The Trojan Women: A Chimeric Reading (Viva Voce in a Zoom Meeting)

I. Score

What is a written play But a Score To be performed

To be reenacted through the live presence of bodies

in a specific place and time

involving movement

among other bodies

three-dimensional beings inside the fourth dimension: of time

their sounds

their voices

sharing the words

Here the score is not performed

here instead of Sounds: Images

still Images

And Sounds are the inscribed Words

as they echo inside our bodies

or outside

while reading the letters

we, readers instead of spectators

another dimension is added

another medium

Graphics and Painting turn into images the play

very similar to the way

a potter then

was staging an act

a moment of a play on its pot

a scene

on the ceramic surface

while inscribing the Names of the Heroes

and 2 or 3 words going out of their mouths

This iconic dimension is the product of a collaboration

a symbiosis of the text and the image inside one work

the symbiosis of 2 personas

Rosanna and Anne

a Chimeric Work À QUATRE MAINS four hands

Mains that are doing the images

and hands that are spelling the words

Here to speak about images is also to speak about texts

Here they are intertwined

II. Style and Its Absence

In order to reenact the score the score has to be embodied

and to be embodied means to take one form

in case we stage the play

the first question would be

What form have the actors of the play

and What form has the chorus of the play

A decision of Embodiment

In any other answer to that question than the present one

in case the heroes were human living beings

alive on the scene

the embodiment would demand a certain clothing

unless nude

certain voices

unless silent

that would direct us towards a certain style

Style Era Period Epoch History

Here the Absence of Style is marked by

the Absence of Clothing

Out of Fashion

and Inside Eternity

III. Embodiment, Elements—Animals

We start by A wave—

An Element, The Sea

Enters Poseidon

Poseidon is A Wave

A multiplicity

and Troy

Troy is a hotel

the only construction we can see

the first style

A hotel in a Place

Ruined

A ruin

Windows Broken and Shut with Nailed Boards.

I quote Rosanna Bruno:

IV. Language

The Expression : Enters Poseidon

Enters Athena

Enters The Messenger

I hear this expression as Archaic

But then

The Way τρόπος the persons speak turns them into

real persons of today

not heroes

not mythic personas but persons that have a life

to show

that are mean and vindictive

βιντίκτιβ

can be full of hate

people common people

they speak as common people

Sometimes American people

“I hate Greek Ships you with your pathological prows

And your spasms of oar and the original sin of your sails . . .

you came hunting that female”

the voices stick into hatred details as if they were posting

in the social media

barking to the others

to make them so Real

was to turn them into Animals

the Animals are always the same

their faces do not change

Hekabe An Old Female Dog A Bitch

As we know in the whole play Hekabe

is lying on the floor as a dog does here is an element

an old dog on the ground is a dog that cannot really move And as we know from Hecuba, another Euripidean Play

Hekabe is turned into a Dog the time she is committing a suicide

but she is turned into a Statue of A Dog

An Image of a Dog

ΚΥΝΟΣ ΣΗΜΑ

on the Hellespont

(Hec. 1265):

“You will become a dog with fiery glances”

V. About dogs _ I quote from HEKABE THE DOG:

(ANNE PIPPIN BURNETT, Arethusa Vol. 27.2: 151–64 (Spring 1994).

“Aristotle says the dogs and pigs share man’s life συνανθρωπεύειν (ΗΑ 571b)

A dog mark of collaboration of man and beast that marked civil peace

Dogs were trained with rewards and punishments

moreover the whole beast could be bought and sold like a slave.

a man was said to suffer ‘worse than a dog’ (κύντερος) Od. 20.18. 7.216; Eur. Supp. 897

women ‘dog-faced’ as Helen so often does Il. 3.180, 6.344, 356; Od. 4.145

On a grander scale dogs in a wild and aberrant state

dogs who ate human flesh could represent the worst forms of disorder,

becoming in the Iliad ‘an emblem of the impurity of battle’ (Redfield 1975: 202)

For the ordinary ban the dog was a trusted and indispensable companion.

With his voice (he was φιλόφθογγος AP app.6 = Anth.Gr. Jacobs 23)

the dog commanded flocks gave direction to the hunt and warned of danger at night.

With his bright eyes (he was χαροπός, Homeric Hymn to Hermes 194)

he saw everything

he was watcher keeper protector and if you dream of him

meant that your goods and treasures and womankind were safe

The bitch-woman of Semonides (7.12–20W) is a watchdog gone wrong

A bitch serves as well and her ferocity in defense of her own is com-memorated

in Homer’s most famous metaphors

(Od. 20.14: “Just as a bitch, standing over her soft pups, barks at the stranger and is wild to fight”)

Mother-love and the power of this love

Bitch an icon of teeming maternity

Hekate and her dogs

Sacrifices

A dog an animal slave brought into the house

enemies and friends the same as of his master

an image of fecundity and fierce maternal care

at almost every point this standard dog offered itself as an obvious figure for Woman

Kynos Sema a spot well-known to the Athenians as a prominent landmark on the route to the Black Sea a rough promontory where the danger was increased

by the powerful current that runs down from the Bosphorus

Eur. fr. 959 N: ‘you will be the agalma of fire-bearing Hekate’

The dog of the Kynos Sea is marked particularly as Hekate’s agalma

Kynos sea is a natural threat transmuted into a natural warning

it marked a point where a ship’s course had to be changed, and so it was in the sharpest sense a tekmar for the sailors”

VI. A Dog and a Fox

Hekabe

An agalma with torch lights in Place of The Eyes

A Hekate of the Sea Roads

A Guard Sitting on the Sea Roads

A Mother of Too Many 20 Kids

A Maternal Figure

A Dog Mother who Lost her Puppies

A Guard of the Tomb of her Family

And Helen

A Fox

With High Heels

Our Dog Ivan here on the mountain is barking continuously

from yesterday

He is chasing after something

Dimitris the Gardener the Native Informant

Told us

He barks because of the Fox

A Fox is here Wandering the Last Days

The dog hates the fox

The dog tries to kick out the fox

out of his territory

out of the TERRITORY of its DOMINION

The Fox is Wearing High Heels

She is Intelligent

Beautiful

Fierce

Wild

The Fox stands opposite the female chorus

Made of Bitches and Cows

Mainly Bitches

As Rosanna said the Cows

while she was drawing them

turned into Dogs Too

And Anne had given her the idea of the Dogs

VII. The Dog-Chorus I quote from an interview:

THE IDEA OF THE DOG CHORUS WAS OF ANNE BUT ROSANNA EMBODIED IT WITH IMAGES

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/troy-is-burning-anne-carson-and-rosanna-bruno-reimagine-euripidess-the-trojan-women

“Anne allowed me so much freedom to respond to her text.

We corresponded occasionally via email and I would send a few images.

She sent me a sticker book of dog breeds and suggested mug shots would be a great way to introduce the chorus, which of course it was.”

It was John W. Golden’s Dogs Sticker Book

“The images in the sticker book are meant to be classic representations of well-known breeds. I wanted to create personalized versions of popular breeds as well as a few atypical mutts. Some of the dogs I drew are based on my friends’ pets. I wanted each creature to have a look of fear or grief—for the animals to inspire empathy. I learned to see the cows as dogs by the end of it—their stature reduced to canine proportions.”

Sticker Book, a Book for Kids

but here for Rosanna now

Each Member of the Chorus has a Face

They are personalized

VI. THEY HAVE THEIR OWN VOICE

by showing us the faces of the dogs

by painting the animals instead of the humans

We can hear their voices by synesthesia The sense of hearing

so Present inside a Theatrical Play

is restituted by the Presence of

Elements such as the Wave of Poseidon

and the Chorus as a Multiplicity is restituted

also by a Pack of dogs and cows

We can hear them

Chorus of Nightmare Dogs Barking the whole Night

The Choruses in Tragedies are Choruses of Others

but here, as Segal wrote about Hecuba

“Violence and the Other: Greek, Female, and Barbarian in Euripides’ Hecuba

TAPA 12 (1990) 109–131”

the play explores the otherness of the female

by combining it with the otherness of the barbarian

Here the Animal Otherness is added on top

chorus of the otherness

the female

the animal

VIII. Comedy

Animal Choruses we have in Comedy not in tragedy

in Aristophanes

This leads us to a Tragi

COMIC

TROJAN WOMEN

A COMIC

is the title

playing with the idea of the Comic(s) as Bande Dessinée

And the Comic as Comic

Funny

A Comic Dimension of the Tragic

Polyphony of the CO (S) MIC

Aristophanes’ animals have always these voices

that Sound as Barbarian

THE ANIMAL BARBARIC

And in Aristophanes

as Studies Show

there is a High concentration of insults involving the term

ΚΥΩΝ THE DOG

The TragiComic is close to the Bakhtinean Menippean Satire Idea

Unrestrained use of the fantastic motivated by a philosophical objective

a parody a carnival sense of the world

presenting people as an embodiment of the ideas they represent

Instead of “the view from above”

The view from the point of the Animals

and other Beings

Because later

Enter other Othernesses

Andromache and Astyanax

Andromache a tree A Poplar Tree on a Cart Trunk Split Roots dragging out the back of the cart

and Astyanax a Sapling

rendering the metaphoric dimension of the ΠΤΟΡΘΟΣ

The shoot that is going to grow

And Menelaus Otherness

as some sort of Gearbox

Clutch or coupling Mechanism

Helen Fox

but sometimes Mirror

a metonymy for a beauty, the Mirror

a woman who is depicted on the mirror she holds

to see herself reflected

Is she beautiful?

So the choices for their kinds in the Comic

genres

representations

are explaining the characters by metaphor and metonymy

IX. To become imperceptible

Little by little the images become more confused

the portraits melt into a chorus between flames

and black is more than present

Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Different kinds of beings biologies and symbiosis

is it possible

Or Biologies and War

War and Destruction

is the result

At the end of the Comic all the animals and objects

all the faces are covered with smoke

Smoke that extinguishes the limits of the play

the limits of the personae

of the objects

the limits of their portraits

X. the limits of articulated voice

IS A KIND OF END