{"id":25502,"date":"2021-05-23T04:58:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-23T04:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=25502"},"modified":"2021-05-24T11:42:50","modified_gmt":"2021-05-24T11:42:50","slug":"how-theater-can-help-communities-heal-from-the-losses-and-trauma-of-the-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/how-theater-can-help-communities-heal-from-the-losses-and-trauma-of-the-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"How theater can help communities heal from the losses and trauma of the pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Joel Christensen<\/a>, Brandeis University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Joe Biden began his presidency by memorializing the 400,000 American lives that had been lost up to that point<\/a> to COVID-19. The ceremony, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial<\/a>, was arguably the first official moment of nationwide public mourning in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo heal, we must remember,\u201d Biden said. \u201cIt\u2019s important to do that as a nation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how do we acknowledge our collective suffering as the toll of the pandemic continues to grow, with hundreds of thousands possibly undercounted<\/a>? How do we talk about healing or justice when the mortality rates in communities of color<\/a> are so much higher?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a scholar of Greek literature<\/a>, I argue that ritual practices from ancient Athens, particularly its plays and communal theatrical events, may have some answers to these questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mourning mass tragedies<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

In ancient Athens, leading politicians commemorated military deaths by offering an annual \u201cepitaphios\u201d \u2013 a funeral speech for those who died fighting for the city. But these official speeches were not the only public forms of mourning and remembrance. Ancient Athenians also held annual competitions in which playwrights responded to events \u201cin real life\u201d through myth and storytelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the story of Oedipus and the plague on Thebes<\/a>, describing how the mythical king struggled to cope with the plague caused by his own murder of his father, was performed as the city reeled from a siege and a plague of its own in 429 B.C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Painting<\/a>
Ancient Greeks held theatrical competitions to remember and memorialize wars, plagues and other traumas. Sometimes these works drew on myths, like the story of Oedipus and the plague on Thebes. G. Dagli Orti\/De Agostini Editorial via Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For ancient Greeks<\/a>, this ritualized storytelling, or \u201ctragic performance,\u201d had a therapeutic effect. It created a context to explore and process individual and collective experiences of loss and trauma. Psychologist Peter Kellerman<\/a> has described this sort of experience as a \u201cmilestone event<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the Greek philosopher Aristotle suggests something like this in his \u201cPoetics<\/a>,\u201d a treatise on tragedy and performance. By identifying with characters and experiencing vicarious pain and fear, he argues, audiences achieve \u201ccatharsis.\u201d Catharsis is a difficult thing to define, but philosopher Martha Nussbaum<\/a> has described it as a \u201cclarification of who we are<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Storytelling, community and grief<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Even though we live our lives in relationships with others, traumas are often not shared. But collectivizing emotion through storytelling can be a critical step in recovering from traumatic events<\/a>. Experiencing and processing grief together provides people with the emotional capacity to articulate how trauma has changed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I and some fellow scholars of ancient Greece \u2013 including Paul O\u2019Mahony, founder of Out of Chaos Theatre<\/a>, and with the support of Harvard University\u2019s Center for Hellenic Studies<\/a> \u2013 have experienced this ourselves over the course of the pandemic. We began producing the series \u201cReading Greek Tragedy Online<\/a>\u201d to keep busy and connected during lockdown. But in the process, it has taught us a lot about the tangible impacts of tragic performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Explore the intersection of faith, politics, arts and culture.<\/em> Sign up for This Week in Religion.<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Participants have found that their lived experiences of the pandemic reshaped the meanings of the plays. Euripides\u2019 \u201cHelen,\u201d<\/a> a story about an alternative Helen who never went to Troy, became a narrative of isolation and loss of control. The political concerns of participants on the day following the U.S. presidential election sharpened the performance of Aeschylus\u2019 \u201cEumenides,\u201d<\/a> which tells the story of the uneasy compromise between the goddesses of vengeance the the gods of law in the creation of trial by jury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The biological basis for catharsis<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

For a few decades now, both neurobiologists and literary theorists have talked about \u201cmirror neurons\u201d that fire in the same places in the brain when one is either performing an action or watching someone else perform it<\/a>. The understanding has grown that \u201cvicarious emotion\u201d \u2013 like crying over the death of a fictional character \u2013 creates some of the same neurological feedback as real-life experiences. This echoes Aristotle\u2019s idea that something therapeutic really happens when we watch a tragic performance<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This effect is no surprise to practitioners of drama therapy such as psychodrama<\/a> or playback theater<\/a>, and some have turned to ancient Greek theater and myth to address contemporary traumas and social ills. Bryan Doerries\u2019 Theater of War<\/a> applies Greek tragedies to help veterans cope with PTSD. Rhodessa Jones\u2019 Medea Project<\/a> applies Greek myths, like Medea\u2019s betrayal by Jason and the murder of her children<\/a>, to the lives of incarcerated women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been nearly a year and a half of mass deaths, lockdowns and social distancing, punctuated by social and political upheavals. Now that America\u2019s top elected leaders are openly acknowledging these enormous losses and traumas, perhaps more people can begin talking openly about what they have faced during the pandemic. Communal theater can offer a template for how to do that \u2013 just as it did for the Athenians, even in their worst years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joel Christensen<\/a>, Professor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joel Christensen, Brandeis University President Joe Biden began his presidency by memorializing the 400,000 American lives that had been lost up to that point to COVID-19. The ceremony, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was arguably the first official moment of nationwide public mourning in the U.S. \u201cTo heal, we must remember,\u201d Biden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":25503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,2450],"tags":[9977,3350,4689,7559,7689,2597,9976,7907,7912,4151,1871,6610],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25502"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25502"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25505,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25502\/revisions\/25505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}