Culture and Nuclear Fission

When the ancient actor stepped out of the chorus to comment on the action it was the equivalent of cultural nuclear fission. Authority responded, first with regulation and then with violence.

What have been the consequences for the arts of active participation in that moment of cultural nuclear fission, when culture first collided with power? In our age of digital liquidity, when a story, fable or lie, is transmitted around the globe in milliseconds, we are going to slow down a bit here and take time to consider a tale from the ancient world. In this way I am hoping we might be able to face our sense of ‘pre-apocalyptic survivalism’¹ historically - and even consider how social solidarity (remember that?) could lead us towards a sense of hope and a renewed belief in ourselves as humanist innovators. So here is the tale. Once upon a time…

Thespis - the actor/character

There is little of more significance in the history of culture than the moment we began to write things down. The Greeks learned to write sometime after 700BC when they borrowed the alphabet from their Near Eastern Phoenician neighbours and adopted it to their own use.

Few facts about Greek theatre history can be clearly established but tradition credits the actor Thespis with the innovation of drama. Aristotle² states that tragedy emerged out of improvisations by the leaders of the dithyrambs – a hymn sung and danced by a group in honour of Dionysus. It seems that the actor Thespis was key to that innovation in 534BC and consisted of him or someone adding a prologue and impersonating a character (in other words ‘acting’) to what had been a narrative previously only sung and danced by a chorus and its leader.

Mystery 0 Elefsina, Greece 2023 - Directed by Chris Baldwin (Photo: John Kouskoutis LDSPro)

Let’s imagine that moment, when Thespis stepped out of the chorus and started to comment, introduce and lead debate, as the ancient equivalent of nuclear fission - the reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei and releases a very large amount of energy.

The word atom, is also part of this tale. It is derived from the ancient Greek word atomos, which means "uncuttable". But now we know the atom can be cut, split into electrons, proton and neutrons. We know too that electrons are elementary particles with no internal structure, while protons and neutrons are composite particles composed of elementary particles called quarks. Yet, for the sake of our story, let’s agree that the equivalent of these early 20^th century discoveries in atomic physics happened in the performing arts 2300 years ago – with the splitting of the chorus and the emergence of the actor who played a character. The big bang of the dithyramb, and the emergence of the actor who depends not on song and dance but the spoken word and written texts, quickly led to drama and its composite particles - tragedy and comedy.

If writing was introduced to the Greek world sometime after 700BC then written records relating to performative activities such as theatre and festivals continue to be rare until that date which I have already mentioned - 534BC. This purported date of the birth of drama is also the date the Athenian government is recorded as granting official sanction and financial support to theatre - when Athens apparently constituted the contest for the best tragedy presented at the City Dionysia, a major religious festival.

What came first in 534BC? The cultural nuclear fission of Thespis walking out of the chorus or the official, state-city regulation of theatre? Was financial support already in place for an art form which would shape the encounter between religious occasions and public gatherings ? Or was there a realisation that political control was required to regulate and manage public space and public narratives? I think we can safely assume that regulation, innovations in management and funding, happens as the result of a series of critical cultural and aesthetic innovations – the big bang of the dithyramb and thereafter the emergence of the conservative tragic form and the more radical, often unstable comedy form. It does not happen the other way round. And I would suggest that such developments never have. Innovation first. Regulation follows on. And that’s ok when time moves slowly. But it no longer does.

Aeschylus of Elefsina - The Playwright

Just over a hundred years later, when Aeschylus was writing plays, we can see that the interweaving of culture and cultural politics were already firmly established. Performance as political messaging had been established. Official performance as official messaging had been officially managed and financed. In the second and only surviving part of Aeschylus’s trilogy, The Persians, which won the first prize at the Athens' City Dionysia festival in 472BC, it’s useful to remember that the audience was listening to this play in Greek.

An exhausted messenger arrives in Susa, one of the Persian capital cities and enemies of the Greeks. He offers to the leaders of the city a graphic description of the Sea Battle of Salamis between Persian and the Greek forces and its gory outcome. He tells of the Persian defeat, and names all of the Persian generals who have been killed.

The Greek audience must have been overjoyed to hear the story told like this in Greek – from the viewpoint of the defeated attackers – and of the real events that had only happened 8 years beforehand. What is more, the "Choragus" of this production, the wealthy citizen who paid for cultural events, was no other than Pericles himself – a populist politician interested in the way public events and history could be told through public discourse in such a way as to impact upon democratic decision-making processes. He was also a hugely successful general who led his Athenian countrymen during the first two years of the Peloponnesian War.

Cultural practices, cultural management, legal structures and formal aesthetic advances are all seen to be intimately interwoven within a wider spectrum of innovations across the socio-political net. The written word leads to the emergence of the actor from the chorus, the rhetorical orator and populist from the senate floor, and the political, legal and financial structures which aim to regulate all of the above. Just like with AI today – the politicians and administrators were playing catch up.