Hagia Sophia project
Entry 1: Tuesday, September 6, 2011
A new project begins.
This is the eve before the theatre ensemble students arrive. I expect 60: 60 middle school students ready to build a theatre piece out of nothing. The task is more formidable this year than it has been before, for this year I am starting with an idea: I want to try and take my experience at The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, and turn it in to a piece of theatre. A building as theatre? How did this come to be?
This summer I had the great opportunity to participate in a Fulbright program that brought 16 elementary and middle school teachers from the United States to Greece and Turkey for 5 weeks of study and travel. I also added 3 weeks of personal travel and study, to make it a total of 2 months of immersion in this region. The purpose: to learn what we could about the history and culture of this region, centered around the Agean Sea, and somehow take that experience and knowledge and turn it into a curriculum for our students that reflected each of our fields of interest. And a vast history it was: from the Neolithic settlements of Catal Hayuk in Turkey (about 5000 BCE) through the Hittites and Minoans of circa BCE 2000, the Myceneans (that would be Agamemnon and the House of Atreus --give it up for the curse) Troy, The Delphic Oracle, Classical Athens, The Hellenization of Western Turkey through Alexander the Great, the Lydians, the Romans, early Christians in Anatolia, the rise of Islam, the Byzantium Empire, the Venetian and Genoan infiltrations into both countries, the rise of the Seljuk Turks, The Ottoman Empire (including the conquest of Constantinople), Greek Independence, the horror at Gallipoli (WWI), The creation of the Turkish Republic under Attaturk, The Nazi occupation of Greece, the Greek civil war…, all the way to the current Greek economic crisis and the Turkish attempt to be part of the European Union and their elections of 2011. Just writing the list (which I am sure is incomplete, apologies to anything or anyone I left out), I am overwhelmed by what we learned and the possibilities that are represented here.
As I decided on how to take all this history and turn it into a piece theatre, for that ultimately is what I do, a friend asked me a question about the trip. What surprised you the most? She asked. A great question to ask someone who has had a life changing experience, much better than the banal: what did you enjoy the most? And the answer I gave was quick and surprised me. I talked about the Christian churches of pre-Byzantium and Byzantium origin, along with the Islamic Mosques of the early Ottomon sultans; the grandeurs of their buildings and how their artwork was so evoking…as my daughter, Carmen, remarked, she being an art student who visited me for the final 2 weeks of the trip, upon seeing this: “ back then artists and art had a purpose”. My answer surprised me, because I am not a religious person, at least not in an organized religion sense, nor that drawn to visual arts. I wasn’t surprised at my tears at Troy, or upon visiting the site of the Delphic oracle. I am a storyteller, and lover of Myth by training and inclination and these were already sacred places to me. But I was surprised at how moved I was by these structures. So, it is to these places of sacredness that I turned my attention. But theatre out of a building? The theatre artist, dramatist in me knows that the classical points articulated by Aristotle and perfected by the Greek playwrights still demand attention today: Where is the conflict here…? Where is the drama? For their beauty is not enough. This is where the Hagia Sophia comes in. And the conflict, or drama, that is imbued in that sacred structure is deep and compelling.
More on this conflict, and how I will introduce it to the students, with the next entry. For in this blog I plan on outlining how we create theatre out of an idea.
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