Trojan Women in Performance
By Avery Willis Hoffman, Inaugural Artistic Director, Brown Arts Institute, Professor of the Practice of Arts and Classics
As the classics and the Western Canon endure a new round of decolonization and dismantling efforts, along with the scrutiny of those wishing to make space for a diversity of storytelling and more widely representational literature, ancient works such as Euripides’s Trojan Women (415 BC) offer a veritable platform for interpretation, for splicing and re-imagining, for the insertion of new voices and texts, and for the insistence on fresh perspectives. Trojan Women in Performance engages audiences and readers in new and dynamic ways, and will underscore the continued relevance of the play, especially today. This interactive examination of a selection of significant productions, across the 20th and 21st centuries, investigates the ways in which the play provides a unique and effective forum for debating issues of human responsibility in times of war—a central theme in the play and a considerable preoccupation during more than a century of armed conflict. Featuring a flexible format that invites users to explore the content in ways that suit their own learning styles or academic interests, whether chronologically or thematically, Trojan Women in Performance opens up new directions of exploration for scholarly and artistic communities.
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Digital publishing opens up the widest possibilities for us to share a rich set of resources to demonstrate how practitioners have championed Euripides’s play Trojan Women as an innovative, non-conventional canvas of exploration and a searing criticism of war-waging, one of the most important societal issues of our time. Bringing scholars and artists into conversation with each other through these interactive means will highlight further the power of theatre and the arts to make space for difficult conversations and for new possibilities to emerge.
Supported by the Mellon Foundation
