Does anyone recognise that text?

That was the beginning to Sarah Kanes 4.48

Psychosis. What I want to ask you about is not what the
words themselves mean, but how it feels to be asked
those questions in such a way? Framed by silence. To be
asked, what do you offer your friends to make them so
supportive? [] What do you offer?
Does it create a sense of awkwardness? Shame?
Embarrassment? Confusion? How do the silences in
between these questions make you feel?
The experience of these questions is something
quite aside from the rather straight forward meaning, and
it is this experience that we are going to look at today.
So, what is phenomenology?
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
Put simply, phenomenology is the study of our
perceptions, of our consciousness , of how we experience
the world. The word comes from the Greek
phainomenon, which means that which shows itself, i.e.
that which is apparent to our senses, that which we
experience first hand.
Generally speaking, if we describe something as
phenomenal, we tend to mean something extraordinary,
something amazing, something out of this world. But
when we use the term philosophically, we mean
something very much of this world. We mean only that
which we experience directly.

[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy started by
Edmund Husserl, and amongst its numbers are such
illustrious names as Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre,
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For a concise overview of
what it is, we can turn to Merleau-Pontys definition on
your handouts:
Phenomenology is the study of essences; and
according to it, all problems amount to finding
definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or
the essence of consciousness, for example [] but
it is also a philosophy for which the world is always
already there before reflection beginsas an
inalienable presence; and all its efforts are
concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and
primitive contact with the world, and endowing that
contact with a philosophical status.
(Phenomenology of Perception, vii)
It is a philosophy that tries to logically examine
experience, perception and consciousness. It looks at the
essence of things, and at the essence of being. Who are
we? What is the essence of me being me, you being you?
How are we aware of ourselves as separate individuals?
What is the essence of selfhood? Are we created by
language, as Deana asked us last week, and which will be
looked at again when looking at Lacan? Or is there
something else?
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Edmund Husserl and Intentionality

When we examine the nature of consciousness, of being
conscious, it becomes clear that consciousness exists as
consciousness of something. If there is nothing to be
conscious of, we cannot, logically, be conscious. We
dont just think, we think about. One of the central
concepts within the field of phenomenology is that of
intentionality: our experience is never experience per se,
but is experience of something, be that a physical object,
an emotion, a thought, or our own existence; it possesses
object-directedness, and it is this object-directedness that
Husserl calls intentionality.
The Natural and the Philosophic Attitude
Another important aspect of Husserls thinking was that
we conceive of there being two attitudes: the natural
attitude and the philosophical attitude. The natural
attitude is the attitude of everyday life. Its the attitude
that allows us to interact with the objects and people
around us unquestiongly. The philosophical attitude,
then, requires us to take a step back from or to transcend
the natural attitude and learn to see things in and of
themselves, without the prejudicial attitude of what it is
or what it is for.
To use a simple example, if you were to describe this pen
in the philosophical attitude you could describe only the
aspects of it that you could immediately perceive. That is
to say, you could not discuss its use, or its cultural
connotations, or the fact that you know the lid comes off,

or that it makes a mark for writing - you must even

discard your knowledge that the object is called a pen.
You can only think about and describe your sensory
perception of the pen; you can only think about and
describe the object as given. This kind of thinking is
called reduction. In the philosophical attitude you reduce
the object to what is immediately given. The point of this
is to allow the philosopher to concentrate on how the
object constitutes itself in consciousness before we start
imbuing it with semiotic meaning. In other words, we
view the object in its raw, un-interpreted state, we try to
see with, in Gaston Bachelards words, the original
amazement of the nave observer.
Fact and Essence
Related to this are the concepts of Fact and Essence. For
Husserl, objects fall into one of two fundamental
categories, that of Fact, and that of Essence:
Under Fact fall all real individual objects, occurring
in space and/or time. Here are enduring objects such as
stones, trees, birds, humans, planets, stars. Here too
are events or processes such as earthquakes, sports
events, political revolutions, thoughts, plays.
Under Essence fall all ideal objects or eidos that
determine concrete objects. Here are the qualities of
concrete objects: for example, on the level of Fact, we
can refer to a human being as a physical thing. On the
level of Essence, we look for humanity.

 So, on the factual level, we can have the theatrical

event as thing, i.e. a series of decodable semiotic
objects and gestures. On the Essential level, we look at
the quality of experiencing the live event.
Pre-reflective and Reflective Self
One of the central concepts of the self within the field of
phenomenology is the difference between the prereflective self and the reflective self, which Husserl
spoke of as the functioning body and the thematized
body.
The functioning body is the pre-reflective self of pure
experience, whereas the thematized body is the reflective
self, the self that interprets and makes sense of
experience and experiences the body as an object. There
is a time delay between the two, even if it is only very
small, perhaps imperceptibly small, but there is a time
delay nonetheless. This means, quite strangely, that we
dont quite exist at the same time as ourselves. There is,
in effect, an existential schism at the heart of our
temporal being.
The initial experience happens first, and the
interpretation and reflection on it comes second.
Therefore, at the risk of over-simplifying somewhat, I
will suggest that the field of phenomenology belongs
more properly to the pre-reflective self, whereas that of
semiotics belongs to the reflective self, the thematized
self that decodes our experience.
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:

Heidegger and the Dasein

Heidegger modified some of Husserls thinking, seeing
Husserl as too subjectivist. Heidegger conceived as the
self as a functioning aspect of the environment, not an
observer of it. We dont just talk about being, but about
Being-in-and-of-the World. If consciousness is
consciousness of, then what we are conscious of radically
impacts upon what and who we are. Likewise, if we exist
as functional aspects of the environment, changes in that
environment again radically impact upon who we are and
how we function. This being-in-the-world, this self-inenvironment is not an autonomous entity but a system.
This system is called the Dasein, it is our physical body
operating in its immediate functional environment. If we
apply this logic to the world of theatre, perhaps
particularly immersive theatre, we can perhaps begin to
get a sense of the potential to create a profound impact
upon the spectator.
Embodiment
Merleau-Ponty was to stress the physical reality of
phenomenology. He emphasised that our consciousness
is somatic (of the body) it is sensory it concerns our
whole body rather than just the mind. We are all familiar
with the Cartesian dictum I think therefore I am? The
problem with this is that it splits the body and the mind
into two different things, suggesting that the body may
be illusory and the mind is all that is real. But
phenomenologically speaking, this is not the case.
Thought, just like seeing, touching, smelling, etc., is
something we experience in and through our body, which

is the centre of our experience. We exist, first and

foremost, as physical beings in the world.
This, importantly, also entails our being as objects for
other people to look at and experience. As such, we
become aware of ourselves not only as subjects, but
simultaneously as objects. I can touch my hand: on the
one hand, I am the subject touching something, on the
other, I am the object being touched. Our awareness of
our own embodied selves is of a self as both subject and
object. This opens up the potential to blur the boundaries
between subject and object.
Intersubjectivity and Empathy:
Phenomenology also looks at how we relate to other
people, at the nature of our relationships and how we
experience each other, and how we experience being
experienced by them. It looks at how we co-exist as both
subjects and objects, both to ourselves and to each other.
Put simply, the sharing of subjective states by two or
more individuals is known as Intersubjectivity. It is a
bridge between Self and Other via the sharing of the
same world and the same environment; it allows me to
understand how you experience the world subjectively.
When this is on an emotional level, I can intuitively feel
and experience what you do. This is the basis for
empathy. And empathy, as you know, is of enormous
import in theatre.

I can tell you that I am in pain by saying Im in pain.

Oh, shame you might reply. But if I show you my pain,
then you will start to feel slightly differently.
Recent neurological research has demonstrated how this
concept of intersubjectivity and empathy operates on a
physical, bodily, neural level. The following clip should
hopefully clarify:
[ADVANCE SLIDE]: MIRROR NEURONS CLIP
Moreover, if we accept for the moment that theatre is, in
essence, a means of storytelling, which is a tradition as
old as humanity itself, neurologists are discovering some
very interesting aspects to this practice. I will play you
another clip from the same programme to explain.
[ADVANCE SLIDE]: NEURAL COUPLING CLIP
Likewise, different styles of music have been proven to
have clear and definite but unconscious effects on
peoples breathing, heart rate, temperature, stress or
anxiety levels, to release chemicals in the brain that
influence our physical, mental and emotional state. And
so we can begin to see the actual physiological potential
of art and theatre, to actually physically, viscerally affect
the spectator through their phenomenal experience.
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
Merleau-Pontys phrase: we must begin by reawakening
the basic experience of the world is key to this.
Likewise, he says:

Looking for the worlds essence is not looking for

what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a
theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a
fact for us, before any thematization. (xvii)
This introduces into the equation quite an old concept in
the field of art. In 1817, the poet Samuel Taylor
Coleridge said this of his collaboration with William
Wordsworth:
Mr. Wordsworth [] was to [] awaken the mind's
attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing
it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world
before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which
in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish
solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear
not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.
Viktor Shlovsky in 1917 (Art as Technique) was likewise
to claim that art exists in order to recover the sense of
life, in order to feel objects, to make the stone stoney.
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known.
Bertolt Brechts concept of the verfremdungseffekt (a
word he first used in 1936) was a politico-aesthetic aim
of making the familiar seem strange.
This perhaps provides us with the clearest separation
between semiotic and phenomenological analysis: the
phenomenological approach wishes us to engage our prereflective senses, to experience the object for what it is,

not what it means. If we strip away the meanings we

ascribe to objects, we are left with the object itself, and
we can rediscover that object for what it is, as it appears
to our senses rather than our interpretive or reflective
faculties, its colour, its texture, size, weight, temperature,
etc. We can remove the film of familiarity from objects
of everyday and see them anew, make the stone stony,
see objects with all the amazement of the nave observer.
It is, if you like, a means of revealing the world to us, not
as a collection of signifiers, but as a collection of strange
and wondrous objects and experiences. Think of finding
a strange object that you dont know what its for, think
of how you scrutinise it, touch it, explore and examine it
with a sense of fascination. Then someone explains it is a
bit that has come off the couch, and how quickly your
interest dies once it has been explained and given its
proper place and meaning within the familiar world. The
object loses its essence and acquires, instead, meaning.
To think of the opposite process, have you ever said a
word over and over again until it loses all meaning, and
what you are left with is this strange sensation of saying
this strangely unfamiliar yet familiar word; that is the
phenomenological experience of saying the word rather
than appreciating its meaning. The French have a term
for this sort of sensation, which is jamais vu. Jamais vu
is the opposite of dj vu. Dj vu is that sensation of
feeling like you have had a certain experience before,
which we are all familiar with. Jamais vu is the opposite,
it describes doing something you have done a thousand
times before but somehow there is this strange sensation
of doing it for the very first time, the familiar becomes

strangely unfamiliar. The phenomenological approach

could be said to aspire to the sensation of jamais vu.
Phenomenology then concerns itself with essence, with
the newness of authentic, bodily and sensory experience.
Applied to theatre, we need to find ways of revealing
something of the essence of the world, of theatre, and of
life, to make the stone stony again.
Bert O. States
The reading for today was from Bert States Great
Reckonings in Little Rooms, and it is probably useful to
turn to him to offer some more concrete examples of the
implications of phenomenology in theatre.
If we look at theatre semiotically, everything there is a
sign for something else. An Actor is the sign for the
character, fair enough, but if we follow this logic
through, a table is not a table. It is a sign for a table. A
chair is a sign for a chair. States claims that we cannot
look at theatre exclusively from a semiotic perspective,
but that a mix of semiotic and phenomenological
approaches is necessary. Sometimes a chair isnt a sign
for a chair: its a chair! He warns us that if we use solely
semiology, then everything on stage is something else. If
we use solely phenomenology then everything on stage is
only itself.
Bert O.States suggests that Art seeks to give us an
encounter with the real thing, to see the stoniness of the
stone rather than the sign value of it. It can be argued that

it is often the sign value that familiarises the object

when an object functions as a sign rather than the thing
itself, it destroys the very essence of the object.
States uses the idea of a dog on stage. The dog, framed in
the illusory world of theatre, does not know it is in a play
and refuses to operate as a sign for a dog. It is essentially
a dog. But in this unexpected context, it somehow
becomes more doglike to our perception than if we saw it
in a park with its owner. Its doglike qualities become
magnified because of its unfamiliar and unexpected
setting. As such, it has a greater level of interest to us
than the dog in the park.
Likewise, a child actor is something we can never fully
accept as the character the way we can accept the adult
actor.
A clock on the stage that is telling the real time is
likewise strange to us, because we are colliding
theatrical time of illusion with real time of reality.
Water and fire likewise resist semiotic encoding because
they are natural elements and not subject to theatrical
conventions. They have a certain primal strangeness of
the sort Merleau-Ponty was speaking about.
States therefore lays down the challenge of finding new
ways of keeping the theatrical experience fresh in this
way, of finding new ways of making the stone stony.
Furniture on the stage used to be painted on the scenery,
and this was the norm, the accepted convention. But the
first time real furniture was used was something new and

unexpected. The chair was no longer a pictorial

representation on the backdrop and became an actual real
chair on the stage: it existed not as a sign, but as a thing
in itself. However, now that has fallen into convention
and we are no longer surprised by the presence of a chair.
Theatre, according to States, consumes reality in this
way. He says:
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
Theater is the medium, par excellence, that
consumes the real in its realest forms: man, his
language, his rooms and cities, his weapons and
tools, his other arts, animals, fire, and water even,
finally, theater itself. Its permanent spectacle is the
parade of objects and processes in transit from
environment to imagery. (States 40)
Theatre is to be viewed as a living beast, feeding on
reality its medium is not paint or clay, but objects of
real life and we must stay one step ahead, finding new
ways to retain the essence, to keep the experience alive.
So theatre can be seen as an experience rather than a set
of meanings to decode. Certain types of theatre
performance have as their goal an attempt to reject or
subvert meaning, such as certain types of avant-garde
theatre, dada and, to an extent, surrealism. What tools do
semiotics give us to approach those? Or does the very
use of those tools mean we will read the performance
wrongly, being inappropriate tools, trying to decode
meaning from work that rejects meaning?

The phenomenological approach does not mean we dont

have to analyse, or deconstruct, but what we deconstruct
is not the same thing as that which is deconstructed
through the semiotic approach.
Catharsis
Now, we have looked at the phenomenology of empathy,
and seen that the empathetic response is physical,
neurological, visceral. It is a strange phenomenon that
exists outside of linguistic codification. Let us now look
at another great theatrical phenomenon, catharsis.
Catharsis is likewise an experience, not an
understanding, and catharsis is at the very core of tragic
theatre. It is what the spectator actually experiences
rather than what he or she may be supposed to
understand from the performance. Bert O States says:
[SLIDE]:
. . . catharsis is our best word for what takes place at
large in the theater. It is precisely a purging: []
[A] play plucks human experience from time and
offers an aesthetic completion to a process we know
to be endless. (States 49-50)
In other words, the structure and experience of theatre
gives a sense of time and place to specific emotions and
experiences that are a condition of life ongoing, endless
processes (desire, fear, yearning, love, suffering, etc.)
and gives them a sense of closure; it allows us to
temporarily purge ourselves of the pressures of the
continuum of life, and these unending things that

characterise our everyday life are, through aesthetic

means, temporarily resolved, offering us respite and a
sense of freedom from them. On this level, catharsis is
different to escapism as it does not offer us a way out of
dealing with these issues, but confronts and resolves,
offering us a sense of resolution and respite.
Phenomenology and Aesthetics
Moreover, French philosopher, Mikel Dufrenne, says:
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
The work of art is the perduring structural
foundation for the aesthetic object. It has a constant
being which is not dependent on being experienced,
while the aesthetic object exists only as appearance,
that is only as experienced by the spectator . . . As
aesthetically perceived, however, the work of art
becomes an aesthetic object. (Mikel Dufrenne,
1953, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience)
In simple terms, something on the stage, say, a chair, may
well represent a chair. But, whether it is shabby or
beautifully ornate, on the semiotic level it will signify
something of the opulence or lack thereof, but on the
aesthetic level, our experience of its ugliness or its
beauty is not something that can be codified or explained
by semiotic analysis. Our aesthetic sense, the aesthetic
experience, which I think is an issue you have looked at
in Critical Theories 1, is not a semiotic but a
phenomenological one. Our emotional response to

aesthetics is arguably something quite outside the

capabilities of semiotics to explain.
At the risk of reigniting the what is art? debate, a work
of art, be it a painting or a Greek tragedy, could be said to
be the essentialisation of an aspect of human reality, of
our truths, hopes, fears, emotions, sufferings, etc. all
those irrational things that make us human and not robots
and this essentialisation gives form, expression,
externality and, ultimately, a sense of resolution to those
unending sensations. This aesthetic essentialisation, due
to the irrationality of its content, will often resist semiotic
codification, which is, in some ways, limited to what we
can directly signify, but we all know that emotions and
experience fall beyond that which it is possible to contain
in worlds and signs alone. As such, can catharsis be said
to be part of the phenomenal, aesthetic experience rather
than the meaning-making, semiotic process?
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
I will give you a couple of fairly diverse examples of
artistic or aesthetic works that seem to challenge
immediate and easy semiotic explanation, but that may
work on a phenomenological level.
ADVANCE SLIDE: Jaws opening
ADVANCE SLIDE: Sheet music and link to explanation
ADVANCE SLIDE: Jackson Pollocks Number 8

(How do we experience this? How do we

experience its energy and movement? How do we
track our intentionality through the picture and how
is that journey experienced? Is it emotional?
ADVANCE SLIDE: Some Egyptian hieroglyphics
Clearly these hold semiotic meaning, if we happen
to read hieroglyphics, but what if we do not? How
do we experience them? We experience a sense of
meaning unavailable to us, a sense of something
beyond our understanding. How do we experience
the aesthetic quality of the carvings? The individual
characters? What is the emotional impact of its
antiquity, knowing this was made by people who
have been dead for thousands of years? Does that
add to its sense of mystery?
ADVANCE SLIDE: A scene from Sarah Kanes 4.48
Psychosis.
What about this? What do we get, if anything, from this?
I will return to this shortly, but for now I want to return
to the subject of tragedy and Catharsis.
Catharsis & anti-structure (Kane)
Hans Lehmann, author of Post Dramatic Theatre, which
you will certainly encounter at some point, asked the
following questions at a recent lecture here at Royal
Holloway:
How does the structure of tragedy relate to the
essence of tragedy?

 How does, if at all, the tragic experience

adhere to tragic structure?
And if we might risk a little conjecture, what
was the essence of tragedy in ancient Greece?
Aristotle, in Poetics, famously came up with the essential
structure of tragedy, identifying key elements that the
plot and characters must adhere to in order to be
effective. I wont go through them in detail, merely
highlight a few key elements such as peripetia, a moment
of reversal; The hero must exhibit hamartia, a
fundamental mistake that precipitates the tragedy, and
experience a moment of anagnorisis, or recognition that
his or her downfall has been brought about by their own
mistakes, and so on
The result, according to Aristotle, is the experience of
catharsis, the purging of emotions (particularly fear and
pity).
Lehmann suggests that Aristotle has missed the essence
of tragedy in his structural definition. The essence of
tragedy for Lehmann lies not in its structure, but in the
experience of the event. After all, the inherent
contradiction in Aristotles definition is that these
specific, technical and quantifiable elements lead to the
phenomenon, or experience, of catharsis, itself
something entirely untechnical and unquantifiable.
Catharsis is something essential, something we
experience, not something that carries meaning or has

structure. As such, if we are to examine the essence of

tragedy, we must concentrate on the experience, and for
this, we cannot do without phenomenology.
Lehmann sought to demonstrate the inadequacy of the
Aristotelian model by applying it to Sarah Kanes 4.48
Psychosis, which he argues contains the essence of
tragedy it encapsulates the tragic experience but does
not contain the structural or linguistic elements
demanded by Aristotle. A semiotic reading of 4.48 does
not account for its tremendous power to affect us in a
profound way.
[ADVANCE SLIDE]: Recall of opening lines
It continues as follows:
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened
banqueting hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor
shifts as ten thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light
enters as all thoughts unite in an instant of accord body
language no longer expellent as the cockroaches
comprise a truth which no one ever utters
I had a night in which everything was revealed to
me.
How can I speak again?
The play continues with various voices, articulating
moments of lucidity with moments of psychosis,
moments of despair and moments of dark humour, cold,

factual listing of medications and flights of murderous

fantasy, all together tracing the unravelling of a mind and
a descent to eventual suicide. One such scene is given as
follows:
[ADVANCE SLIDE]:
100
91
84
81
72
69
58
42
37

38

42
21
12

28
7

Now, whilst a semiotic reading of 4.48 Psychosis is

certainly possible and in itself highly rewarding and
illuminating, we can see the potential duality in scenes
like this one. Within the context of the play we can ask
what this scene signifies, or we can ask how do we
experience it?
We can interpret it as a common psychiatric technique,
which is to count down from 100 in intervals of 7 in
order to regain our control over our own mind when it
starts to run away from us. But we see that the intervals
are arbitrary, and their positioning on the page is erratic.
From this, semiotically, we can speculate that this

symbolises the unravelling of a mind and its vain

attempts to regain control of itself. But from a
phenomenological perspective, how do we convey this
feeling of futile desperation to an audience? There are
clues here written on the page, just as music is likewise
scored on the page, but putting this into practice,
capturing the essence of this, achieving a direct and
primitive contact with its reality, is something far more
challenging for the theatrical practitioner. We can cop-out
and merely symbolise, or we can look at how to achieve
the intersubjectivity of this experience.
The Practitioners Perspective:
So how can we approach theatre, as practitioners, from a
phenomenological perspective? Several practitioners can
be said to work from the phenomenological level, I will
give you just a few:
- Brecht, as has already been discussed, looked for the
Verfremdungseffekt, making the familiar seem strange,
or the stone stony.
- Artaud and total theatre as an experience, attacking all
the senses rather than offering a semiotically
decodable piece of bourgeois theatre. The Artaudian
actor is supposed to be akin to a moving hieroglyph,
loaded with a sense of primal meaning without actual
everyday, rational , decodable meaning.
- Grotowski and the total act a form of actor training
that aims at a state whereby there is no difference
between the actor and the action: the movements on

stage capture the essence of truth they do not signify

truth, they are truth. From this principle Grotowski
developed his own style of theatre that was devoted to
essences, and as such was avant-garde, primitivist,
anti-semiotic insofar as it resisted normal decoding
and favoured the event as an encounter.
- Jacques Lecoq and Physical theatre the essence of
the self as a lived, embodied being, reconnecting with
and relying on impulse, the connection with the prereflective self, the functioning rather than the
thematized body, through which an actor achieves
presence.
Now I am not saying that the pure phenomenological
approach is the only one to be taken in isolation. States
makes it very clear, as I mentioned before, that a
combination of the two is important. States uses the
example of Jastrows duck-rabbit figure to illustrate that
we can and should take both approaches. Look at the
duck-rabbit figure on your handout for a moment.
Concentrate on how it appears to your consciousness.
Youll notice, as numerous philosophers have pointed
out, that you can hold it in your consciousness as a
rabbit, or you can hold it in your consciousness as a
duck, but you cant consciously perceive both figures at
once, although both are there.
When you switch your concentration from the duck to
the rabbit, youre choosing arbitrarily how to view
reality. This realization serves to draw our attention to
the idea that there isnt one correct way to see reality, but
different interpretations, none more true than others.

And so we look for essences, not just of objects and

things, but of theatre itself. And if we are to look for the
essence of theatre, we can do worse than to look at its
(Western) origins in Ancient Greece. Athenian Tragedy
took its themes and stories from Mythology, which for
the Greeks was a fundamental part of their shared
identity. What was seen on the stage were the Gods and
Heroes of antiquity, reinterpreted in the light of
contemporary events which is the essence of myth
its aliveness, its willingness to change and adapt and be
reinterpreted in accordance with the shifting context of
present circumstances.
But why theatre? Why were these stories not just told?
The theatrical experience of classical Greece was not as
we know it today. It was part of a religious ritual in
honour of the god Dionysus, god of theatre and wine.
The plays were accompanied by sacrifices, the chorus
was a highly trained group of performers who would
dance and sing and without whom, no theatrical tragedy
was conceivable. But why? I would argue that the reason
is that the liveness of the event, the essence of theatre,
was heightened by these phenomena, by the music and
the dancing, and this, contrasted with the deep semiotic
and structural meanings of the myth, brought it straight
into the now in ways that simple verbal storytelling
cannot do. Rather than the gods and heroes existing
conceptually through their semiotic signifiers, they
existed there in front of you, they are shown as being in
the world and of the world, sharing the same space and
time as the spectator in a heightened sense of reality.

Naturally the Greeks were too sophisticated to think that

the actors on stage were actually the Gods and heroes
themselves, but that is not what is important, because
their essence was there in the masks animated by the
performers in a celebration of the community and its
ancestry, its values and its character. This is the essence
that cannot be captured by words or signs alone. It is
something else, something beyond, something that is
experienced viscerally. This is why theatre, of all the art
forms, was the centre of civic life. That which binds a
community together is not just a shared language or
meaning, but also, and fundamentally, shared experience.
And no other art form can offer all of this. So yes, we
need semiotics in order to interpret meaning, but if we
forget the phenomenological aspect, the liveness of true
experience, the essence of theatre, which is, lets face it,
the very essence of life itself, then we lose its, and
consequently our own, soul.