Imagining Medea

This ain't no Dreamgirls," Rhodessa Jones warns participants in the Medea Project, the theater program for incarcerated women that she founded and directs. Her expectations are grounded in reality, tempered, for example, by the fact that women are the fastest growing population in U.S. prisons. Still, Jones believes that by engaging incarcerated women in the process of developing and staging dramatic works based on their own stories, she can push them toward tapping into their own creativity, confronting the problems that landed them in prison, and taking control of their lives. Rena Fraden chronicles the collaborative process of transforming incarcerated women's stories into productions that incorporate Greek mythology, hip-hop music, dance, and autobiography. She captures a diverse array of voices, including those of Jones and other artists, the sheriff and prison guards, and, most vividly, the women themselves. Through compelling narrative and thoughtful commentary, Fraden investigates the Medea Project's blend of art and activism and considers its limits and possibilities for enacting social change. Rhodessa Jones is co-artistic director of the San Francisco-based performance company Cultural Odyssey and founder of the Medea Project: Theater for Incarcerated Women. An award-winning performer, she has taught at the Yale School of Drama and the New College of California.

Medea - simply to mention her name conjures up echoes and cross-connections from Antiquity to the present. The vengeful wife, the murderess of her own children, the frail, suicidal heroine, the archetypal Bad Mother, the smitten maiden, the barbarian, the sorceress, the abused victim, the case study for a pathology. For more than two thousand years, she has arrested the eye in paintings, reverberated in opera, called to us from the stage. She demands the most interdisciplinary of study, from ancient art to contemporary law and medicine; she is no more to be bound by any single field of study than by any single take on her character. The contributors to this wide-ranging volume are Brian Arkins, Angela J. Burns, Anthony Bushell, Richard Buxton, Peter A. Campbell, Margherita Carucci, Daniela Cavallaro, Robert Cowan, Hilary Emmett, Edith Hall, Laurence D. Hurst, Ekaterini Kepetzis, Ivar Kvistad, Catherine Leglu, Yixu Lue, Edward Phillips, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Paula Straile-Costa, John Thorburn, Isabelle Torrance, Terence Stephenson, and Amy Wygant.

This is the first book-length study of early modern English approaches to Medea, the classical witch and infanticide who exercised a powerful sway over literary and cultural imagination in the period 1558-1688. It encompasses poetry, prose and drama, and translation, tragedy, comedy and political writing.

Reclaiming Greek Drama for Diverse Audiences features the work of Native-American, African-American, Asian-American, Latinx, and LGBTQ theatre artists who engage with social justice issues in seven adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone, Euripides’ Trojan Women, Hippolytus, Bacchae, Alcestis, and Aristophanes’ Frogs, as well as a work inspired by the myth of the Fates. Performed between 1989 and 2017 in small theatres across the US, these contemporary works raise awareness about the trafficking of Native-American women, marriage equality, gender justice, women’s empowerment, the social stigma surrounding HIV, immigration policy, and the plight of undocumented workers. The accompanying interviews provide a fascinating insight into the plays, the artists’ inspiration for them, and the importance of studying classics in the college classroom. Readers will benefit from an introduction that discusses practical ways to teach the adaptations, ideas for assignments, and the contextualization of the works within the history of classical reception. Serving as a key resource on incorporating diversity into the teaching of canonical texts for Classics, English, Drama and Theatre Studies students, this anthology is the first to present the work of a range of contemporary theatre artists who utilize ancient Greek source material to explore social, political, and economic issues affecting a variety of underrepresented communities in the US.

Imagined Theatres collects theoretical dramas written by some of the leading scholars and artists of the contemporary stage. These dialogues, prose poems, and microfictions describe imaginary performance events that explore what might be possible and impossible in the theatre. Each scenario is mirrored by a brief accompanying reflection, asking what they might mean for our thinking about the theatre. These many possible worlds circle around questions that include: In what way is writing itself a performance? How do we understand the relationship between real performances that engender imaginary reflections and imaginary conceptions that form the basis for real theatrical productions? Are we not always imagining theatres when we read or even when we sit in the theatre, watching whatever event we imagine we are seeing?

Leading and emerging, early career scholars in Classical Reception Studies come together in this volume to explore the under-represented area of the Australasian Classical Tradition. They interrogate the interactions between Mediterranean Antiquity and the antipodean worlds of New Zealand and Australia through the lenses of literature, film, theatre and fine art. Of interest to scholars across the globe who research the influence of antiquity on modern literature, film, theatre and fine art, this volume fills a decisive gap in the literature by bringing antipodean research into the spotlight. Following a contextual introduction to the field, the six parts of the volume explore the latest research on subjects that range from the Lord of the Rings and Xena: Warrior Princess franchises to important artists such as Sidney Nolan and local authors whose work offers opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis with well-known Western authors and artists.

In this groundbreaking study based on archival research about Chicana and Chicano prisoners—known as Pintas and Pintos—as well as fresh interpretations of works by renowned Pinta and Pinto authors and activists, B. V. Olguín provides crucial insights into the central roles that incarceration and the incarcerated have played in the evolution of Chicana/o history, cultural paradigms, and oppositional political praxis. This is the first text on prisoners in general, and Chicana/o and Latina/o prisoners in particular, that provides a range of case studies from the nineteenth century to the present. Olguín places multiple approaches in dialogue through the pairing of representational figures in the history of Chicana/o incarceration with specific themes and topics. Case studies on the first nineteenth-century Chicana prisoner in San Quentin State Prison, Modesta Avila; renowned late-twentieth-century Chicano poets Raúl Salinas, Ricardo Sánchez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca; lesser-known Chicana pinta and author Judy Lucero; and infamous Chicano drug baron and social bandit Fred Gómez Carrasco are aligned with themes from popular culture such as prisoner tattoo art and handkerchief art, Hollywood Chicana/o gangxploitation and the prisoner film American Me, and prisoner education projects. Olguín provides a refreshing critical interrogation of Chicana/o subaltern agency, which too often is celebrated as unambiguously resistant and oppositional. As such, this study challenges long-held presumptions about Chicana/o cultures of resistance and proposes important explorations of the complex and contradictory relationship between Chicana/o agency and ideology.

The collected essays in this volume focus on the presentation, representation and interpretation of ancient violence – from war to slavery, rape and murder – in the modern visual and performing arts, with special attention to videogames and dance as well as the more usual media of film, literature and theatre. Violence, fury and the dread that they provoke are factors that appear frequently in the ancient sources. The dark side of antiquity, so distant from the ideal of purity and harmony that the classical heritage until recently usually called forth, has repeatedly struck the imagination of artists, writers and scholars across ages and cultures. A global assembly of contributors, from Europe to Brazil and from the US to New Zealand, consider historical and mythical violence in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and the 2010 TV series of the same name, in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in the work of Lars von Trier, and in Soviet ballet and the choreography of Martha Graham and Anita Berber. Representations of Roman warfare appear in videogames such as Ryse: Son of Rome and Total War, as well as recent comics, and examples from both these media are analysed in the volume. Finally, interviews with two artists offer insight into the ways in which practitioners understand and engage with the complex reception of these themes.