ESSAY: When the Dead Rise to Look Us in the Eye

This is the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL – week seven, neighbourhood seven. From the Bloemekenswijk to the Westerbegraafplaats. From the gateway of life to the resting place of the dead, this week ends beneath the monumental entrance to the cemetery, the mythical place that is home to Charon and Cerberus. A theatrical quest for meaning.

To the north of the historic city centre are more than thirty streets named after plants, clustered around a water tower. This was the place where an enormous artwork made of flowers was hoisted to the top of the tower in 2021, in a project aiming to bring people together and create a greater sense local identity, local colour if you like. The Bloemekenswijk, or ‘Flower District’, is poor, densely populated, young and diverse. And you do see a colourful mix of young passers-by in the streets and parks, with cargo bikes and pushchairs.

Not far away is the largest cemetery in Ghent, with more than 30,000 graves: a place heavily charged with historical meaning. It is a haven of greenery in the style of an English garden, where the victims of two world wars lie alongside their French, Italian and Russian brothers. Although its official name is the Westerbegraafplaats, or ‘Western Cemetery’, locals still refer to it as the ‘Dissidents’ Graveyard’, because Jews, Protestants and atheists are buried here as well as Catholics. Stern angels regard you with a neglected gaze from between the broken pillars in every tint of marble.

Week seven covers the two areas with a walk (OUTSIDE ORESTES, Werktoneel with KASK Drama) and two plays: Poppenkast Ion by CirQ and The Libation Bearers by Collectief HINTER & Toneelacademie Maastricht with the City of Ghent’s greenery department. A video projection from sunset to sunrise on Friday night (our private lives | BEDROOM, by BERLIN & Beyond the Spoken & NTGent) and a moment for reflection on Sunday (Het noodlot voorbij/ Zeven tegen Thebe) complete the programme for the week.

They offer many ways of approaching classical tragedy, but the question always remains what exactly it is that you want to know. The past has a dominant presence within us; as much as we may try to deny it, it is clear that the past has not finished with us. Below, I will reflect in two tonalities, on tragedy and ritual, although I might equally have opted for five or ten such themes.

IN A TRAGIC FLOWER MEADOW

A festival called ALL GREEKS features the 32 tragedies that have been handed down to us one way or another. In the Bloemekenswijk, life is in full bloom; in the Westerbegraafplaats faded souls inhabit parks and avenues. What does tragedy have to do with these two places? Every death is tragic, and yet tragedy and death are not the same, for all they may ogle and leer at each other. Tragedy is an outlook on life that overcomes you in a world full of ambiguity and mortality that you cannot comprehend. Expressed in its darkest form, we find the famous mantra of Greek pessimism: “For humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.”

At times, today’s world also feels dark, hybrid and unstable, disturbing and disorienting. Maybe the Greek tragedians were actually the first Westerners to teach us how to live with so much insecurity. Maybe they were also the first to ask the following tragic questions that are so familiar today: “All these contradictions! How can I know so much and yet not know at all? How should I act? What should I do? Why is suffering so deep?” Plato couldn’t stand questions like this. He banned them from his ideal republic. So censorship has been there from the outset: censorship of the arts and all the emotional mess that people bring upon themselves.

The ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL programmed 32 tragedies, although once there were a thousand. Not all tragedies are equally tragic; living with that would have been inhuman. Some were performed in a trilogy that inclined towards synthesis and acceptance at the end. Others were razor sharp and permitted no escape, and still others were almost comical, poking fun at all that sacred seriousness.

In this seventh week of ALL GREEKS, Poppenkast Ion offered a farcical frolic, firmly making fun of the goods, that incomprehensible gang of inflated egos and impetuous fools! OUTSIDE ORESTES - Cyclical Performance I focused mainly on secular space, in a calming walk through the familiar unfamiliarity around the water tower in the Bloemekenswijk, an experience that was simultaneously alienating and banal. Agamemnon’s death was re-enacted in a nocturnal setting as a ritual of mourning that we have collectively and individually forgotten. There was also much silence and humility in The Libation Bearers, among the gravestones at the Westerbegraafplaats: mourning for fictional, tragic loss in a place designed for real loss. A fourfold desire for understanding and healing against a backdrop of dark, uncomprehended clouds.

There was more disruption in the closing moment of reflection on Sunday, centred on Seven Against Thebes, a pitch-black play full of fraught tragedy. Two brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, take their hunger for power to the limit and kill each other. They leave two sisters behind, Antigone and Ismene, who react differently. Blood pours from this family in great gouts. Wounds three generations old are ripped open again, with murder upon murder leading to an inescapable finale.

In due time, when the times demand it, all these tragedies re-emerge, whenever the need for meaning in life cannot be appeased by imaginings of paradise in the form of redemptive religions and ideologies along the lines of Catholicism or Marxism. As in Kantor’s Dead Class, the dead rise and look us straight in the eye. Then it becomes clear that the world was not made for us, and we were not made for the world. Then tragedy forces humanity to confront the limitations of its condition, its fallibility, boundaries and limits. Didn’t the cellular biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee close his book The Song of the Cell (2022) by saying that after the frontal attack of viruses, people today don’t even know what we don’t know? We who thought we knew so much.

It is no coincidence that the Ghent-based poet Nele Buyst chose to read from the cycle Mycelium, een polyfonie on Sunday, a section from her recent poetry collection CORPS, poreus (2024). The West has chosen to remain ignorant of the richness of underground life, she maintains, “like arteries around / a beating organ / threads of fungus writhe / sucking / in stubborn dissonance / always temporarily / to stick”. Radical doubt as to the central position of humanity in an Anthropocene that humans themselves have set on a path to damnation leads to the tragic consciousness that humanity is no longer the crux of existence. This new form of generalising tragic consciousness no longer offers up a single protagonist, the tragic hero in whom the untenable tensions of culture reach breaking point. Today, a vague, worldly unease on the one hand and an unnameable existential abyss on the other form an emotional background that is diffusely tragic but ever present, if compulsively repressed.

The performance of tragedies in the fifth century BCE aimed to generate a collective identity, although undermining it was equally popular. Voice and dissenting voice, polyphony and antiphony resounded throughout a city that was xenophobic, patriarchal and imperialistic, as well as a focal point for slavery, as the British classicist Edith Hall has pointed out.

In terms of its conceptual world, tragedy is predominantly male and not intended to redeem us, but rather to stimulate us and teach us to accept that there is neither reward nor punishment: not in history, not in philosophy. Does this explain the combination of political, feminist and colonial dissenting voices in this festival, a surprising mixture of cynicism and silliness, ritual calm and confusion? Do we experience too much neoliberal freedom and estrangement from a cosmic connection between above and below? There are plenty of opportunities for artists to feel uneasy in our cosmos, but this perspective rarely becomes enormously tragic.

When Kay Sara, the Antigone in Milo Rau’s production Antigone in de Amazone, speaks of the major catastrophe playing out before her eyes – the destruction of a continent whose forests are going up in flames and rains of ash descending on São Paulo – tragedy comes threateningly closer. The apocalypse we have called down on ourselves will reach us soon, and the problem with this is not, as Sara writes, that you don’t know that our forests are burning and our people are dying. The problem is that you have got used to knowing this. Her appeal is sharp and clear: “This insanity has to stop, let’s resist together, let’s be human.”

Those who walk into the Westerbegraafplaats at 5:30 a.m. on a rainy morning and see all those monumental tombs passing before their eyes on the way to Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers might well ask themselves what all these thousands of dead souls thought about cosmic connection (or the lack of it) in their own lifetimes. Were they full of trust in redemption from outer space or astonished by the tragic unease they found themselves experiencing? Surrounded by a mass of vital energy come to rest, we experienced poignant silences in The Libation Bearers that called upon us to withdraw calmly into the depths within ourselves, and find ourselves a place, in the cosmic face of nature, rain, grass and members of the city’s greenery service hard at work, to grieve along with mourning families. What a bizarre but forceful emotional appeal – “Please follow the family now” – to close the performance. Everyone stands and leaves the cemetery in a silent procession. Great simplicity. Here, tragedy meets the ritual of mourning – a good choice in a good setting.

RITUALS AROUND AN OPEN GRAVE

Descending into the collective workings of the soul, the 32 tragedies remind us that the classical fifth century BCE also performed these dramas as rites of passage, touchstones between an archaic, mythical world and a new world that would begin with the enlightened minds of those such as Socrates. They were also ritualistic in that they offered the population the opportunity to sing and act together in choral contests that reminded them of their own myths and prehistory. But were they really a product of the ecstatic nature of Dionysian festivals, as Nietzsche would have it in his Romantic theory of the origin of Greek tragedy – a train of thought that people hardly dared criticise for many years due to the sacredness in which this philosopher was held?

Something here is not quite right. We have thinkers such as the Albanian author Ismail Kadare to thank for considering a completely different origin of tragedy. Kadare maintains that tragedy is more the daughter of anguish than of ecstatic festival rites. So we might need to adjust our Romantic ideal of Greece and the celebratory character of the ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL.

Anyone who speaks of the ancient Greeks is always stuck to some extent in thoughts based on a given theory. When Kadare refers to the funerary rites that evoke the atmosphere of the Balkans rather than Nietzsche’s German Romanticism, his words join of a clash of methods that has been going on for centuries. Nineteenth-century German Romanticism simply couldn’t resist seeing Hellas as a fundamental component of Germany’s own heritage. As the philosopher Dennis Schmidt once wrote in his On Germans and Other Greeks (2001): the entire nineteenth century in Germany used the Greeks as the ultimate touchstone to shape its own position in the world. If you read the three parts of Martin Bernal’s impressive Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (1987, 1991 and 2006), however, you see how much there is to be said for the Afro-Asian roots of Hellas. Incidentally, it is sobering how intensely the latter hypothesis was used and abused in openly racist academic discourse throughout the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries!

Being open to an alternative origin of funerary rites that may lie at the root of Greek tragedy, as Kadare proposes from the Balkan tradition, thus requires a certain amount of courage. Overall, his hypothesis comes down to the view that both funeral rites and their inverse form, nuptial rites, are rooted in the deepest emotions that enrich tragedy (Eschyle ou le grand perdant, 1995). The ritual of death was held around the open grave, he claims, with weeping women (‘les pleureuses’) responding to each other as the members of the first chorus. Above all, the huge open grave of Troy, the expedition of mass destruction embarked upon by all the leaders of the Greeks to retrieve Helen, would torture Greek consciences for centuries afterwards. This we can conclude from the fact that the majority of Greek tragedies have to do with processing this massacre. Exterminating a competing culture bears the stench of the open grave, and this is what the population needs to come to terms with.

It is this memory of the problematic tomb in both The Libation Bearers and Seven Against Thebes that throws a wet dishcloth into my face. If you imagine these tragedies by Aeschylus with new images and settings at one of the largest cemeteries in Ghent, you are making an important cultural statement about what ‘can be buried’. Indeed, the tomb of the murdered Agamemnon is at the Westerbegraafplaats for a short while, visited by his daughter Elektra who lays upon it a lock of her banished brother Orestes’ hair. In Seven Against Thebes, where fratricide creates a ‘loyal’ brother “slaughtered without blame / where it is honourable for young men to die”, a brother who therefore gets a grave, and a rebellious brother who “must be ejected from the city, unburied / as prey for dogs”, an Antigone stands who will not allow “his flesh to be eaten by dog and bird”.

Between nightfall and sunrise, Yves Degryse and Barbara Raes, two of the artistic directors of the new NTGent, presented a 33^rd tragedy, based on an alternative ending for Agamemnon and entitled our private lives | BEDROOM. As darkness falls, a new story is projected in words and images onto an apartment block next to Machinistenpark, opening the walls, as it were, of the flat where Clytemnestra is spending the night with her murdered husband Agamemnon. Orestes, banished immediately after the murder and so unable to say his final farewell to his father, does get this chance in Degryse and Raes’ version, as do the mother, sister and uncle.

Together, eye to eye, in a bedroom where the body is being washed and embalmed, where a wake is being held and someone is reading aloud, tension and unease reach a climax but silence reigns. How will they get through the night together when a dead – and previously hated – body remains? As a member of the audience, you hold your wake outside, by the open fire; from the outside, you have the chance to look right inside the home of strangers. Outside is abandoned for inside, time and space are gradually forgotten, linear time transforms bit by bit into a nocturnal, intuitive sensing. Layer after layer is peeled away from human beings as clumsy spectators when the matter at stake is death and looking into each other’s soul.

To allow mourning for a mass murderer like Agamemnon and to have an Antigone claiming the right to bury her brother as far away as the Amazon (Milo Rau) – this leads to profound ethical questions about the extent to which the dead can be buried. Since the flyer for our private lives | BEDROOM also includes a magnificent poem from the collection Neem dit lichaam (2019) by the Palestinian poet and journalist Fatena Al-Ghorra, the link with contemporary mass murderers is readily made. She, too, pays final tribute to a corpse, finding ‘many holes and hollows’ in it, ‘remnants of ongoing wars’; a ‘persistent autumn’ also overcomes people today.

Death rituals are reconsidered in three tragedies by Aeschylus, attempts to heal, exercises in consciously saying goodbye. This lends greater weight to questions of who may be buried, where and how, who is excluded from burial and thus condemned to a life as a living corpse. Performing Greek tragedies today means allowing the dead to rise, but also choosing whether or not to allow old and new corpses to be buried. When the messenger conveys the ban from the new ruler Creon on burying Polynices at the end of Seven Against Thebes, freedom is curtailed, a state of emergency declared, repression imposed and the life of human beings ‘disciplined’ (Foucault).

What type of life is left then; you might ask? Does this belong to zoë or bios, Aristotle would wonder. Does life under Creon’s rule belong to the ‘good life’ or ‘naked life’? It is an important debate that has woven itself constantly through classical tragedies in recent years. Aristotle contrasted zoë with bios in the way that natural, naked life (zoë) contrasts with politically engaged life, the good life (bios). Antigone felt that she had been forced out of social life and viewed herself increasingly as part of purely animal life, whereas her sister Ismene sees the good life in terms of the city, the law and the authorities. Antigone was supposed to live the life of a living corpse, was symbolically dead throughout the tragedy and put a physical end to this ambiguous situation herself by hanging herself in the tomb.

Recently, questions about this have shifted from a psychological, religious or feminist angle to a biopolitical one – according to a concept that investigates how government power is typically manifested in the management of human bodies and lives. So no more Hegel, Butler, Lacan, Žižek, etc., but Benjamin, Agamben and Arendt, following in the footsteps of Foucault, the founding father of biopolitics. What is interesting here is that this ‘new Antigone’ has a liminal experience, because the fact that Creon appoints himself sovereign ruler causes a power shift. ‘Camps’ are set up that exclude certain people and grant privileges to others, public zones where the law suddenly no longer applies, generating ‘enclosing exclusions’ that indicate who is to be placed inside and who is to stand outside the rule of law (Georges De Schrijver). Sound familiar? This is the wet dishcloth that hit me during ALL GREEKS whenever I heard talk of Agamemnon and Creon, two illustrious psychopaths.

Today many people think of the exclusions and camps in Guantanamo, Lampedusa, Bosnia and Rwanda, where people are robbed of their freedom in the name of a temporary suspension of their rights that serves the ‘higher purposes’ of national security. We might remember the radical limitation of individual rights and freedoms after 9/11 by George W. Bush’s administration, when millions of people saw their personal rights restricted. Obviously, the Nazi death camps are the ultimate example, with their systematic reduction of Jews to living corpses and then to real corpses. This is a good illustration of how a process of systematic exclusion gradually intensifies (Carl Schmitt).

For example, the Argentinean version Antígona Furiosa by Griselda Gambaro (1986) gives a salient representation of where a state of exclusion can ultimately lead: a temporary suspension of civil rights becomes permanent, the city itself determines who still belongs there and who can be murdered with impunity, in a ‘dirty war’ without precedent.

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has already drawn attention to the fact that the situation of rejection and control arises step by step: people are robbed of their citizenship, lose the right to teach at universities or exercise a profession, banned from mixed marriages, banned from access to restaurants or parks, their possessions are confiscated and they are obliged to go and live in ghettos. Paradoxically, those who are excluded continue to live under the control of the system, and the longer this exceptional situation lasts, the stronger the boundary between exceptional and normal becomes.

Where is the ‘system’ for us today? How aware are we of exclusions that happen quickly and deep within ourselves, how unfree has our freedom become? Who or what gives us social and political identity, and in which small steps do we relinquish it? Are we aware of this? How many living corpses – called ‘undocumented people’ nowadays – have I met in this seventh week? Anyone who walks through parks in the Bloemekenswijk or lingers near the Westerbegraafplaats will come across them, refugees living in a state of naked life.

ALL GREEKS has turned out to be a festival about imaginary Greeks that has sparked off a long-lasting exercise in political thinking. What kind of Greeks do we want to see, what wild dreams do we have about a shared European heritage and future? At the end of his Europe Trilogy (2014-2016), Milo Rau said that as terrible as everything was that he had presented in terms of individuals and families, he nevertheless saw light at the end of the tunnel in the form of the spectator. Because this Other is the one who listens and watches attentively, the one who sees the actor struggling in their tragic blindness and might therefore be filled with sympathy.

Following the big ALL GREEKS FESTIVAL for a few weeks made me aware of an ‘us approaching’, so many Others that I had never seen inside a theatre before, but who were now enjoying radical multiplicity and disarming beauty in a completely different setting, surrounded by nature. Theatre reinvented itself, breathing deeply, more environmentally friendly and more social than ever, embedding itself in the entire city. In doing so, it did not shy away from confrontation with the darkest subjects you can possibly imagine. People encountered each other in body and mind, forming small, new, diffuse communities, discovering that holding rituals together might sometimes be the appropriate antidote to so many forms of dehumanisation.

More than ever, then: power to the new imagination, because new barbarians are once more standing at the gates of the city.