The APGRD Database
of Modern Performances of Ancient Drama at the University of Oxford
by Amanda
Wrigley
Archive of Perfomances of Greek and Roman Drama,
University of Oxford, UK.
The Archive of Performances
of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) was founded in 1996 by Edith
Hall and Oliver Taplin in response to the need for a coordinated research
effort devoted to the international production and reception of ancient
Greek and Roman plays from the Renaissance to the present day. Funded
initially by the Leverhulme Trust (1996-1999) and subsequently (1999-2004)
by a Research Project grant from the UK's Arts and Humanities Research
Board (AHRB), the project has for some years been working to establish
the international history of ancient plays in modern performance,
primarily on the stage, but also on film, television and radio, and
in opera and dance. From October 2004 the APGRD has been engaged in
a new, five-year AHRB (now AHRC) research project which grows organically
from these foundations, developing theoretical models for the scholarly
practice of performance reception, collecting all the information
that can be discovered about identifiable performances in antiquity,
and turning to further kinds of performance and interpretation in
the modern period, in particular studying opera and dance more systematically
than we have so far been able to do.
Purpose
The central purpose
of the APGRD is research, and the publication of several books (see
below) has arisen from a full programme of lectures and conferences.
A further major research output will be the publication of the APGRD
Database of Modern Performances of Ancient Drama. The APGRD also
serves as a repository of physical materials relating to the stage
history of the ancient plays in performance, such as posters, flyers,
theatre programmes, tickets, newspaper reviews, designs, photographs
and audio-visual recordings. The basis of this collection is the personal
archives of the APGRD’s founding Directors, Edith Hall and Oliver
Taplin, who together with colleagues Peter Brown (Director), Fiona
Macintosh (Senior Research Fellow), Pantelis Michelakis (Honorary
Research Fellow), Amanda Wrigley (Researcher), and Christopher Weaver
(Administrative Assistant) continue to work tirelessly to source new
materials from archives, libraries, and theatre companies. In addition,
we have recently benefited from the expertise of Dr Vasiliki Giannopoulou
who has been working on the post-Renaissance reception of Aristophanes.
Events
An international
conference is held every three years, on Medea
and Agamemnon in performance
in 1998 and 2001 respectively, and on the performance reception of
Aristophanes’ Peace, Birds and
Frogs in September 2004. In addition, a regular public lecture
series has brought a rich variety of performing arts practitioners,
translators, and academics from many disciplines to Oxford to share
their knowledge and experiences (the complete list of speakers is
available online). A colloquium on ‘Iphigenia
in the Arts’ took place at the University of Bristol in May 2004 under
the auspices of the APGRD and Bristol’s
Centre of the Classical Tradition.
Moreover, for the past four years the APGRD has joined with the Department
of Drama and Theatre
at Royal Holloway, University of London to organise an
annual two-day Postgraduate
Symposium on the modern performance of Greek drama.It has also
supported ‘Dionysus Recast’, a postgraduate seminar series held each
summer term from 2003 to 2005 at the University of Oxford. In addition,
the APGRD has benefited from close collaboration with the Open University’s
research
project on The Reception of the Texts and Images of Ancient Greece
in Late Twentieth-century Drama and Poetry in English (see Hardwick
in this issue) and the wide membership of the European
Network of Research & Documentation of Ancient Greek Drama
Performances (see Mavromoustakos
and Ionniades).
Publications
These activities
have led to the publication of two collective volumes: a diachronic
survey of a single tragedy, Medea
in Performance, 1500-2000 (Oxford: Legenda, 2000), and a synchronic study of the revival of the Greek tragic
repertoire in the later twentieth century, Dionysus Since 69:
Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium (OUP, 2004).
Two further volumes are now in press: Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC-2004 AD
(OUP, November 2005) breaks new ground by tracing this play’s performance
reception from antiquity to the present; and Edith Hall and Fiona
Macintosh’s book, Greek Tragedy
and the British Theatre, 1660-1914
(OUP, July 2005), investigates the reception of ancient tragedy
in one country. The volumes on Medea and Agamemnon arise out of
the proceedings of our conferences on these plays; Dionysus
Since 69 arises out of our twice-termly lecture series, with the
addition of chapters by all members of the research project; and Greek
Tragedy and the British Theatre is the sole work of Edith Hall
and Fiona Macintosh. The proceedings of our conference on 'Aristophanes
Upstairs and Downstairs: Peace, Birds, and Frogs
in Ancient and Modern Performance' will appear in book format. For
further published research by APGRD people, see the online bibliographies.
APGRD Database
Each of these
four (published or in press) books includes a substantial production
chronology of some kind which is in effect a snapshot of a section
of the APGRD Database. This electronic research resource makes available
online data on over 8,000 works of modern performance which draw on
ancient Greek and Roman drama, and bibliographical references to enable
the researcher to consult a range of evidence on each production.
Even in its developmental stage, this electronic resource has proved
to be an invaluable research tool for an international body of scholars
in a wide range of disciplines and specializations, from those investigating
the performance history of a particular play, for example, to those
seeking to map the cultural history of a particular country in a specific
decade.
(i) Production
details
The performing
arts can be complicated: since much of the data used to identify and
describe works of performance in the database can exist in multiple
values, it is of the utmost importance that all the data can be recorded
in a searchable way. If a production of Medea, drawing on the
ancient plays of that name by both Euripides and Seneca, in a modern
adaptation created by using two early 20th-century translations, is
performed with English dialogue and modern Greek songs, as a collaborative
effort between two theatre companies, under two directors, and touring
internationally to numerous venues and festivals over a period of
three years, then there must be a facility for locating this record
in the database using any combination of these values. The database
has therefore been designed with a sophisticated query facility enabling
the researcher to access records from a wide selection of ‘entry points’:
for example, chronological (year ranges), geographical (country, location,
and venue), by person (translators, directors, actors, designers),
theatre company, language of performance, type of performance (e.g.
stage, dance, musical, puppetry), the modern texts used to form the
playscript, and, of course, by the ancient play(s) on which the modern
work of performance draws.
(ii) Bibliographical
references
In addition to
the presentation of these hard facts, a vital function of the database
is to point the researcher in the direction of bibliographical sources
which will offer further information on productions: for example,
reviews, articles and listings in the press; academic books and journal
articles; histories of theatre companies and venues; published playtexts;
books by or about theatre practitioners; and standard reference works.
Links to other
websites are also provided as a further type of published ‘evidence’
for productions. Although websites are a rich source of information,
their ephemerality has serious implications for the currency of the
references which are provided by the database. The database is, at
this stage of publication, a purely textual resource, and does not
include any image, video or sound files, due to the financial resources
that would be required to develop the database to hold such files
with regard to current best practice, and to digitize the entirety
of the APGRD’s archival resources for over eight thousand works of
performance. Rather, the database aims, by providing bibliographical
references, to act as an effective jumping-off point from which the
international research community can continue its investigations at
local research libraries.
The ‘production
details’ about works of performance contained in bibliographical sources
have been transferred to the database, but the contextual information
surrounding these facts cannot efficiently be held by a database.
So, although the database has been designed to hold a complex level
of data – such as that in the 1977 New York Shakespeare Festival production
of Agamemnon directed by
Andrei Serban, Priscilla Smith took the roles of both Clytemnestra
and Cassandra at the Vivian Beaumont, but that when the production
transferred to the Delacorte these roles were played by two actors,
Gloria Foster and Dianne Wiest – it cannot easily explain why this
change of cast was made.
The bibliographical
references will also provide the researcher with the tools to verify,
and perhaps sometimes disagree with, the information provided by the
database. Often subjective decisions have to be made relating to the
interpretation and prioritization of the variety of evidence available
on a production: for example, a production may be advertised as a
‘version’ of an ancient play, but after seeing the play in performance
or looking carefully at the playscript it may be thought more appropriate
within the reference terms of the database to describe the production
as a translation of that ancient play. Often, the sources of evidence
for the ephemeral activities of the stage can contradict each other,
and it is therefore incumbent on the researcher to make an independent
assessment of the bibliographical (and other) sources listed for a
production. The database is therefore only the starting point for
independent, interpretative research.
Advantages
of electronic publication
The overwhelming
advantage of electronic over hard-copy publication for such a reference
work is that newly-discovered productions can be added at any point,
and the data on productions already recorded in the database can be
continually revised and expanded as new sources come to light. The
process of data collection on a production can be haphazard and incremental:
after stumbling across a passing reference to a production of an ancient
drama in the biography of an actor, for example, some time may pass
before an email to the theatre company involved yields a theatre programme
for our collection and therefore new information for our database.
And so the information held by the database expands incrementally
not only in terms of new productions but also in terms of the depth
of data held on known productions.
A further advantage
of electronic publication for several thousand records is that the
data can be accessed through a variety of different entry points:
for example, a combination of geographical and chronological search
terms can provide an interesting report of what was happening in a
particular place at a particular time; a search for all known productions
of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon will return a list of over 700 productions
across the globe; and a search for Steven Berkoff will bring up a
list of those productions in which he was involved either as an actor
or a director, as well as all those productions which have used his
adaptations of Agamemnon and Oedipus Tyrannus.
The database has been designed with a feedback form in the hope that
researchers using the resource will inform the APGRD when they discover
errors in the data or have supplementary material – in terms of both
productions and sources – to contribute.
Solutions
to the problem of documenting the performing arts
The ephemeral
nature of the theatrical event means that it is publicly documented
for only a short length of time. Evidence may be preserved in the
form of a newspaper review, magazine article or theatre programme,
but for many productions once the theatrical event is over information
about it disappears from immediate sight. Theatre companies who can
afford to maintain a substantial web presence are increasingly sensing
the importance of archiving web pages on past productions. Documentation
in the performing arts can be patchy and disorganised, and the printed
record of a performance can be unreliable even in specialist journals
and magazines. Secondary sources such as newspaper reviews can mis-spell
actors’ names and report the dates of the run incorrectly, and even
advance publicity from a theatre company might advertize a tour that
in fact never happened. Relying on such secondary printed sources
for data collection on a performance event is therefore problematic,
but it remains one of the most fundamental methods of data collection
for the database.
The approach
taken during data entry is one of rigorous cross-checking of data
whilst keeping in mind the relative merits of different types of source.
A piece of documentation from a theatre company (figs 1, 2 & 3)
is generally
taken to be a more reliable source of production details than a newspaper
review (fig. 4);
Fig. 4
however, a sudden
change of cast during the run of a production, for example, will not
always be reflected in the programme. A reference to a production
in an academic article might mis-remember the premičre of the initial
run, but it might contain valuable information on a revival and tour
three years later. And so, the information on the database will only
reflect those sources which have come to the attention of the APGRD
team at that point in time. Every attempt has been made to examine
and cross-check data in order that it reaches the research community
at an appropriately scholarly standard, but it is the hope of the
research project that users of this resource will treat it as a springboard
to propel them into a deeper investigation of the history of a particular
production.
How it
works in practice
The database
has been designed in the style of a standard academic library catalogue
so that researchers can ‘drill down’ into the data, following leads
of interest as they arise. A search for all productions of Euripides’
Iphigenia at Aulis performed internationally in the last decade
(fig 5) returns
an overview list of 47 records (fig. 6 ).
 |
 |
| Fig. 5
|
Fig. 6
|
Following the
link to the most recent British production brings up the detailed
record for that directed by Katie Mitchell at the Royal National Theatre
in 2004 (fig. 7). From this detailed record the researcher could,
for example, click on the theatre company’s name to return a list
of all productions of ancient drama staged by the (Royal) National
Theatre (fig. 8), or click on the name Katie Mitchell to see the other
productions on which she has worked (fig. 9)
Future
datasets
In addition to
the conferences, lectures, and books which will emerge from the new
project from October 2004, its research will also generate three substantial
datasets for electronic publication. These datasets will make use
of some of the fundamental tables and relationships drawn in the current
APGRD database. Building on existing foundations in this way will
enable the researcher to search the three new datasets either independently
from, or in tandem with, the APGRD database.The new datasets will
be as follows:
1. Records for
the performance of drama in antiquity from c.500 BC to c.500 AD, and
documentation of the evidence for their performance. The performance
of drama in antiquity will—in addition to tragedy, comedy, and
satyr play—include pantomime, parodic mime, tragoedic recital
and citharoedic recital on theatrical themes. Documentation for their
performance will refer to source materials such as papyrus, vase-painting,
inscription, scholion and treatise. Our new AHRB-funded doctoral researcher,
Rosie Wyles at the University of Durham, is investigating the performance
reception in antiquity of Euripides under the supervision of Edith
Hall, and the findings of this research will be of great importance
for the design of the new electronic resource.
2. An index of
c.1,500 operas composed from the early modern period to the present
which draw on ancient drama, and several thousand records detailing
performances of them.
3. A similar
index of c.1,000 ballets choreographed from the early modern period
to the present which draw on ancient drama, and records detailing
performances of them.
Conclusion
The APGRD Database
of Modern Performances of Ancient Drama has been designed to provide
the research community with an efficient tool with which to access
a rich and complex set of data on the performance of ancient drama
on stage, film, television and radio. It is intended that the potential
value of this resource will be realized with the emergence of further
interdisciplinary works which endeavour to investigate, contextualize
and interpret the data, thus proving it to be an indispensable instrument
for those working in the field of reception studies.
Amanda Wrigley
Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama
Amanda Wrigley
is Researcher at the APGRD at the University of Oxford. She is a Classics
graduate, a qualified librarian, and specializes in archival investigation
of theatre history. She is co-editor with Edith Hall and Fiona Macintosh
of Dionysus Since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn
of the Third Millennium (OUP, 2004). Her forthcoming publications
include a study of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon on BBC Radio, 1946-1976.
She is currently working on a publication documenting the history
of Greek plays at Oxford and by the Balliol Players.
