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Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka Hon. FRSL, known as Wole Soyinka, is a Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist in the English language. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature for "in a wide cultural perspective and with poetic overtones fashioning the drama of existence", the first sub-Saharan African to be honoured in that category.
In Greek mythology, maenads were the female followers of Dionysus and the most significant members of the thiasus, the god's retinue. Their name, which comes from μαίνομαι, literally translates as 'raving ones'. Maenads were known as Bassarids, Bacchae, or Bacchantes in Roman mythology after the penchant of the equivalent Roman god, Bacchus, to wear a bassaris or fox skin.
The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.
In Greek mythology, Pentheus was a king of Thebes. His father was Echion, the wisest of the Spartoi. His mother was Agave, the daughter of Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, and the goddess Harmonia. His sister was Epeiros and his son was Menoeceus.
In Ancient Greece a thyrsus or thyrsos was a wand or staff of giant fennel covered with ivy vines and leaves, sometimes wound with taeniae and topped with a pine cone, artichoke, fennel, or by a bunch of vine-leaves and grapes or ivy-leaves and berries, carried during Hellenic festivals and religious ceremonies. The thyrsus is typically associated with the Greek god Dionysus, and represents a symbol of prosperity, fertility, and hedonism similarly to Dionysus.
Cithaeron or Kithairon is a mountain and mountain range about sixteen kilometres long in Central Greece. The range is the physical boundary between Boeotia region in the north and Attica region in the south. It is mainly composed of limestone and rises to 1,409 metres (4,623 ft). The north-east side of the range is formed by the mountain Pastra.
The Dionysia was a large festival in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus, the central events of which were the theatrical performances of dramatic tragedies and, from 487 BC, comedies. It was the second-most important festival after the Panathenaia. The Dionysia actually consisted of two related festivals, the Rural Dionysia and the City Dionysia, which took place in different parts of the year. They were also an essential part of the Dionysian Mysteries.
A theatrical culture flourished in ancient Greece from 700 BC. At its centre was the city-state of Athens, which became a significant cultural, political, and religious place during this period, and theatre was institutionalised there as part of a festival called the Dionysia, which honoured the god Dionysus. Tragedy, comedy, and the satyr play were the three dramatic genres to emerge there. Athens exported the festival to its numerous colonies. Modern Western theatre comes, in large measure, from the theatre of ancient Greece, from which it borrows technical terminology, classification into genres, and many of its themes, stock characters, and plot elements.
Greek tragedy is one of the three principal theatrical genres from Ancient Greece and Greek inhabited Anatolia, along with comedy and the satyr play. It reached its most significant form in Athens in the 5th century BC, the works of which are sometimes called Attic tragedy.
The satyr play is a form of Attic theatre performance related to both comedy and tragedy. It preserves theatrical elements of dialogue, actors speaking verse, a chorus that dances and sings, masks and costumes. Its relationship to tragedy is strong; satyr plays were written by tragedians, and satyr plays were performed in the Dionysian festival following the performance of a group of three tragedies. The satyr play's mythological-heroic stories and the style of language are similar to that of the tragedies. Its connection with comedy is also significant – it has similar plots, titles, themes, characters, and happy endings. The remarkable feature of the satyr play is the chorus of satyrs, with their costumes that focus on the phallus, and with their language, which uses wordplay, sexual innuendos, references to breasts, farting, erections, and other references that do not occur in tragedy. As Mark Griffith points out, the satyr play was "not merely a deeply traditional Dionysiac ritual, but also generally accepted as the most appropriate and satisfying conclusion to the city’s most complex and prestigious cultural event of the year."
The Bassarids is an opera in one act and an intermezzo, with music by Hans Werner Henze to an English libretto by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, after Euripides's The Bacchae.
Omophagia, or omophagy is the eating of raw flesh. The term is of importance in the context of the cult worship of Dionysus.
Sparagmos is an act of rending, tearing apart, or mangling, usually in a Dionysian context.
Femi Euba is a Nigerian actor, writer, and dramatist, who has published numerous works of drama, theory, and fiction. His work as a theatre practitioner encompasses acting, playwriting, and directing. Among the topics of his plays is Yoruba culture.
The Bacchae is an independent film adaptation of Euripides' play The Bacchae, produced by Lorenda Starfelt and John Morrissey, and directed by Brad Mays.
Dionysus in '69 is a 1970 film by Brian De Palma, Robert Fiore and Bruce Rubin. The film records a performance of The Performance Group's stage play of the same name, an adaptation of The Bacchae. It was entered into the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.
Alcmaeon in Corinth is a play by Greek dramatist Euripides. It was first produced posthumously at the Dionysia in Athens, most likely in 405 BCE, in a trilogy with The Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis. The trilogy won first prize. Except for a few fragments, Alcmaeon in Corinth has been lost. Irish playwright Colin Teevan published a reconstruction of the play in 2005. Approximately 23 fragments covering about 40 lines of Alcmaeon in Corinth are extant and were incorporated by Teevan in his reconstruction, although it is not certain that all these fragments belong to this play. No complete scene has survived, nor has the cast of characters.
Dionysus in 69 was a theatrical production directed and conceived by Richard Schechner, founder and longtime artistic director of the Performance Group (TPG), a New York-based experimental theater troupe. An adaptation of The Bacchae by Greek playwright Euripides, Dionysus in 69 was an example of Schechner's practice of site-specific theatre, utilizing space and the audience in such ways as to bring them in close contact with each other. Dionysus in 69 challenged notions of the orthodox theater by deconstructing Euripides' text, interpolating text and action devised by the performers, and involving the spectators in an active and sensory artistic experience. Brian de Palma, Bruce Joel Rubin, and Robert Fiore made a film of Dionysus, merging footage from the final two performances of the play in July 1969.
The Lightning Child is a 2013 play by Ché Walker, freely adapting The Bacchae by Euripides. Its premiere production at Shakespeare's Globe in London ran from 14 September to 12 October 2013 - the same theatre has previously put on Walker's The Frontline.
The Bacchae, also simply known as Bacchae, is a classical Meitei language play, based on an ancient Greek tragedy of the same name, written by Euripides, one of the three tragedians of classical Athens. Directed by Thawai Thiyam, son of Ratan Thiyam, it is based on the story of king Pentheus of Thebes and Olympian god Dionysus.
References
- 1 2 Soyinka, Wole (1973). The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite. London: W.W. Norton & Company. ISBN 9780393325836.
- 1 2 Hazel, Ruth (2011-09-28). "Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English from c.1970 to the Present | Performing the Bacchae". Archived from the original on 2011-09-28. Retrieved 2020-10-16.