Our Gift To Dionysus

We all know the roots of our art come from the plays performed at the annual Feast of Dionysus.  Were we alive then, and male, and of a certain age, and free, we'd be required by civic and religious duty to sit through an all day theatre festival at the end of which prizes were given out to the favorites.

Our own view of these rites and these plays is somewhat distorted.  Most of the plays generated for this festival and most of the playwrights have vanished from our collective memories as if our society had been dipped into the River Lethe.  What remains are a few full texts and some fragments and even those are corrupted.  Most of the texts we have survive because medieval Monks copied them (making lord knows what alterations) thinking they would be good for the study of classical Greek.  The commentary we have on these works-- Aristotle's Poetics-- dates from after the plays were in fact performed and is filled with conjecture as to how they were received by their audience.

But one thing we do know for sure is that the plays were performed in honor of Dionysus.  But do we ever consider why?  I only recently started thinking about this myself.  When I was a child I loved Greek Myths and Dinosaurs in about equal measure. Oddly enough, most theatre or arts inclined adults I know loved Greek Myths and Dinosaurs as children.  And so perhaps it was fourth grade me speaking to 29 year old me, but a couple of weeks ago it hit me:  Apollo is the God of Music, Poetry and the arts in general, not Dionysus.  In fact, Dionysus is pretty specifically a God of a particular crop (the grape) and one of its end products (wine).  His festival is at root a harvest festival (more on that later) so what gives?

The more I looked into it, the more I realized what a peculiar god our good friend Dionysus is.  He is the last of the Gods to be invented/written about, and the final member of the 12 Gods of Olympus (although he is mentioned very briefly in a late Homeric ode, he is not an olympian yet).  He is the only one of the Twelve Gods to be born of a mortal woman; his father was Zeus, everyone's favorite Randy Thunderbolt.  For a long time, his rites were not performed at a Temple, but out in the middle of the woods. The Bacchanal was not presided over by Priests and Priestesses; it was instead an anarchic drunken collective of women who would rampage through the forest and tear deer to pieces for sustenance.  

Dionysus is also more emotionally and psychologically complex than many of his cousins amongst the 12.  We often call the Comedy-Tragedy masks "Janus Masks" but Dionysus was also known for his dual nature, which reflected the dual nature of wine and drunkenness (something I'm guessing most readers of this blog are fairly familiar with).  He journeyed to Hades to rescue his mother, but would bring down destruction for the least provocation.  He gave men inspiration, but also appears as a force of pure, destructive chaos.

He is also the God of something much more specific than most of his relatives.  

So what gives here?  I have a few ideas.

First, at some point, Dionysus became a little more domesticated.  We do not in fact know how this happened, but by the time they celebrated the Feast of Dionysus, he was the God of both wine and inspiration. And it was in tribute to this inspiration that the festival was probably held.  Also, Apollo is an intellectual rather than emotional God-- theatre, even at its roots, was built to some degree on emotion, inspiration and things that cannot be easily explained and rationalized. Dionysus' nature also could contain both comedy and tragedy, and both were performed at the City Dionysia.

There's also another important aspect of Dionysus which I recently learned about that connects to another important dramatic concept: Dionysus dies every winter and is reborn every spring.  Unlike his cousin Persephone, who symbolically "dies" (by journeying to the underworld to live with her captor/husband Hades) thus causing winter in the tears of her mother Demeter, Dionysus in many legends is literally killed.

Why is this?  Because the vine must be actually destroyed to allow new grape crop to grow.  During this period, Dionysus literally dies.  Horribly.  According to one pervasive legend, he is ripped apart by a Titan.  Then in the Spring, he is resurrected.

Perhaps the connection to theatre isn't clear, but there are a few that i can think of.  Every play is in part defined by its temporal limitations.  The performance at some point ends and then it goes into our memory or becomes vapor and slowly drifts away on the breeze.  No show will last forever (even Wicked), and a recording of a show isn't the show itself.  The ephemerality of theatre is key to its very being, and has been since the beginning.  Every play dies, the lucky ones are occasionally reborn.

There is a second implication, however.  Theatre is created in rehearsal.  What does rehearsal mean?  Well, it's meaning comes from lots of places... in France rehearsal is called "repetition" which comes from the same root as the English word: Rehercer in Old French, Rehercen in Middle English.  To Repeat.

But to repeat what?  Well, it actually literally means "To harrow again".  "A harrow" (according to Susan Cole's Directors in Rehearsal) "is a heavy frame of timber or iron, set with iron teeth or tines; it is dragged over already ploughed land in order to break up clods of earth, pulverize and stir the soil, uproot weeds, eliminate air pockets that would prevent soil-to-seed contact, and cover the seed." Rehearsal is the process of again and again tearing up the soil to allow the eventual crop to flourish. 

Every time we walk into the rehearsal room, we murder Dionysus so that he can be reborn in glory. We do this through the metaphorical harrowing of the elements of a play (the text, the performances, the staging, the design etc.) to create the eventual production. No wonder some people treat the rehearsal hall as sacred.

Comments

[Guy Yedwab]

There's a point that you might want to add to this thoughts about Dionysus (which are very interesting and I think right on the money): the reason that Dionysus was latest to come to the game, and the reason that Dionysus was watered down.

Originally, the cult of Dionysus was not in any way related to the Greek pantheon; Apollo the God of Music and Wisdom was the champion of arts. But people in Ancient Greece thought that the whole scene was just a little too head-y, and this cult sprang up: the cult of Dionysus. The parallels between Dionysus' death and rebirth and that of Christ are fairly interesting.

The cult participated in drunken orgies in the woods. It was a large cultural problem for the established Greek pantheon, and (being polytheists) they decided that the best way to beat Dionysus was to induct him into the Pantheon.

But as soon as Dionysus was an official god--amphitheaters bridging the indoor world of the temple and the outdoor world of the forest--the Greek establishment basically opposed the orgy element (duh), and in its wake came... theater.

The ritual martyrs and rebirths Dionysus, like the ancient ritual. But what it digs up from under the ground is all of the dark, powerful, sexual wildness that the normal Greek pantheon suppressed. Which is why theater became a controlled outlet--see Boal's "Theater of the Oppressed."

Thank you for making me think today. I was pretty tired when I woke up.

[Scott]

For more info on the connection between Apollo and Dionysus, you really ought to read the book "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" by Roberto Calasso. He suggests that Apollo and Dionysus are actually aspects of the same God, which would explain why their arts are so closely connected. Calasso is a scholar of the highest degree, and he has an interesting mind. Highly recommended.

[Kaitlyn]

The best and the worst thing about the history of theatre, especially its origins, is that there is only so much information we are positive about and the rest is speculation.

Like other theatre artists, I have a soft spot in my heart for Dionysus, and I've written a short response to your inspiring post that can be found at http://monthlymanifesto.blogspot.com/2008/12/art-of-paradox.html