Classics Confidential

In the third in our series of interviews recorded at this year’s Classical Association conference, the composer Angelique Mouyis talks with CC’s Anastasia Bakogianni about classical echoes in modern music.

In the first part of the interview, Angelique tells us about the music she wrote for a contemporary version of Euripides’ Bacchae (2010). Re-titled Forget this City by playwright Samara Weiss and performed by the experimental company Enthuse Theatre under the direction of Ashley Kelly Tata, this modern refiguration transplanted the ancient story to the spaces of New York City. Most performances took place outdoors and Angelique explains how this impacted on the music that she composed to accompany the action and how she came to be involved in this innovative project in the first place.

In the second part of the interview, we continue a discussion that had begun earlier that morning at our panel Mikis Theodorakis: The Ancient Ideal in Contemporary Greek Music. Angelique talks about her love of the Modern Greek composer and explores his dialogue with the classical past and in particular with Greek Drama. Theodorakis believes that there is a living connection between ancient and modern Greece that finds its purest expression in the medium of music.

Angelique explores her research interest in Theodorakis’ musical oeuvre in her book Mikis Theodorakis: Finding Greece in his Music (Kerkyra Publications, 2010).

Click on the image below or follow this link to watch the interview on our YouTube channel!

In the second interview recorded in April at the Classical Association conference in Reading Dr Lisa Maurice of Bar Ilan University talks with CC’s Anastasia Bakogianni about her twin passions: children’s literature and the portrayal of Jews in films about antiquity.

In this vodcast she talks about the popularity of the classical world in children’s literature and its impact on how ancient Rome is perceived in the modern world. At this year’s CA there were two panels devoted to the subject, testifying to the vibrancy of research in this area. Lisa discusses how the portrayal of Romans in fiction for children and young adults has changed over time. In the 1950s the Romans were seen as the great civilizers, but more recently they have become the villains. In the second half of the interview Lisa talks about her work exploring what it means to be Jewish in ancient Rome with particular reference to two televisions series: Masada (1981) and Rome (2005-7). The shifting portrayal of Jewish and Roman identity on the small screen allows us to reflect on our own understanding of both ancient and modern and the on-going dialogue between the two.

Lisa is pursuing her interests at the upcoming conference she has organised: Beauty, Bravery, Blood and Glory: Ancient Virtues and Vices in Modern Popular Culture (10-11 June 2013).

Click on the image below or follow this link to watch the interview!

This week we’re posting the first in a series of interviews recorded earlier this month at the Classical Association conference in Reading (with special thanks to the Reading Classics Department for their help and support!).

Following on from a panel of papers on Mikis Theodorakis: The Ancient Ideal in Contemporary Greek Music, Professor Gail Holst-Warhaft of Cornell University joined CC’s Anastasia Bakogianni to discuss her love of Greece (both ancient and modern), and to share with us  how this life-long love affair found a creative outlet in her poetry collection Penelope’s Confession (Cosmos Books, 2007). In this vodcast she talks about why she felt drawn to the Homeric heroine Penelope and to the other ancient heroines that ‘speak’ in her collection (Helen, Andromache and Clytemnestra all put in an appearance). In her poems featuring Penelope, Gail portrays a woman tired of being held up as a paragon of wifely virtue and fidelity. She offers us instead a portrait of a much more humane Penelope who questions the bareness of the life that her husband’s long absence has condemned her to because of his desire for the glory of war and the spoils of victory. Gail thus demonstrates the importance of examining the female perspective of these ancient stories. She also stresses the links between ancient and modern Greece by presenting her poetry in a bilingual edition (English and Modern Greek). Many of her poems feature a distinctly modern setting of a Greece of coffee-shops, music and wonderful landscapes of the imagination.

Click on the image below or follow this link to our YouTube channel to watch the interview!

Last week we posted an interview with Professor Judith Hallett from the University of Maryland about her work on American women scholars and the Classics. Here, in a second interview with Anastasia Bakogianni, Professor Hallett discusses how classical reception can be used to engage students. She talks about how it can be incorporated into the teaching of Latin and more generally its value as a teaching tool in today’s competitive higher education climate.

Click on the image below or follow this link to our YouTube channel to watch the interview!

This week’s Classics Confidential vodcast features Professor Judith Hallett of  The University of Maryland talking about her work on American women’s engagement with the classics. She discusses the difficulties that women faced in gaining entry into higher education and in establishing their scholarly role and position. And she talks about the fascinating case of Edith Hamilton, who taught classics and wrote a number of influential books that helped to shape a whole generation’s response to ancient Greece and Rome.

Click on the image below or follow this link to watch the interview on our Youtube channel!

This spring will see the publication of a ground-breaking book on The Art and Ideology of the Trade Union Emblem, 1850–1925, which is the product of a collaboration between art historian Dr Annie Ravenhill-Johnson and OU classicist Dr Paula James. For students of the ancient world, one of the most interesting elements of the book will be its treatment of how the banners incorporated elements from the classical artistic tradition, ranging from figures of gods and personifications to architectural motifs and Latin mottos.

In this interview filmed for Classics Confidential, Paula James tells Anastasia Bakogianni about how this collaborative project began and developed, and gives us a taste of the book’s content by introducing us to a banner made for the Dockers Union in the 1890s. This banner by an unknown artist (depicted above) features an idealised, muscular figure of Hercules, shown as the champion of a workforce struggling against the exploitative forces of capitalism. In our video, Paula James talks us through how this striking image reworks different visual and cultural traditions to produce a representation rich with meaning for participants in the late nineteenth-century labour movement.

The book will be out in May 2013, and you can already read a summary on the Anthem Press website. Until then, those interested in this topic might enjoy exploring the online resources of the People’s History Museum in Manchester (the current home of the Hercules banner discussed here) and the Working Class Movement Library.

Click on the image below or follow this link to watch our interview.

Jenny Strauss Clay is famous for her work on Homer, the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, with a focus on how these archaic Greek hexameter poems maps out an epic cosmos.  But today she will talk about a different kind of mapping, based on what has been labelled the “spatial turn” in Classical studies.  Her recent book, Homer’s Trojan Theater, exploits digital technology, cognitive mapping and mnemonics to analyse visualization in Homer, especially in relation to the Homeric battlefield.  (For the accompanying website to the book, go to: http://www.homerstrojantheater.org/.) She has continued in this direction with a new project investigating Homer’s Catalogue of Ships (Iliad 2) as a cognitive map, which promises to revolutionise the way we think about Homeric poetry and geography (http://ships.lib.virginia.edu/neatline-exhibits). But first of all she broaches the controversial topic of writing in Homer…

For those of you interested to learn more about the Jenny’s approach to the Catalogue of Ships, there’s a vodcast of her recent talk at the Digital Classicist seminar @Berlin here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKcQPLuCXHc

But first of all, click on the image below or follow this link to watch our interview.