The Heart of the Matter is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary project that explores how visual storytelling can support student wellbeing, foster creative academic engagement, and deepen critical thinking. Initiated through a Global Engagement Seed Fund from UCL and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, the collaboration brings together Dr Eleanor Chiari, Associate Professor (Teaching) at UCL, and Professor Subir Dey from IIT Delhi’s Department of Design. Both educators were drawn to the power of images to articulate complex inner experiences, especially following the COVID-19 pandemic. In combining visual culture, design, and pedagogy, their workshops invite students to use drawing and storytelling as a means of academic expression and a tool for connection and self-reflection. We interviewed Dr Chiari shortly after the succesful running of a zine-making workshop at our recent Celebration of Humanities Education.

1. Where did the idea for this project come from?

Our collaboration started from a call for a Global Engagement seed fund for interdisciplinary pedagogical collaborations matched by UCL and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. During lockdown, Professor Subir Dey taught a module on Comics for Mental Health in the Department of Design at IIT Delhi and he found me through my UCL module on Trauma in Visual Culture. From different angles and in very different contexts, we were both considering the power of visual images to process complex private and public traumas. Given the challenges some of our students were facing with classroom engagement after the pandemic and with the threat of generative AI looming on the horizon, we wanted to explore ways our disciplines (design and cultural studies/visual culture) might come together in productive and joyful ways. We came up with a project that helped us explore how graphic visual storytelling might be used in the classroom. Professor Dey was interested in helping his students become more critical readers of images, and I was immediately thrilled by the possibilities that design approaches might offer to the creative assessments I was using with my students.

2. You mentioned the challenges students were facing after the pandemic. Could you tell us more about the current needs of students for emotional support and how your project addresses these needs?

Subir and I both hold active pastoral roles in our universities, he as undergraduate tutor for the Department of Design at IIT Delhi and I as Programme Director for the BA Language and Culture in UCL’s School of European Languages, Culture and Society (SELCS). We both found that the pandemic accelerated processes that were already manifesting in our classrooms in recent years. Anxiety in particular seemed to be on the rise, not helped by insecurity over the future and increasing pressures over the cost of living.

Many students seem to find the classroom environment more emotionally charged than they used to. Establishing moments of joy and connection early on during the educational process can help students feel safer and better able to open up in front of classmates. The zine exercise we showcased at the Celebration of Humanities Education can be adapted in a variety of ways to get students to introduce themselves to fellow classmates (and could be assigned as homework if there isn’t time in class). In Delhi, we asked students to answer the question ‘who are you?’ and it was fascinating to see how many students chose to introduce themselves through the harder challenges they had faced in their lives. Showing fellow students their drawings and telling their stories allowed them to break the ice and get to know each other on a much deeper level than simple introductions might have done.

Drawing as a practice is a powerful tool for bringing people back into their bodies and, when well managed, creative practices in the classroom can be deeply bonding experiences. Sometimes, what we cannot say in words, we can communicate through stories and that vulnerable act of sharing unconscious parts of ourselves can help students feel seen and heard, a bonding and restorative experience. In our workshops, which were aimed at exploring scholarly ideas visually, we were struck by the students’ curiosity to share their personal stories and how that process helped establish deep connections between participants that ultimately also affected their learning and their enthusiasm for doing so.

3. How does interacting with visual storytelling and zine-making shift students’ understanding of knowledge production, pedagogy, and academic communication?

Zines are deceptively simple canvases for thought. For those not familiar with what a zine is, it is a self-produced micro-magazine or booklet, in our case consisting of six pages plus a front and back cover. Zines are very useful thinking tools because they restrict the space for expression… Like the word count in academic essays, challenging students to express their ideas in a fixed number of pages requires them to make strategic decisions about what they want to communicate and how. This is in itself a very useful exercise in narrowing down ideas and exploring effective communication.  There are some wonderful purely textual zines out there, but we were interested in using zines as tools for graphic visual storytelling. For that, we needed students to consider visual metaphors and also to reflect on all the ways they already communicate visually every day (on WhatsApp, through memes, cinematic spectatorship etc…) and to explore how these techniques might be used to communicate academic ideas visually as well.

Telling a good visual story is challenging, but when someone is able to pull it off, the experience is deeply gratifying. In our workshops we also took this process to a second level by getting students to plan a zine collaboratively. In negotiating and discussing ideas with others and planning how best to express them in drawing, students further consolidate their own understanding of those ideas and they engage with them in an entirely new way.

4. In what ways did the interdisciplinary nature of the workshops enhance or challenge the learning experience of students?

If you are working in a group with students who study different disciplines you often need to simplify your ideas to explain them. Students have to shed academic jargon, or become critically aware of academic practices which have become second nature to them. This reflective practice can be invaluable. In our Delhi workshops, the humanities students really benefited from working with extremely talented design students, who could quickly transform their ideas into beautiful drawings. Design students also benefited from the structured analytical planning and depth that humanities students brought to their storytelling. All students benefited from being pushed to think and work beyond their comfort zone. We have received wonderful feedback from all the workshops and have already seen students use their zines to promote their research at postgraduate conferences. One research illustration was even accepted for a journal contribution in comparative literature!

5. What role did the workshop’s balance between structured guidance & open-ended exploration play in fostering student creativity and critical thinking?

Our workshops were designed, first and foremost, to be as inclusive and friendly as possible and to create the illusion of casual exploration. But they were, in fact, very carefully scaffolded. Each activity ensured that learners would be prepared for the next stage of engagement and aimed to build their confidence and encourage them to push themselves further.

A storytelling workshop requires careful consideration of time, objectives, expectations, and overall learning. While these factors were closely integrated in our workshop, we also ensured activities contained a playful element to make them light and enjoyable. This approach ensured that creativity was gradually revealed through the activities without overwhelming the students. The paced-down approach also gave them enough time to reflect and progress through the activities efficiently.

6. How might the practices of cross-cultural collaboration and visual literacy cultivated in this project be applied across broader educational contexts, e.g. at UCL?

During the Celebration of Humanities Education, I was delighted to see that my colleagues who teach languages in SELCS saw real potential in how zine-making could be used in Language teaching. It could be a very fun way of exploring and explaining complex grammar rules but also of getting students to do all kinds of storytelling in the classroom. We are already discussing a training session with me as part of our peer dialogue practices. I now regularly use creative forms of assessment in my teaching and I am very keen to promote such methods to any colleagues interested in adopting them for their modules.

Subir Dey and I used the generous contribution from the Centre for Humanities Education to create a workbook that can be used by students, teachers and creatives alike. The activity book will be a hands-on practice book to be used to enhance and polish creative storytelling skills, which can enhance academic thinking more widely. It is in the design stages now, but please watch this space for information on how to access it soon!

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To find out more about Eleanor and Subir’s project, visit their website at: https://www.heartofthematter.in/

Dr Eleanor Chiari is an Associate Professor (Teaching) and the Programme Director for the BA language and Culture in the School of European Languages, Cultures and Society at University College London. She has been teaching interdisciplinary modules on history, photography, and visual culture for the past 16 years.

We need to talk about Humanities education and celebrate the rich and exciting variety of perspectives and approaches within. On a sunny Wednesday morning on June 11th I found myself entering UCL’s Institute of Education to do just that, and here is what I found.

The day started bright and early with introductory speeches on the future of teaching and learning in the Humanities from Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen (Founding Director of the Centre), Stella Bruzzi (Executive Dean, UCL Arts & Humanities), and Kathleen Armour (UCL Vice Provost, Education & Student Experience). Their speeches addressed some of my own concerns about the place of AI in the Humanities and acknowledged the challenges of teaching new generations of thinkers to respect and be curious about new ideas and visions of the world. I really appreciated these foci.

The large crowd of curious participants soon dispersed into several rooms to attend morning sessions. A panel in the discussion room led by Anne Grydehøj discussed the future of teaching languages at UCL, while Antony Makrinos looked at the future of Classics through VR goggles in the Technology Room. I didn’t get to take part in these, unfortunately, but the idea of wandering through a virtual agora or forum via an ultra-modern set of VR goggles was equally intriguing and entertaining.  As a Slade MFA student, I was drawn to the showcase of Spineless Wonders, an amazing collection of artist books and small press publications presented by Sharon Morris and Liz Lawes. After a quick cup of tea, I decided to return to the Showcase room and participate in a Culture and Language Show and Tell, an interactive discussion presented by Elletra Carbone about using objects from UCL’s Special Collections to provide a tangible connection between abstract language and material culture. Sadly, the nature of having separate discussions taking place simultaneously meant I couldn’t see Alexander Samson and Paula Rodriguez discuss the adaptation of Spanish Golden Age theatre classics in the twenty-first century or participate in the workshop “Ethical Encounters in Community-based Research, Learning, and Assessment”, led by Jelena Calic and Eszter Tarsoly.

In the afternoon, Jeff Bowersox led an interactive, multiplayer, pedagogical game that allowed players to take part in a model of the political system of the Weimar Republic, the post-war German government from 1918-1933, prior to the rise of Nazi Germany. Walking past, the session appeared in full and enthusiastic swing, so I made my way to the Showcase Room and joined a workshop on Graphic Narratives led by Eleanor Chiari. I entered the room with confidence, but it turns out an art degree doesn’t necessarily mean one would find sequential narrative storytelling easy! Thanks to help from Dr Chiari, however, I soon started storyboarding. It was amazing to see everyone’s results, with little zines illustrating different subjects and experiences. As an artist, I am used to creative exercises, but it was great to work with people who might not normally choose this way of working. I found it challenging to commit to one subject to illustrate – producing only five images requires a simplicity which is often missing in the way I paint. I nevertheless enjoyed this opportunity to be specific for a change.

In the late afternoon, many people were engaged in panel discussions on EDI Practices and Wellbeing in the Humanities Classroom. I decided to visit “A Mini Augmented Reality Exhibition of the Chinese Export Watercolours,” presented by Zeyu Zhao and developed with Gao Jin. I was really impressed with the outcome of this small display. Seeing the levels of engagement provoked by interactive displays made me reconsider my reservations against AR in exhibiting.

While many people engaged in panel discussions were UCL professional services or teaching staff, I felt welcome and encouraged as a student to share my views and ideas. It was a fantastic opportunity to meet and talk to experts in the humanities and make connections between subjects I wouldn’t have made before.  It was the first time I had taken part in such an event, and I felt empowered to seek out more opportunities like this one, just to have a chance to listen to and exchange perspectives on a wider variety of subjects than those directly concerning fine art practice.

And it was great fun! I would highly recommend attending similar events in the future to anyone curious and open-minded.

Noemi Stysiak is a Polish painter and second-year student at the Painting MFA at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art.

The Our New Gold international digital storytelling festival invites students from all over the world to submit short films in which they respond to, adapt, perform, and present adaptations of Golden Age plays they have been studying. There are thought to be more than 10,000 extant Spanish comedias (plays) from before 1700. Similar to its Shakespearean counterpart in London, the first fixed public theatres emerged across the Iberian Peninsula in the 1580s and performed to large audiences representing a cross-section of society. The main difference between Spanish and English Renaissance Drama was that women played female parts, in contrast to the boy actors in London. Sir Richard Wynn noted that actresses were particularly good at playing women and were one of the main reasons for the theatre’s popularity. Although there are well-known classics of European theatre like Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (1636), many plays are little-known or unknown and new discoveries emerge all the time, including an unknown play by Lope de Vega discovered in 2010, Mujeres y criados.

The founder of the Our New Gold festival, Paula Rodriguez, is an actor, maker, and director who has dedicated herself to adapting this scintillating and underrecognised dramatic tradition. Student responses to the plays are incredibly varied and diverse. They reframe, reword, translate, set to music, perform, adapt, explain, and recast. At the root of all of them is a commitment to the plays’ texts—a love for poetic language, polymetric verse, and the plays’ resonant plots and situations, that so often feel so much more contemporary than they are.

We held a series of workshops in the autumn to discuss adaptation and begin to work on student projects. In the Spring, the jury convened to discuss the various entries and chose winners, special mentions and finalists. All of the winning entries can be viewed on the festival website: https://www.ournewgold.org/2024-festival.

In my opening remarks, I noted that theatre is embodied, presential, and located. Even in the more audio-visually driven short films, there are elements of performance, acting, fragments of mise-en-scene, alongside remarkable technical achievements from the animated photographs of Recuerdo to the soundscapes that accompany a translation of Calderon’s Life is a Dream Lucid Dreaming, and the animation of an Ode to Living Truthfully based on El monstruo de los jardines, reflecting on intergenerational expectations. The Golden Age has been written off too often as conservative and Catholic, linked by the Franco dictatorship with absolutism and hailed as a model for its repressive, pious ethnonationalism. This festival, however, embodies the radicalism, global resonance, and surprising diversity of these early modern representations. Ultimately, fiction and theatre are among the most challenging and fascinating sources for understanding the past because they reveal how people sought to represent themselves, the aporia and gaps in these representations provide the most important kind of evidence, not least because history is always in question.

It was an absolute joy to witness the creativity, the deep and varied engagement with the materials, the genuine attempt to build bridges between our world and the incredible culture of Spain’s Golden Age, its savagery, violence, and profound meditations on the human condition.

All the winning entries are on the website. UCL will be hosting the festival again in 2025 – 6, let’s see if we can get a UCL winner this time!

Alexander Samson is a Professor of Early Modern Studies in UCL’s Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies.  His research interests include the early colonial history of the Americas, Anglo-Spanish intercultural interactions and early modern English and Spanish drama.  He runs the Golden Age and Renaissance Research Seminar and is director of UCL’s Centre for Early Modern Exchanges and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.

Aristophanes’ Peace: A Topical Story by Giovanna Di Martino

After thirteen long years of war, Athens and Sparta have turned a proxy dispute into an all-out extravaganza of chaos. The goddess Peace has been locked away in a cavern, far, far away, tired, sad, and downright cross with everyone for ignoring her.

Meanwhile, the gods have taken a permanent vacation from their heavenly palace, seeking refuge in the most remote corner of the earth, leaving the god of War to run the show. The result? A nation exhausted, angry, and simply desperate for any sort of deal to end the madness.

Enter Trygaeus: a once-successful winemaker who decides to take on the epic task of saving Greece. With a giant beetle as his trusty steed, he’s determined to fly to heaven, convince the gods to convince humans to cut the nonsense, and rescue Peace.

Originally produced in the spring of 421 BCE in Athens at probably the largest theatre festival in the ancient world, the City Dionysia – just days before a much-anticipated peace treaty was finally signed between Athens and Sparta – Peace is the work of the visionary playwright Aristophanes: it stands as a powerful symbol of hope and the promise of an end to stubbornly useless suffering.

This was the imaginative story that we decided to work on for our project Aristophanes at Chickenshed, an international collaboration between the University of Bristol, University College London (UCL), the University of Parma, Chickenshed Theatre and Teatro delle Albe.

Aristophanes at Chickenshed: Aims, Motives and Methods

The project comprised a five-day workshop on Aristophanes’ Peace held from the 28^th of October to the 1^st of November 2024 at Chickenshed Theatre in London. This was directed by Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari of Teatro delle Albe, with the assistance of dramaturg Giovanna Di Martino (UCL), who also produced a new translation of the play. This project brought together students from the universities involved with students from the Chickenshed’s education programmes, culminating in two (sold-out) performances of a new version of Peace.

This workshop is rooted in the pedagogical imperative of integrating performance practice into the study and teaching of ancient Greek drama. As well as providing a more accessible approach to ancient Greek dramatic scripts, this approach also serves as an appropriate method for exploring these texts that, before enjoying a long and successful literary life off the stage, were originally intended for performance.

Ancient Greek Drama, in and outside the Classroom

Since the 1960s, ancient Greek drama has remained one of the most widely used sources for writing new plays and for directors to experiment on a global scale (Hall 2004: 12). This year, the London stage alone has seen Robert Icke’s widely acclaimed Oedipus at the Wyndham Theatre and Alexander Zeldin’s equally successful The Other Place (a rewrite of Antigone) at the National Theatre; in January, the Old Vic will present Matthew Warchus and Hofesh Shechter’s Oedipus, while Daniel Fish’s Elektra will run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

But ancient Greek drama is also one of the most appealing and widely studied aspects of ancient Greek literature and culture more generally, both at school level (through the syllabuses for Classical Civilisation, Drama and English, at both GCSE and A-Level) and in Higher Education (Andújar 2023: 373).

Though the performance history of these ancient scripts has been incredibly rich since their return to the stage in the early modern period, only recently has the discipline of Classics begun considering the reception of these texts on the stage as an integral component of the texts themselves. Recent developments in this area are part of the new subfield of classical reception studies. In addition to recognising the dramatic nature of these texts in analysing and teaching them, this field also incorporates the performance history of these texts through time as part of the multiple layers of meaning they present to us today.[1]

Yet, while taking stock of their dramatic nature and how they have worked historically on the stage is indeed a step forward for the discipline as well as for the theatre practitioners wanting to engage with these ancient scripts on the contemporary stage, only very recently has there been a change in the way these texts are taught in the classroom.[2]

Practice Research, Performance Pedagogy and the Chorus

The aims and outcomes of this workshop should be inserted into this new thrust towards practice-based teaching and research practices that align with theatre and performance studies’ long-term commitment to performance as a method of inquiry and a pedagogical tool.

Our workshop combined practice research with performance pedagogy: while it aimed at producing new knowledge in the ‘ecosystem’ of scholarship, performance, and translation of Aristophanes’ Peace,[3] it also invited university and drama students to be active participants in this process of knowledge-production.

The integration of both methodologies was greatly supported by the directors of the workshop, Marco Martinelli and Ermanna Montanari. Martinelli’s unique approach, termed the ‘non-school’, emphasises a non-prescriptive engagement with ‘canonical’ texts that often serve as the subject of classroom study. He advocates for deconstructing and bringing these texts to life on stage through a process he calls ‘messa in vita’ (‘putting into life’). As a theatre practitioner, he draws upon the ancient Greek chorus, as well as the Medieval Passions (sacra rappresentazione), up to Majakovskij’s revolutionary theatre. His theatre practice revolves around the concept of the Chorus, which transforms individual identity into collective identity.[4]

The workshop also hugely benefited from Ermanna Montanari’s long-term vocal exploration (on which she has published widely).[5] She was responsible for the warm-up exercises, through which students worked extensively on breathing, movement and voice.

Their approach was complemented by Chickenshed Theatre’s fifty years of experience bringing together young people from a variety of difficult circumstances and backgrounds and using theatre to help them develop skills, confidence and community. This combination of approaches was supported by academics from the participating universities in several ways. Lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation of Peace were interwoven with the students’ improvisations during the devising process and Di Martino also acted as a simultaneous Italian-English interpreter during the workshop. Lucy Ruddiman, and Zoë Carvalho Morris provided dramaturgical support during the workshop process – while also participating in the performance.

The Process: New Knowledge and Community Building

The process of bringing together this Chorus of different voices to explore Aristophanes through a collaborative combination of methods and languages was as important as the performance we created. The goal was not to re-create or re-discover meanings that Peace may have had in the ancient world, but to participate in creating new knowledge around the play, its myth-story, and contemporary theatre practices that were generated from the participants’ interactions with them. One student reflected, ‘I loved creating for an Ancient Greek show – as I had very little knowledge of shows from that period beforehand. This experience has inspired me to be more confident in trying a new approach in theatre.’ The value of this project was in the different ways in which the ‘non-school’ method combined with Chickenshed’s inclusive theatre practices to allow the student-performers to construct their own Aristophanes; one who enabled them to express some of their own concerns through performance.

Another valuable aspect of this process was the community (the Chorus) that emerged throughout the workshop. There were challenges to this: we had different groups of people (some of whom were already used to working together in a particular way, and some of whom had never worked together before); we were combining different methods of making theatre; we were exploring a play that almost all participants were unfamiliar with; and we were doing it all across a language barrier. Nevertheless, the students reported that they felt a strong sense of community in this process. One student commented, ‘I didn’t expect to build such a strong connection within such a short period of time.’ That we were able to bring this group together into a community to create our own Aristophanes was a testament to the success of the process, which we felt spoke strongly in favour of performance pedagogy as a way of exploring ancient drama.

Language and Performance

Another key aspect of this project was its multilingual nature, where language should not be merely understood as a means of communication, but as a means of being, a way of thinking and, in this case, a way of ‘feeling’ theatre. One of Chickenshed’s main organizers described this project as a valuable opportunity for students to experience something new, primarily by being exposed to people speaking different languages. From the beginning of the collaboration between Albe, UCL and the University of Parma, this has been a central aspect of the project.[6]

It was noted by one participant that one of the most exciting things was indeed to be able to ‘work in a foreign language’. Another participant spoke of the opportunity to ‘connect strangers without words’ even though they did not share a language. And again, another was surprised that though ‘we spoke different languages’, there somehow emerged a common language, that of ‘performance’.

Giovanna Di Martino is Leventis Research Fellow in Ancient Greek Literature at University College London. Her main research areas are the translation and performance of ancient Greek drama in the early modern period, in Europe and beyond. She has recently co-edited a volume for De Gruyter: Translating Ancient Greek Drama in Early Modern Europe: Theory and Practice (15th-16th Centuries) and two special issues for Skenè: Memory and Performance: Classical Reception in Early Modern Festivals. She has also contributed several journal articles on translation theory and practice of Greek and Latin texts across time. Her research interests include the reception of ancient Greek drama during Fascism (on which she has published two special issues for CRJ and Brill’s Fascism). She is the author of the monograph Translating and Adapting Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes in the United States (Skenè, 2020) and is currently working on her second monograph for OUP on Aeschylus’ Reception. Translation, Adaptation and Performance. She has several ongoing practice-research projects on the translation of ancient Greek drama and its adaptations.

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Outputs

Inclusive Theatre and Community-Building | Giovanna Di Martino, Marco Martinelli, and Dave Carey

Since the end of the project, we have been sharing the premises and outcomes of this workshop with a few audiences. First, we held an event with Marco Martinelli and Dave Carey in conversation with Giovanna Di Martino at the University of Oxford, hosted by the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, on 4^th November 2024. Here we talked about Chickenshed and Teatro delle Albe, their history and ethos, and then presented a few clips from the workshop as a result of the successful collaboration.

Roundtable on Ancient Greek Comedy as Community Engagement

We also held a roundtable discussion at the University of Bristol on 11^th November 2024 as part of the Theatre Department’s events, though the panel included both classics and theatre scholars. It was a fruitful and productive discussion led by Giovanna Di Martino and Lucy Ruddiman that (unusually) brought together different disciplines and students from a diverse range of BAs. The panellists have since been in contact and expressed a desire to continue the conversation. We hope that this indicates the possibility of a future life for this project and the value of these sorts of collaborations.

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This video is a selection of moments from the performance. Each moment is intended to illustrate a different aspect of the process that went into creating it.

• Prologue: This was to convey the war happening in the background of the play, while building a sense of chorus. The performers entered the space, fell to the floor and rose again. This was repeated a few times but is only shown once here.
• The Feeding of the Beetle: The protagonist of Peace, an Athenian named Trygaeus, has acquired a dung beetle which he intends to fly to Mount Olympus to rescue the goddess of Peace. Here the beetle is represented by half the chorus and the other half are workers feeding it dung. This scene mixes the improvisations of the participants with lines from Giovanna Di Martino’s translation.
• The Flight of the Beetle: Trygaeus flies the beetle to Mount Olympus. This scene demonstrates more of the choral techniques explored, which are drawn from Ermanna Montanari’s (the other co-founder Teatro delle Albe who was also present for the workshop) work with breath and voice.
• The Gods of War: On arriving at Mount Olympus Trygeaus finds Hermes, who explains that the other Olympian gods have left the gods of war in charge. The gods of war enter singing war songs, which were chosen and created by the students.

Credits

Directors: Marco Martinelli, Ermanna Montanari

Dramaturg and Translator: Giovanna Di Martino

Assistant Directors: Zoë Carvalho Morris, Lucy Ruddiman

Workshop Organisers: Francesca Bortoletti, Giovanna Di Martino, Lucy Ruddiman, Francesca Venturi

Cast Members: David Akubardiya, Desirè Andreotti, Yasmine Anouar, Reece Bailey-Smith, Sean Baradhi, Chiara Barresi Vannini, Luca Bartolomucci, Jacopo Rossano Botto, Sofia Buttini, Alan Campani, Zoë Carvalho Morris, Camilla Castellano, Bianca Dondi, Samuel Gould, Harry Johnson, Katie King, Bunny Kwabene, Theo Leslie, Agnes Lindstoel Wilhelmsen, Naledi-Zoe Mangrozah, Joguina Mokekola, Leonardo Morgan-Russel, Annalisa Pagani, Benedetto Loris Pizzo, Lucina Rigoberto, Lucy Ruddiman, Hamza Sogut, Giada Vendemmiati, Lily Walker, Yasmin Wilson, Kye Wolbrom.

Video Footage: Simon Gutimo.

Sponsors: Istituto Italiano di Cultura (London), UCL’s Centre for Humanities Education, Ravenna Teatro (Ravenna), the Leventis Foundation, the Gilbert Murray Trust, the Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, the Classical Tradition, the Institute of Classical Studies, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (Oxford), the University of Parma-DUSIC, and the WIDE European Program.

Approved by UCL’s Ethics Committee under the title ‘Theatre Practice and Ancient Greek Drama in Translation’, Ethics Number 22797/001. PI: Giovanna Di Martino.

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[1] The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, founded in 1996 by Edith Hall and Oliver Taplin, is a pioneering research centre in this field. Today, the Archive continues to serve as an interface between ancient drama and its reception, both on and off the stage, while also developing new reception through collaborations with creative artists. On the return of Greek drama to the early modern stage, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024; on Greek drama on the British stage, see Hall and Macintosh 2005; on Greek drama in the Americas, see Bosher, Macintosh, McConnell, Rankine 2015; on the Latin American stage, see Andújar and K.P. Nikoloutsos 2020; on the Georgian stage, see Gurchiani 2017; for a general overview, see van Zyl Smit 2016.

[2] See Mitchell-Boyask 2023; Meineck 2023; Plastow and Bullen 2024, amongst others.

[3] For the use of the term ‘ecology’ and ‘ecosystem’ in relation to any new knowledge produced around ancient Greek drama, see Plastow and Bullen 2024.

[4] Martinelli’s non-school developed in Italy, but also in France, Belgium, Brazil, Senegal, the United States and recently in the United Kingdom. See Marco Martinelli, Aristofane a Scampia, Milan, Ponte delle Grazie, 2016; Id., The Sky Over Kibera, 2019: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt18358142/; Id., Aristophanes dans les banlieues. Pratique de la non-école, trans. Laurence Van Goethem, Arles, Actes Sud-Papier, 2020. For more information on Martinelli’s non-school practice, see https://www.teatrodellealbe.com/ita/contenuto.php?id=4. For more on his ‘choral’ practices, see Marco Martinelli, Coro, Genoa, AkropolisLibri, 2023, and Di Martino 2024.

[5] Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Cellula: anatomia dello spazio scenico = an anatomy of stage space, Macerata, Quodlibet, 2021; Ermanna Montanari, Enrico Pitozzi, Prima voce, Bologna, Sigaretten Edizioni Grafiche, 2022.

[6] On the history of this collaboration, see Bortoletti, Di Martino, Refini 2024a, 6-7.

Bibliography

Andújar, R. (2023). Profile: Greek tragedy and performance. The Classical Review, 73 (2), 373-377. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-review/article/profile-greek-tragedy-and-performance/F526AC205991FC008F369060D629212D

Andújar, R., & Nikoloutsos, K. P. (2020). Greeks and Romans on the Latin American stage (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (Eds.). (2024). Memory and performance: Classical reception in early modern festivals. Skenè: Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies, 10 (1). https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/issue/view/32

Bortoletti, F., Di Martino, G., & Refini, E. (2024). Preface. Skenè, 10 (1), 5-7. https://skenejournal.skeneproject.it/index.php/JTDS/article/view/465/426

Bosher, K., Macintosh, F., McConnell, J., & Rankine, P. (2015). The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas (1st ed.). Oxford University Press.

Di Martino, G. (2024). Practice research, performance pedagogy, and early modern Aristophanes: Building (on) the script(s). Skenè, 10 (2), 247-292.

Gurchiani, K., Torlone, Z. M., Munteanu, D. L., & Dutsch, D. (2017). Greek tragedy on the Georgian stage in the twentieth century. In A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (pp. 548–559). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Hall, E. (2004). Introduction. In E. Hall, F. Macintosh, & A. Wrigley (Eds.), Dionysus since 69: Greek tragedy at the dawn of the third millennium (pp. 1-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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