The Mask Of Zeus

Using both textual and iconographic sources, this richly illustrated book examines the representations of the body in Greek Old and Middle Comedy, how it was staged, perceived, and imagined, particularly in Athens, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. The study also aims to refine knowledge of the various connections between Attic comedy and comic vases from South Italy and Sicily (the so-called 'phlyax vases').0After introducing comic texts and comedy-related vase-paintings in the regional contexts, The Comic Body in Ancient Greek Theatre and Art, 440-320 BCE considers the generic features of the comic body, characterized as it is by a specific ugliness and a constant motion. It also explores how costumes -masks, padding, phallus, clothing, accessories- and gestures contribute to the characters' visual identity in relation with speech : it analyzes the cultural, social, aesthetic, and theatrical conventions by which spectators decipher the body. This study thus leads to a re-examination of the modalities of comic mimesis, in particular when addressing sexual codes in cross-dressing scenes which reveal the artifice of the fictional body. It also sheds light on how comic poets make use of the scenic or imaginary representations of the bodies of those who are targets of political, social, or intellectual satire. There is a particular emphasis on body movements, where the book not only deals with body language and the dramatic function of comic gesture, but also with how words confer a kind of poetic and unreal motion to the body.

"What matters about a play is not the extent to which it is like any other play, but the way in which it is different," writes Thomas G. Rosenmeyer. "This is, I suggest, how the ancient audiences received the performances.... My purpose, then, in writing these essays is twofold: ... to devote enough space to the discussion of each play to allow its special tone and texture to emerge without hindrance and at leisure ... and to include in one collection analyses of plays so different from one another that the accent will come to rest on the variety of the tragic experience rather than on any one narrowly defined norm." Greek tragedy is a vehicle for many different ideas and many different intentions. From the wealth of material that has come down to us the author has chosen six plays for analysis. He reminds us that the plays were written to be seen and heard, and only secondarily to be studied. The listeners expected each play to have a specific objective, and to exhibit its own mood. These the author attempts to recover for us, by listening to what each play, in its own right, has to say. His principal concern is with the tragic diction and the tragic ideas, designed to release certain massive responses in the large theater-going group of ancient Athens. In exploring the characters and the situations of the plays he has chosen, the author transports his reader to the world of fifth-century B.C. Greece, and establishes the relevance of that world to our own experience. The essays are not introductory in nature. No space is given, for instance, to basic information about the playwrights, the history of Greek drama, or the special features of the Attic stage. Yet the book addresses itself to classicists and nonclassicists alike. The outgrowth of a series of lectures to nonspecialists, its particular appeal is to students of literature and the history of Western thought. Parallels are drawn between the writings of the philosophers and the tragedies, and attention is paid to certain popular Greek beliefs that colored the tragic formulations. Ultimately, however, the approach is not historical but critical; it is the author's intention to demonstrate the beauty and the craftsmanship of the plays under discussion.

Jarry - Garcia Lorca - Satre - Camus - Beckett - Ritual theatre and Jean Genet - Fringe theatre in Britain__

(Trigger warning: Harsh Language, Abuse, Slavery, Excessive Violence, Injustice) The Celestial is a symbol of the divine, a pillar stretching high into the heavens. It is worshipped for the blessings it brought upon the world; extraordinary power, revolutionary tools, and beings beyond understanding. Bearing its power will not only change your fate, but the fate of the world. Grelt has existed within a struggle for power for over a century. A war between Angels and Demons ravaged the land, but only ended with the formation of the hybrid alliance between the angels, non-unified, and Hirians. The non-unified race did not receive the divine gifts of the Celestial, they were not worthy. As beings who were deemed unworthy by the great Celestial, they have no choice but to bow before the hybrids alliance. Jack Eldritch It has been a week since the execution of Jacks parents, and he has taken their place as a miner in the small non-unified town of Logos. He is beginning to feel the despair living the rest of his life under the hybrid alliance, and seeks to change the world he was born into.