that it is the performative gesture—that is, engaging in an action with the object—which transforms and transcends its former use, and renders the reiteration poetic. It is a not a superficial alteration—rather, consequential.

Precariousness is a concept by which material (object, body; image, sound, text) can be manipulated, and it is the degree to which the manipulation is intentional that is a measure of the creative potential of a work.

Engaging in action, as catalyzed by the presence of an object, is both the means and its end.

AGON: Origins and usage
The term “Agon” has its origins in classical Greek literature; it is a noun denoting a conflict, struggle, or opposition, and is most often used to describe athletic competitions or public debates, although its application and interpretation is plastic enough for use in various other contexts. It appears in dramatic text as early as Aeschylus’ Oresteia, but does not gain regularity of form as a rhetorical device until Sophocles and, later, Euripides. It is not nor was it ever structurally formalized, although classicists often make reference to the “central agon” in a post-Sophoclean dramatic text as if it were prerequisite. This is untrue; rather, it is a literary and performative gesture indicative of the collective Athenian (all major “Greek” dramatic works were) psychology circa 5th cent. BC—that is to say, 5th century Athenians were fascinated by and preoccupied with constructing effective systems of logic and rhetoric, and the existence and evolution of a “dramatic agon” is demonstrative of this.

As a discerning reviewer of French classicist Jaqueline Duchemin’s 1947 book, The Agon in Greek Tragedy points out:

The writer gives good ground for the general impression (which is far from new) that there is a gradual increase in fixity of form from Aeschylus to Euripides; that the ‘typical’ agon, consisting of two set speeches, each followed by two (rarely three) lines from the chorus and then by a passage of stichomythia, appeared first in Sophocles, who was guided by his own instinct, that Euripides borrowed certain rhetorical characteristics from the Sophists, whose influence upon him was strong in many respects, and that the Sophists, in their turn, may have derived hints from the poets. It is, however, an exaggeration to speak of this kind of agon, as the writer sometimes does, as a ‘traditional part of the drama, with fixed rules.”

(Pickard-Cambridge, p. 14)

Regardless of the precision (or lack thereof) of the definition of the word in the realm of academic discourse, my interest lies in its usage as a poetic device. “Agon” as a metaphor for the creative process whereby actors engaged in “rigorous physical and imaginative exercise” are thus able to actively confront and capitalize upon conflict, struggle, and opposition…and hopefully express this truthfully and articulately to an audience; to give an experience transcendent of pure aesthetic pleasure; to make acutely aware of the immediacy and ephemerality of the particular time and space in which this event is to occur; to contribute to the collective experience in a manner which is unique and hard-fought—almost sacrificial…

—This would be a triumphant use of the word “Agon.