Word: walkerism
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...Kathryn Walker is quick to admit, "staging Greek tragedy can be very hard to pull off." The 1997 Visiting Artist at Radcliffe has imposed this difficulty on herself with delight. Her audacious production of Euripides; The Bacchae opens this week, the result of many years of reading, thinking about and loving the play...
...Walker has written that the play "explores the terrain of the ineffable." The god whose cult it concerns is beyond mortal understanding: Dionysos is automorphic, xenophoric, acrobatic, dark, sexual and fierce all at once--a gleeful irreverent demanding reverence. So Euripides focuses on our experience instead: the human response to divinity...
...Walker sees the play's interpretation of that experience as contemporary and relevant, and presents what she calls a "profound disillusionment with the values of the state," in a "narrow, legal and power-obsessed society." Dionysos, held in myth to be the inventor of theater, imposes on civic order a dancing, crowded and angry disorder that could sweep, perhaps, over Boston as readily as over Thebes...
...innovative answer was Walker's. She says she opted for them not to be sung "in favor of the distinctly musical possibilities of the speaking voice." She also found C.K. Williams' English version of the play, which she adapted for this production, "ravishing to read." She claims for her chief love "language used skillfully," and finds much to love in the Williams...
...adds that the quality and pleasures of the text led him to an approach "almost operatic in conception, and my definition of opera is 'what is fun'." Computerizing Walker's recitation of the odes, Harper pooled talents with Walker and choreographers Claire Mallardi and Tommy Nebblett in a kind of multimedia approach...