Tagged β€” Jamie Lyons

Euripides

9 entries
The thing about Euripides is he was the asshole of ancient Athens, the guy who showed up to the theater festival with a safety pin through the sacred conventions and said, look, your gods are basically drunken frat boys with better PR. While Aeschylus and Sophocles were still genuflecting before divine order and tragic nobility, Euripides was in the back alley with Medea, letting a woman rage and murder her way through every comfortable assumption the audience brought through the door. He understood something vital and raw: that tragedy isn't about falling from greatness. It's about discovering you were never that great to begin with, that the cosmic joke was on you from the start. His characters don't just suffer; they unravel. They argue, rationalize, seduce, and betray with a psychological precision that must have felt like a knife between the ribs to audiences expecting mythological comfort food. The establishment hated him, naturally. Only won first prize at the Dionysia five times in a career spanning decades. Athens basically told him to fuck off with his modernist interrogations. Too dark, too questioning, too willing to let women speak uncomfortable truths and slaves show more dignity than kings. He had the audacity to suggest that maybe heroism was a convenient myth we tell ourselves while doing monstrous things. What's miraculous is how alive his work still feels, how it vibrates with a kind of desperate intelligence. The Bacchae is essentially a horror film about the violence lurking beneath civilization's surface. Repression meeting ecstasy in an explosion of torn flesh and divine indifference. Trojan Women is every war ever fought, seen from the rubble through the eyes of the people history usually doesn't bother mentioning. He was writing for a democratic society eating itself alive, watching Athens stumble through the Peloponnesian War, and you can feel that political exhaustion seeping through every line. The cynicism isn't empty posturing. It's earned, hard-won through watching humans repeatedly choose the worst possible version of themselves. Ancient critics called him "the most tragic of the poets," and whether that was compliment or insult, it nails something essential. Euripides didn't offer catharsis or easy answers. He offered the cold comfort of recognition, the savage pleasure of seeing human nature stripped down to its wiring and still somehow worth the price of admission.

Enclose The Divine The Man Who Knows Path of Steady Success Love is The Fullest Education No Man's Friend

Euripides Enclose the Divine

Euripides Enclose the Divine

The Fragment: What house shaped by builders could enclose the divine form within its enfolding walls? So here’s the thing about garbage. About the stuff we leave on sidewalks. That dollhouse sitting on the curb, some kid’s entire universe, once upon a time. Rooms where dolls had dinner parties and tucked themselves into beds the […]

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Euripides, Fragment, Tragedy, Coronavirus, Covid, Santa Cruz

Euripides The Man Who Knows

At 5:40Am. on March 23rd, 2020 the world’s falling apart, and I’m standing in front of a bronze surfer on Santa Cruz‘s Westside, taping up PPE to enact a 2,400-year-old Greek tragedy that nobody’s read in its entirety because, and here’s the beautiful, fucked-up part, it’s lost. Gone. Euripides wrote it, and then history ate […]

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Ancient Grief in a Modern Gym

So here’s the thing about these images: they’re documentation masquerading as art, or maybe art pretending to be documentation, that beautiful, fucked-up place where nobody’s quite sure what they’re looking at anymore. Rush Rehm’s doing Euripides like it still matters, like these 2,400-year-old words about women destroyed by war and men destroyed by their own […]

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Ancient Grief in a Modern Gym
East Palo Alto, Site Specific Theater, Site Responsive Theater, San Francisco Theater
Euripides, site spcific, theatre, theater, site responsive, dance, slackers hill, marin headlands, performance art, muriel maffre, ryan tacata, photography, documentation, artist, scholar, Io, Zeus, Museum of Performance + Design, MPD, san francisco

Euripides Love is The Fullest Education

At 6:57 a.m. on April 7th, 2016 (this specificity matters, that exact fucking minute matters) Muriel Maffre, Ryan Tacata and myself dragged our asses up Slacker Hill in the Marin Headlands to do something either profoundly necessary or completely insane. We performed fragments of a lost Euripides tragedy, one of those plays that got shredded […]

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Euripides, site spcific, theatre, theater, site responsive, dance, slackers hill, marin headlands, performance art, muriel maffre, ryan tacata, photography, documentation, artist, scholar, Io, Zeus, Museum of Performance + Design, MPD, san francisco

Waiting for Light: Pre-Show Rituals at Slacker Hill

The thing about standing on a hill in the dark waiting for the sun is that you’re participating in the oldest ritual humans have, the one where we gather to witness something larger than ourselves and somehow make it mean more by being there together. So we’re up here in the Marin Headlands with the […]

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Slacker Hill Earned Its Name (Until We Showed Up)

Slacker Hill Earned Its Name (Until We Showed Up)

Slacker’s Hill, Marin Headlands: some places just earn their names through the accumulated weight of bodies showing up, doing nothing in particular, letting the view do all the work. But at sunrise, with Muriel Maffre and Ryan Tacata running Euripides fragment #91 (we’re calling itΒ Love is The Fullest Education) on this windswept chunk of rock […]

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Euripides No Man’s Friend

Here’s what you need to understand: 5:55 in the goddamn morning, July 1st, 2015, we’re doing Euripides, or what’s left of him, anyway, some scrap of text that survived the wholesale cultural annihilation of everything that mattered, everything that was true. No Man’s Friend, I call it informally, because even the Greeks knew that sometimes […]

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site specific theatre, site responsive theatre, san francisco, aquatic park, Euripides, Val Sinkler, Jamie Lyons, classical drama, photography, documentation, Stanford, Live, Art, artist, scholar, dance, performance art, Euripides, graveyard, national parks, bay area

These enunciatory operations

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These enunciatory operations
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