[MUSIC]
Stanford University.
>> Okay, welcome,
my name is Walter Scheidel,
I'm the Chair of the Classics Department
here at Stanford.
And welcome to the eighth Lorenz Eitner
Lecture on Classical Art and Culture.
It's a lecture series that the department
has run for the last number of years in
order to publicize classics, classical
scholarship, to a wider audience.
So thank you for coming, for braving the
rescheduling and the inclement weather,
by local standards at least,
and for finding this new venue.
This series has been endowed by two of
our benefactors, Peter and Lindsay Joost,
who are ordinarily here, but I guess
they have trouble finding this room.
It was endowed in honor of Lorenz Eitner,
who died a number of years ago.
He was the Director of the Stanford Art
Museum, what is now the Canter Museum,
for quite a long time,
from the 60s to the end of the 80s.
And he was really instrumental in
raising its profile from a rather
provincial collection to a major
regional art collection and
institution of teaching and research.
Our distinguished speaker
tonight is Peter Meineck,
a professor of Classics and
Ancient Studies at New York University,
at NYU, and also the founder of
the Aquila Theatre 21 years ago.
Now, we always say we are very grateful
for people to come here and talk to us.
In this case, we are really grateful,
because last week,
when Peter was meant to talk, this was
made impossible by the super-storm.
We are very lucky that you caught
the right window to escape from
New York City before the blizzard hit,
so we are really indeed,
very fortunate to be able to
welcome Peter here today.
Professor Meineck is
originally from London,
he holds a PhD in Classics from
the University of Nottingham,
where he is currently
an Honorary Professor of Classics.
He also founded the Aquila Theatre,
as I just said, back in 1991,
a theater whose mission it is to present
innovate productions of classical,
i.e., ancient drama.
He has been very active in the performing
arts in a wide range of places, from
New York City and London, to Greece and
the Bermudas, as I've learned recently.
And in venues as diverse as Carnegie Hall,
the Lincoln Center,
the Ancient Stadium at Delphi
in Greece and the White House.
He has produced and/or directed
over 50 shows, he has written,
translated or
adapted about two dozen plays.
And he has written several literary
adaptations for the stage, such as
The Man Who Would be King, Canterbury
Tales, The Invisible Man, and Catch 22.
He has also designed lighting for
dozens of other shows,
he is very much involved
in the performing arts.
He has created
the Aquila Theatre's Education Program at
Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem and
several national theater
education programs.
Academically, Professor Meineck
specializes in the performance reception
history of ancient drama.
He has published quite a number of volumes
of translations of Greek comedy and
tragedy, especially by Aeschylus,
Sophocles, and Aristophanes.
And has written widely in journals and
edited volumes on
a subject of reception and
performance of ancient drama, and
he also works as a Greek literature and
mythology consultant.
Including to Will Smith, on the movie I am
Legend, which I'm sure our grad students
in classics will be pleased to know, you
can actually become a Greek literature and
mythology consultant and make money in
Hollywood, I mean, who would have guessed?
>> [LAUGH]
>> And then in addition to all of this,
he's Director of
the National Endowment for
the Humanities Program called
Ancient Greeks, Modern Lives,
a national collaboration between the
theater and a number of public libraries.
Now this program has a special
focus on military veterans, and for
that reason, last year,
was invited to perform at the White House.
In recognition of his
outstanding accomplishments,
Professor Meineck has received numerous,
and I guarantee you,
very numerous, prestigious grants and
awards for his work.
His main project right now is
the intersection of cognitive theory and
ancient drama.
In fact, he's currently working on
an entire book on this topic entitled,
The Embodied Theater,
Cognitive Studies of Greek Drama.
And if that sounds familiar,
that's because that's also
the topic of his lecture tonight.
And we are very grateful indeed for
giving us a preview of this exciting and
genuinely cutting edge work.
And that's why we are lucky
to be in this venue,
because this is a cutting
edge science building.
Few professional classicists have
done as much to popularize ancient
culture beyond the ivory
tower as our speaker tonight.
Please join me in welcoming
professor Peter Meineck,
our Lorenz Eitner lecturer this year.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you Walter, and Margo, for
suffering all my trials and tribulations.
I volunteer as an EMT in my town, so it
was an exiting week, but that's my fancy,
that's what I would really do
if I could give all this up, so
it was quite an exciting week last week.
And now we have this storm called Athena
that's arrived, that's appropriate.
I have all these photos of my kids in
snowsuits making snow angels and stuff,
so I'm missing out on that,
but it's great to be here,
and I literally got here in the window.
And I haven't been to Stanford since,
I think, 1993,
where we came with a production
of a Scottish play,
I cannot say the name of it, because this
is a kind of a theater, you understand.
So it's really lovely to be back
with a new project that's something
I've been working on for
the past two or three years.
And from the outset, I'm gonna say,
I'm not a cognitive scientist, and
I'm not a neuroscientist, but
I'm very interested in engaging, and
am engaging with people from those fields.
I'm part of a neuroaesthetics
group at NYU, and
this is really turning
into wonderful projects.
And many of my colleagues who work in
those fields are very interested in
working with and talking to artists
in dance, and theatre, and music.
The area that we're all moving into
are these cognitive gaps, they're so
fascinating, and I think it's in those
cognitive gaps where great art lies, and
sometimes bad art as well, actually.
And I'm very interested in the cognitive
gap, and so my current project,
which I'm gonna talk to you
a little bit about today,
is this sort of intersection between
cognitive theory and ancient drama.
And what can we tease out of
current cognitive theory,
what can it tell us about ancient drama?
The reason that I'm interested in this
approach is I'm interested in reception,
but I'm also interested in
reception of the original plays,
which is kind of unfashionable
at the moment, actually.
I want to know as much as I can
about why these plays were created,
how are they worked, how do they function?
This is the theatre guy in me, all great
art has techniques and craft behind it,
and I'm very interested in trying to
understand the craft of ancient drama.
And I feel some of these cognitive
approaches have certainly given me
some new tools to think
about some old questions.
Then, of course,
the first question is, and
I'm using the term neuroscience here to
really cover the science of the brain,
can neuroscience be applied
to the ancient Greek brain?
And, to persuade you as classicists
that this stuff can work,
there's a lot of elephants in the room.
That we need to get out of the way.
Many times I hear,
well isn't neuroscience deterministic?
What about culture, what about geography?
Well, I actually think that there's very
interesting new fields of neuroscience,
cultural neuroscience,
anthropological neuroscience,
where neuroscientists themselves
are coming up against these problems and
are very interested in talking to us.
We study culture, that's what we do,
we're really good at it.
We're interdisciplinary, we study art,
architecture, anthropology, literature,
texts.
I think that we should have a seat at this
table and I think there's a lot that we
can add to how humans cognate and
how they have cognated.
The problem is, is that there's no one
area that we can call cognitive theory,
those of you who work in this will know.
I'm showing you a video actually,
of one of my favorite skits.
This is Monty Python's famous philosophers
football match between Greece and Germany.
Cuz I think it really underscores really
the problems that are going on in
philosophy of the mind is there's really
isn't much agreement as to how we think
and how we cognate.
>> [LAUGH]
>> And this was truly genius, and
one of the few times Greece has
beaten Germany in soccer actually.
>> [LAUGH]
>> And some of the arguments are up here
that go all the way back to Plato and
Aristotle of course, right?
>> [LAUGH]
>> There's the Greeks, right?
There they are.
Rationalists vs empiricists,
nature vs nurture, innate vs learned,
biology vs culture,
computational vs embodied, and
as we enjoy this wonderful sketch, I just
wanna pick out some of those things.
Putting way too much focus on my talk.
But I've spent a good year,
I realized when I started my book,
I needed to really go and
understand these arguments.
So I spent a good year in the world
of philosophy of the brain.
And it really does feel like
the philosopher's football match.
But what's interesting,
is as I came out of this process,
I realized that much of what I was
experiencing and knowing from my work as
a theater director,
was this idea of embodied cognition.
Now my colleague at NYU, Joseph LeDoux,
who works on the emotions and cognition.
Has come up with what I think is a very
good diagram of COGNITIVE WORKSPACE.
There's not one unified thing
that we're looking at here.
There's environmental stimuli,
well we studied that, that's classicists.
Explicit memory, we're also good
at thinking about memory and
how memory operates in the texts and
the art that we study.
Body feedback, well,
I'll talk a little bit about that,
because that's very much the realm
of the actor and the dancer.
Central nervous system arousal, well,
here's some deterministic stuff.
We all have these functions,
they're provoked by different forms and
different mechanisms, but
we all have flight or
fight, we all have an endocrine system,
we all have hormones.
Language as well,
which plays a part in cognition, and
our survival circuit activity.
So Joe LeDoux's model is a good sort
of road map into cognitive workspace.
This is sort of how I've sectioned
off my current study into some
of the ways I'm thinking about
cognition and ancient drama.
The neuroscience of the mask is what
I'm gonna be talking about today, but
I'm thinking about space, movement, music,
narrative patterning,
the cognitive life of props.
Who knew?
Color and perception, group dynamics
of spectatorship, choral identity.
There's an enormous amount of fascinating
work being done on racism and
ethnic identity in neuroscience which
I think is fascinating when we think
about the chorus.
And why you constantly, well,
frequently have choruses of young Athenian
males playing characters who are as far
away from Athenian identity as
you could possibly imagine.
And cognitive catharsis,
I won't actually dare to go there and
re-address this question of catharsis.
Well let's unpack some of this.
Colleagues working in other areas have
been able to suggest some tools to
approach some of these mechanisms.
Cognitive archeology is one area
that's been very useful to me.
Various people in archeology are using
cognitive tools to think about
particularly early human activity, the
paleolithic brain, tall making, language.
And this is starting to creep
into classical archeology now,
so this is not completely new territory.
There's also people working in literature
on the brain, there's a group here
at Stanford that have been doing
studies with fMRI brain imaging and
people reading Jane Austen
which is fascinating.
And there's also a few people working on
theatre and cognition, so there are a few
people out there and I've been able
to draw on some of these studies.
To tackle this whole idea of determinism,
I want to bring up the work of Nisbett.
Which is quite controversial, and when I
first was pointed to Nisbett, Nisbett,
about ten years ago and has been working
on this area for most of his career.
Was one of the first people in
neuroscience to really challenge the whole
idea of determinism by suggesting that
there were different ways that humans
cognated.
And the problem with the scientific
method, I think, for
those of us who work in humanities,
is scientists of course are forced to
create controls in their experiments.
So it's hard for us sometimes to
read that literature and hear,
well I had 15 Asians and 15 Westerners and
we start to sort of question and
get very suspicious of some of these
quantifiables that are put on people.
But this is the scientific method and
they have to start somewhere and
we have to understand that.
Nisbett looked at what he
termed East Asians and
what he termed Westerners,
people in northern Europe and America.
And came up with science that showed
that as far as he was concerned,
people from East Asian
countries were field dependent.
They were more holistic thinkers,
they thought more in terms of group and
area rather than specifics.
And the people from the west were
perhaps more field independent and
more individual.
And he described this as
the Aristotelian brain.
Which I thought, great!
The Aristotelian brain,
I've just completely proved that
we've got a direct root between
our brain and the ancient brain.
But of course, it's not as simple as that,
and just like I'm daring to go into
neuroscience, this is a neuroscientist
daring to go into classics.
I don't really know what
the Aristotelian brain is, and
I don't know if I'd ever like to meet it.
Having been a great lover
of Aristotle of course.
And then the Confucian brain was
the other brain that he brought up.
Now I have to say Nisbett has now
moved away from this idea, and
his thoughts are more complex now,
but ultimately one of his cognitive tests
was to ask people to look at a fish tank.
And, what he came up with was that,
people with the Confucian brain
would be able to describe in much
greater detail, the background.
And people with his Aristotelian
brain would be able to describe
the size of the fish.
And this is field dependency
vs field interdependency, and
to a certain extent,
there is some truth in this science.
And, he did set out to prove
that culture impacts cognition,
not everything is biological.
So, we are bio psycho social creatures.
And, I would hope that the,
at least the social side,
as classicists, we're already involved in.
I'm very interested in eye tracking.
And I think that eye tracking
experiments can tell us a lot
about how people cognate.
This is Yarbus's famous experiments where,
here’s a nice Russian girl and
somebody looking at her with their
pupils being tracked our eyes saccade.
And Yarbus proved that
when we look at faces.
And I'll come back to this
one to talk about the mask.
We look, we, I say we, author's subjects
looked intently at the eyes and the mouth.
Well, do we all look like that,
do everybody perceive faces the same way?
Well, let's take a look at our friends
the gorillas and look at primates.
And primates do actually
look heavily at faces.
If you show them a complete body and
a face,
the primate will look intently at face.
They look at a more linear pattern.
And you'll notice that humans
look more of a triangle, eyes and
the month, but not all humans.
Primates, too, do look intently at faces,
faces are very very important.
And I'm gonna get to this
question of what's so
important with faces because it
gets to my question about the mask.
If faces are so important,
why would you disguise them?
Why would you ever wear a mask?
We were talking about this in
a drama class this afternoon.
What we know about ancient drama in
the fifth century is it's movement based.
It's full of dance, music, singing.
Wearing a mask is the worst thing that
you could possibly do in that kind of
art form.
So I'm interested in,
what's the impact of wearing a mask?
Why do we wear a mask, and how to we
cognate when we're wearing a mask?
Well, to get back to Nesbit.
What’s interesting is that if
you look at the Western faces.
And these are Western
people looking at faces and
East Asian people looking at faces.
The red dots are Western, and
the blue dots are East Asian.
The East Asian subjects seem to
look at intently at the nose, and
the Westerners look at the eyes and
the mouth.
This is really fascinating,
because if you look at no masks,
they do have sizable noses, all right.
The nose on a no mask is one of
the most prominent features of
looking at those masks.
And if you look at fifth century and
these are only vases and
sculptures from the fifth century,
the noses are actually quite delicate.
They're quite small.
These are not the asterisks,
big Greek profile noses.
These are quite small noses.
This is kinda interesting because
maybe we have some evidence here for
how the Greeks may have cognated.
Maybe the masks show us,
in terms of the way they're constructed,
that their cognition was not
dissimilar to our cognition.
What this bit does show and what these
studies that have come after him show,
is that culture has an impact.
So for example, one study took Chinese
students who had grown up in Hong Kong and
gone to English schools.
When they showed these students
a British flag and they looked at faces,
they looked at the eyes and mouth.
When they showed them a Chinese flag and
they looked at faces,
they looked at the nose.
So that's within the same experiment,
so culture's important.
One thing that you'll notice
about these Greek masks, and
I'll get back to this, is their eyes.
And I'm gonna focus on the mask, and
I'm gonna focus on the visual
aspects of the mask.
And the Greeks loved their eyes.
Here's some beautiful statue
eyes in the Metropolitan Museum.
We forget sometimes that the eyes set
in statues were a very prominent and
important part of engagement with
the plastic art which is statuary,
which must have a relationship
to the construction of the mask.
We can think about eye cups,
the symposium eye cup.
Very interesting symposium eye cups, room
for a whole other talk on these things,
but they're very very popular,
in the mid to late 6th century.
And then they completely disappear when
drama and tragedy starts to develop
in Athens, then they come back again
towards the end of the 5th century.
And they definitely have a strong
relationship with Dionysius, and
of course, at the bottom of these cups,
when you drain them,
would often be some wonderful
eyes staring back at you.
And we can think of the ophthalmoid,
the eyes that were on
the front of Greek ships.
And the eyes of the owl, of course, and
I'm gonna come back to money later.
If you've ever seen owl eyes,
right, they're incredible.
They definitely have a relationship to
these representations that we've seen
in Greek vases.
And here's Dionysius, of course,
with his freaky eyes, right?
So eyes are very important when thinking
about how the Greeks themselves thought
about the act of going to the theater.
Remember, theater means seeing place.
The Romans called their theaters
auditoriums, hearing places.
But these are seeing places.
So the visual's very important.
And one thing about eyes and cognition is
that everybody just look at each other for
a second, just look into each other's eyes
do it, deeply and intently, all right.
It's kind of awkward, isn't it, right?
We're not comfortable looking
into each other's eyes.
You know, cognitive scientists tell us,
the only times you really look into each
other's eyes are, you know, when we're
fighting or doing the other thing that
begins with f that I will not mention.
>> [LAUGH]
>> And
actually, we are the only mammal
that really has whites, right?
Most mammals, if not all mammals,
don't have scala, they don't have whites.
They don't want their eyes to be seen.
Either they are hunters or
are they being hunted.
So the whites of the eyes
are very important.
And looking at gaze direction and
where eyes are looking,
is something that is very
key to the green mask.
Not having eyes is kind of disturbing,
right.
And yet most of us probably think of
the Greek mask as not having eyes.
What's interesting is
that western cognition,
if that's Greek cognition showed
us that when people look at faces,
they look at the eyes and
the mouth intently.
They're looking there for
emotion and expression.
The reason that we look intently into the
eyes when we fight is we are looking for
that saccade, we are looking for that
moment when something is going to break.
Most disguises don't really take the eyes
away, they really frame the eyes.
Yet, Zorro's disguise and
the Lone Rangers disguise,
I mean they're pretty effective, right?
You really don't know who that is.
And there's the pussy riot ski mask,
of course, right?
The quintessential villain's disguise,
and these wonderful masks that
look very much like Greek tragedy
masks except they don't have eyes.
Greek tragedy masks and
comedy masks had eyes.
They faced us.
The term for mask that we first find on
an inscription in the fifth century and
we don't find it again until
Aristotle's poetics is prosopo
which I translate a bit
freely as before the gaze.
So the mask is before
the gaze of the viewer.
To put on the mask is to stand
before that viewer and to perform.
I do an experiment with
my students at NYU.
We go out into Washington Square Park and
I say to one of them, stand there.
Nothing happens.
Then they put on a mask and stand there
and within five seconds there is a crowd
of thirty people that gathered around
them expecting something to happen.
The mask is a call to theater,
it's very very powerful.
And this is a mask from the dated
to the end of the fifth century.
And this is my model mask
which I'll be coming back to.
But I want you to notice the eyes and
how naturalistic this mask is.
Now thinking about the representations
of masks on Greek vases,
we should also think about
this in cognitive terms.
Whenever you see a mask and
there's very few actual examples of
this is a mask found at the in 96.
There's very few examples of
masks from the fifth century.
Most of the masks that we see in our books
are Hellenistic masks of Roman masks,
nothing to do with the fifth
century Athenian theater.
But look at this one,
here's a fragment of a mask and
it's literally coming to life
in the hands of the actor.
The expressiveness in his fingers and
I love the gaze direction.
On the aulos player, who's taken
back by the lifeness of the mask.
It's literally exploding in his hand.
So the vase paint is very interested
in the cognitive effects of the mask.
This is one of my favorites.
I had such a hard time
getting an image of this, and
I know I'm being recorded so
I probably shouldn't admit this.
But this is a fragment of
a vase from the Black Sea.
And it's in a museum in Kiev.
And they will not give
up a photograph of it.
They won't reply to emails or
letters or phone calls.
And this is a scan from something.
And finally, Eric Chappo told me,
yeah, this image was taken with a cell
phone camera by a German PhD student who
doesn't want to admit that it's her image.
But actually, it's an amazing shot of
chorus members performing in their masks,
these beautiful white female masks.
There's the aulos player.
But I love this young man who's
the assistant of the aulos player.
And he's probably holding
the reed case for the aulos.
And his job is to keep an eye on
the aulos player and change the reeds.
But he has become transfixed by the mask,
he can't take his eyes off it.
I think it's a beautiful little
study on the power of masks.
And here you can see another young boy,
who's just about to dress
18-year-old ephebe,
perhaps dressed as a female chorus member.
That mask is facing us, so we engaged it
very directly with the eyes of the mask.
But look at his gaze direction,
again, he's totally transfixed by
the mask of his fellow choral
performer dressed as a maenad.
See if I can get this going,
is that gonna work?
Yeah, well, our eyes are fascinating
because they move, they saccade,
and Michael Spivey has an amazing
work called Continuity of Mind.
He works a lot in gaze direction, and
what's interesting about the way we
cognate is Spivey has proved that actually
our eyes move before we have the thought.
Our eyes actually go to the place before
we even think about going to that place.
Which is very interesting when you think
about drama and anticipation of drama.
Because I know,
as a director, that my job is to literally
keep you on the edge of the seat.
So Aristotle says the same thing.
I have to constantly make you
anticipate what's gonna happen next.
Spivey's theory is that we
actually don't see movement.
So if I do this with my arm,
you're not seeing that.
What you're seeing is that,
that, and that.
And people with lesions on their parietal
cortex actually do just see that,
that, and that.
They can't cross the road,
they can't judge traveling distances.
What we're doing is, we're guessing.
Based on our experience,
we're making guesses of movement
based on these saccading snapshots.
Which is why every now and again,
if somebody makes a gesture next to you,
you misinterpret that gesture, and your
sort of central nervous system makes you
flinch, believing maybe that
you're gonna get struck.
Because evolutionarily, you're gonna make
the best decisions for your survival.
Well, I think this has
profound implications for
the way that theatre's received.
And you know right, being in a darkened
room and watching bad theatre for
one hour is the longest hour of your life,
right.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Cognitive anticipation, I think,
is very, very important, and
it's fascinating to actually
even read Shakespeare.
Most actors read Shakespeare, including
my actors, to the end of the line, right,
or the end of the speech.
But Shakespeare embeds his text with these
sort of explosions in
the middle of the line.
He makes us anticipate
what's gonna happen next.
So I think that saccading
eyes tell us a lot.
One of the experiments that
we've just applied for
NSF funding for is to actually
watch people watching theater, and
eye track where their eyes are going and
what they're anticipating.
I think that would be fascinating.
Well, to move back to cognition and
really relate it to the Greeks,
cognition changes.
And one study came out in 2003,
which was looking at
a society in rural Mexico.
This was a culture that
was not monetized it all,
it was an agrarian based
culture that dealt in exchange.
And the culture's been studied for
about 30 years, and
then it became monetized in the 1980's,
and it was a study of weaving, and
when the culture became monetized,
cognition changed.
The patterns in the weaving changed,
relationship changed,
gender relationship changed in the
community, people started to travel more.
This is a very rich and deep study, but
actually, this can be applied to some of
Seaford's recent work on money,
which I think is very interesting.
He also takes the view that the
monetization of the Greek world in the mid
6th century also led, and he doesn't
quite say it's a cognitive change, but
certainly a cultural change.
And there's those owls again
with their big eyes, right?
And some of Seaford's quotes up here.
Two results of a monetized society,
philosophy and tragedy, focusing on
the extreme isolation of the individual
from the gods and his or her own kin.
So, in a way, Seaford's coming to this
similar Nisbet idea that what was
a field dependent culture is monetized and
mutates
into a field independent culture, where
individualism becomes much more important.
Well, I think we could probably see these
things happening, certainly in Athens,
around the mid sixth to late
sixth century in education.
What called a visual turn in art,
in writing,
in the development of narrative drama,
which is a brand new thing.
In social and political reforms,
there's Clysonnes web, right?
In sea power, trade,
and cultural exchange.
So I'm gonna say that there's a cognitive
turn that happens around 500 BC in Athens.
And I think a lot of this stuff is
spinning from this cognitive term.
And I think we can start to see
these ancients faults encapsulated
in literature and art.
So how did the Greeks cognate?
Well, who were the Greeks, right?
Did an Athenian cognate in
the same way as a Spartan?
Did an Athenian thief cognate in
the same way as an Athenian aristocrat?
Well, this is a tricky area.
There's some wonderful studies that I was
reading recently during the election that
Republicans cognate
differently to Liberals, right?
Republicans have bigger amygdalas because
they're more emotional, and Liberals have
a higher functioning parietal cortex
because they're more analytical.
And there are studies out there that will
show you this, so even within our culture,
we can't settle on what
is American cognition.
I think it's a really interesting area,
and
I don't think there's one way of
cognition in any culture, but I
think there's generally culturally agreed
upon ways that people think they cognate.
And what I think I find in Athenian
culture is an idea of embodied cognition.
That four is embodied.
Here's one of the greatest examples of
embodied cognition I could find anywhere,
which is Athena being born, fully armored,
fully grown, out of the head of Zeus.
So this idea of intellectualism and
Sophia and reasonableness
comes out of the head of Zeus.
And often when we see the pre-Socratic
philosophers or even the tragic
playwrights describing emotion or
cognition, there's a sense of embodiment.
This is not Cartesian form, and
I think one of my challenges
is to separate myself.
I mean, whether I like it or
not, I'm a Cartesian, right?
But as theater director,
I'm not a Cartesian.
I hate seeing performances where I have
an actor who's acting from the head up.
He may, or she, be reciting superb
Shakespeare, but their body is lying.
And a lot of what we do with actors is try
and get their body to feel truthfully.
What the words are saying
at the same time.
Very difficult in classical theater.
I love this moment from Agamemnon,
where the chorus talk about
Agamemnon coming home.
I have seen him come home myself.
I witnessed it with my own eyes.
And they know something
bad is gonna happen.
But my soul still echoes with
the drone of the lyreless hymn,
I have learned The Furies dirge of death.
And lost all strength of hope.
Now look at this for embodied cognition.
The truth twists in my guts.
My heart throbs with foreboding.
My head spins at the thought
of the fulfillment of justice.
Now we too use a lot of language of
embodiment to describe our emotion.
We do in the theater.
I was rolling in the aisles.
I was on the edge of my seat.
We often use language
to embody our thoughts.
So my proposal, and
I think the parts of cognitive
science that I'm borrowing from
are definitely embodied cognition.
That we are not just brains.
Alvan knows work, out of our heads.
We're not just the brain and
everything happens within,
we are connected to our body, and our body
is connected to the outside environment.
This is, Malafouris is a cognitive
archaeologist's version of cognition
as embodied, the body and the mind,
situated in action, distributed beyond the
individual, mediated it socially embedded.
It's extended beyond the skin.
It's enacted.
So our brain is not envatted.
It doesn't sit.
We couldn't take the human brain,
put it in a vat,
like a computer, and give it
a stimulus and it would still respond.
It has to be connected to
the rest of our body and
our body has to be connected to
the experience of being in the world.
So our thoughts are extended.
I wanna demonstrate that with
a game of Tetris, right?
Extended mind theory.
So three ways we could possibly
solve the problem of Tetris, right,
as the game plays.
We could solve the problem
internally using only your brain.
Now that's hard, right, to think about
where these pieces are gonna go,
without being able to manipulate them,
which is what we do with Tetris.
Or, we could implant a neuro
mechanism into our brain,
which helps with shape processing.
Or, we use extended mind theory, which is,
we're allowed to use a computer keyboard
or joystick to manipulate
the shapes as they fall.
And I think it would be
possible to play Tetris
without being able to actually
manipulate these shapes.
So this is the sort of battle
between the computational mind and
the extended mind, and if we can sort
of apply this to ancient culture.
A couple of terms I might use,
you've heard this exogram
is a mental concept stored on
an external device, right?
Pen and papers, and
exograms stylos and wax.
And we see an ancient laptop
with stylos and wax there.
Chiseling, inscription, brush painting,
these are all exograms.
An engram, a concept stored in biological
memory, containing the nervous system and,
therefore, perishable.
We have both, right?
But we need exograms.
We need to be able to recall
things beyond our minds.
Well, I think Athenian Culture
is an embodied culture.
I think that they moved as much as
they possibly could, whether it was in
athletics, in warfare, rowing, or
being in as a processional culture.
And great tragedy was nothing
if not processional drama.
Here's my colleague,
Richard Scheckner's famous napkin drawing
of one of the origins
of drama in procession.
Where we have a procession that stops,
we have an informal audience gather and
the procession leads it's way to a planned
event at the end of a procession,
normally a sacrifice.
And if anybody loved to process,
it was the ancient Athenians.
There are something like over 100 known
processions that took place in
Athens in the fourth century.
And, of course, the Festival of Dionysus
itself was bounded by a procession and
the drama was processional drama.
Well I wanna talk a little bit about
that end point of the procession and
embodied cognition and
really start to prove my point.
I should say to Walter,
during the blackout, I had no power, but
I had access to my PowerPoint so I've
working this PowerPoint so many times.
So if I go on too long,
pull my power, all right,
when I hit my allotted time, because
I'm very enthusiastic about this stuff.
So here's the site of the sanctuary
of Dionysus eleuthereus and
here you can see at the aerial view of it,
and it's in the sacred heart of Attica.
What [INAUDIBLE] actually calls
the Eye of Athens, the Acropolis.
This is the spiritual heart of the city.
And we know how important
this sanctuary was,
cuz [INAUDIBLE] tells us that even in
the most trying times of the plague and
the population being gathered
between the long walls.
One of the places they were not allowed
to use was the Sanctuary of Dionysus.
So being allowed into this
space was very very important.
And the mask itself operates
within this embodied space.
What do we mean by that?
Well, here's Felix Bonfeld's photographs
of the Acropolis in 1860 and
you really get an impression of
what a rock the Acropolis was.
This was a high place.
The theatre hasn't been excavated yet.
There it is.
So when you went up onto the Acropolis,
you were sitting in the sky and
that's really important to
understand how Greek drama operates.
Here is a shot of the view.
So the seeing place that was the Theatron,
at The Sanctuary of Dionysus,
was far more than a place
where you saw plays.
It was also a place where you
engaged with the environment.
It was also called The Sanctuary
of Dionysus Eleutherius,
named after Elutheri.
Well, Elutheri, here it is,
is the most northern part of Attica,
that borders those nasty Boeotians, those
Thebans, right, there's Mount Cithaeron.
It's subliminal place, it's a place
of mist and mountains and Dionysus,
of course, is a God of liminality.
He inhabits those places.
So the theater of Dionysus
is this liminal sky space.
I should say that,
most of you probably know this,
but the new archaeology that's coming
out that's being done right now.
Is telling us that unfortunately
the Theater of Dionysus of the 5th century
wasn't this magnificent circular stone
auditorium that we grew up with.
It was a rather dumpy
frontal 5,000 seat space.
Looked more like the theater of Thoracoss,
but you know what?
This is my reconstruction of what
the space probably looked like
at the time of the Oresteia in four,
five, ADC.
But this makes complete sense for
a theater of the mosque.
A complete, complete sense for a theater
where the mosque is gazing at you.
Here's a,
a stadium in Brazil called Eco Stadium,
which is a 5,000 seat space
of benches on a hill side.
Which I think gives you a good impression
of the simplicity of the theater space
in the 5th century.
By about 530, 430, 420,
some stone seats were erected and
the started to become stone but
prior to that it was
really a temporary structure, partially
temporary erected only for that festival.
But look at that view.
This is a visual experience.
That's a hard act to follow,
doing a show in a space like this.
And I've done a lot of
open air theater and
its a very very different
cognitive dynamic.
I'm gonna need your help now
because I am a theater director.
So I want to demonstrate
what I'm talking about.
As classicists,
we get bogged down in text.
And one of the ideas behind my
project is to move away from the text.
And to see the text as actually
the final part of theater and
not the first part of theater.
That's heresy, I think in my field to a
certain extent, but I want to demonstrate.
An element of human cognition that proves
that the text is really not important.
So can I have two volunteers,
this is really, really easy.
I need two volunteers,
volunteer now, it gets worse later.
Two volunteers, come on,
I need grad students, right?
You guys.
You two.
You're volunteering, come on.
>> [LAUGH]
>> This is really easy.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Come out front.
This is, some of you know this, right,
this is called the McGurk effect.
Okay, so stand here.
Actually, you stand here,
and you, back to back.
Here, face, there you go,
that's it, back to back, right.
I want you to say bah, bah,
bah, bah, bah and nothing else.
Try that.
>> Bah, bah, bah, bah,-
>> Louder.
>> Bah, bah, bah, bah, bah,-
>> You hear that?
>> Yes.
>> Okay, I want you to mouth bah,
bah, bah.
Try that.
And really overenunciate.
>> [LAUGH]
>> When I point at you,
I want you to change it to a fah sound.
But don't change what you're saying.
Show me that.
Really, really, enunciate.
Now change to a, you see that?
Okay, so we'll start with the bahs.
You're just doing bahs, okay go.
>> [NOISE]
>> What do you hear?
>> Fah.
>> Change back.
>> [NOISE]
>> Keep going.
>> [NOISE]
>> [LAUGH]
>> [NOISE]
>> Change back.
>> [NOISE]
>> It's uncanny, right?
Thank you, that was excellent.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> The McGurk effect shows us two things.
It shows us first of all that we don't
see with our eyes, we see with our brain.
That's really, really important.
Careers of many magicians
are based upon that premise, and
many people in the theater.
The second thing it shows us is that
our visual stream will always trump our
auditory stream.
Well, not always.
I think maybe if we hear a scream or
something,
our sort of central nervous
system might kick into action.
But it will definitely trump
the stream that processes language,
because we've been processing visuality
at lot longer than we've been
processing language, and that's like
an actor reciting Shakespeare and his or
her body is not at all feeling
the words that they're speaking.
We've all experienced those
kind of performances.
So that's my case for visuality,
putting visuality front and
center in the experience of the theater.
It doesn't mean that
the text is not important,
I just think that we tend to
start at the text first, and
I wanna give you some tools,
where we can come to the text later.
So here's some tools.
Why am I showing the test pilot?
Well, a gentleman call Fred Previc was
working for the US Air Force and was
given the task of figuring out why pilots
blackout when they lose the horizon.
It's quite common.
This is actually how John Kennedy died,
he lost the horizon, he crashed the plane,
and what Previc did is
rethink three-dimensional space and
put it into four spatial areas.
This is an embodied idea of
three-dimensional space, and I think if we
can use Previc's model to think about
the ancient theater, we can start to
understand the impact of what it would
have been like to watch an ancient play.
So here we have these four dimensions
of space, which I'll take us through,
with my lovely Greek audience here.
Now, this of course is an audience for
a chariot race, but
it's the only audience I've got,
so bear with me.
So this is peripersonal space,
I told you I had way too much
time with this Powerpoint.
This is peripersonal space,
which is the space that you can touch.
That's your peripersonal space.
So you've got that, there it is,
peripersonal space.
The next element of space is
focal extrapersonal space.
This is what you see
in your foveal vision.
Everybody do this,
this is your foveal vision.
If you were wearing a mask
this is what you would see.
We're gonna come back to this later,
cuz when you drop your foreview vision,
you're thank goodness my peripheral
vision is back again, and
I definitely think that the ancient
theatre is exploiting the fact that
we see by oscillating between
peripheral and foreview vision.
All right, so
that's what we're looking at.
Action extrapersonal space is landmarks,
things that we would move through a space
geographically, and of course, I'm not
the only person to tell you that what was
seen by the audience in terms of what was
on the Acropolis, what was in the old
southern city, was key to understanding
how their social memory worked.
In the Agamemnon the chorus say,
yet above is one Apollo panel Zeus,
there is indeed three caged Apollo
panel Zeus above them on the Acropolis,
and there's Ruth Scodell has done some
wonderful work on social memory and
on how, what was seen in the city was
woven into the fabric of ancient drama.
Now we have one I'm interested in,
which is Ambient extrapersonal space.
This is sitting in the sky.
This is something that when we go and see
a Greek play today, we don't often get.
We can find a Greek play, we put it
into a black box, we shine lights so
that we make you look.
I think this is key to understand
the dynamism of ancient drama.
What's interesting is that
when we cognate, right,
when we think hard about something,
we tend to look up.
You can try this experiment on each other,
you can look at a friend and say
what's your favorite food, and then say,
tell me the last time you had that food,
and they'll instantly look up, and
you can see it in babies as well.
We actually go and look into that space.
Everybody does it.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Right?
It's a great photo, isn't it?
>> [LAUGH]
>> So, I think we have to first of all
cognitively place these plays in this kind
of space where you're actually allowed
to move your eyes and your vision away
from the foveal vision of the performance,
and think about these concepts,
and be more reflective.
This is something that many of us in
the theater are uncomfortable doing
with drama.
We have to keep you there,
hold your attention, make you watch this.
This is how we get oppressed.
I think it's a very different
experience in this space, and
this is why we must have the mask.
The mask is a visual call
to attention in that space.
When that mask goes into that orchestra,
which wasn't circular, but
when it walks into that orchestra straight
away that thing is in your foveal vision.
It's no bigger than a human face,
there's no megaphone mouth,
it's quite naturalistic, but we are so
dependent on looking for faces.
But when a face is taken away,
we're going to watch, and
it's hard to take your eyes
off somebody wearing a mask.
Here's the mask that I showed you before,
and
I wanna talk a little bit
about how this mask operates.
Here's Mona Lisa and
Leonardo here also knows how we
look at the corners of the eyes and
the corners of the mouth, and so he's
presented them in and then he's given you
this background that really pulls your
peripheral vision, these meandering
rivers, and this is Margret Livingston's
example of peripheral and
foveal vision which is superb.
Everybody look really closely at her
mouth and focus on her mouth, and
then look at the background, and
then focus on her mouth again, and for
some of you it will change.
It doesn't happen for everybody, and this
is of course what makes it compelling.
Is she smiling, is she frowning?
She has this enigmatic expression
because Leonardo is playing around
with peripheral and foveal vision.
If we look at the way masks
are presented in Greek vases,
it's interesting because
they're not photographs.
But the vase painter's chosen certain
features,big thick bottom lip,
big eyes, furrowed forehead.
And smooth areas,
just like Leonard around the eyes.
Here's the actor holding the mask,
quite different features,
I think that's deliberate.
Peripheral and foveal vision comes
into play, take a look at this, right?
Dr Angry and Mr Calm,
if you actually squint a little bit,
you might see these faces change.
See if that works, I can help you with it.
You see that, I fuzzed it there.
You can see them change there, right?
What happens is, one is in your fine or
foveal features and
one is in your peripheral.
And actually, we oscillate between the
two, between peripheral and foveal vision.
And you can actually start to see
these features change slightly.
So even just watching a static
face is very dynamic.
Let me just blast through these.
The other thing that the mask does is,
in taking away your focus on the face,
it pushes it to the body.
And dancing was incredibly important
as we know in the ancient Greek world,
just read Plato.
We have an uncanny ability to recognize
movement when it's moving, watch.
And you don't even play soccer,
or cricket, karate, right?
These are just points of
light in a human body.
If that was you, you'd recognize yourself,
if that was a friend,
you'd recognize them.
Let's get to some neuroscience.
Here an fMRI machine, not to many of them
hang around in classic's departments.
The limitation of neuroscience is we
can't yet wear these on our head and
go out into the world.
That's a problem, right?
We will be able to soon I hope and
you've all seen these images.
Let's be real about
the limitations of neuroscience.
Ultimately, the brain scan that you
get is not the brain being scanned,
it's an approximated brain.
And these are huge areas in terms
of what's going on in the brain.
It's not very accurate, but nevertheless
it's still amazing, cutting edge science.
And I think, in hand with psychology and
cultural studies,
can come up with some amazing findings.
One done at University College,
London, looked at ballet dancers.
This is actually my wife, Desiree,
when she was principal ballerina at
the Metropolitan Opera, there she is.
And this is me, over here.
>> [LAUGH]
>> That's not me.
Anyway, they took ballet dancers and
they put them in a fMRI machines and
they watched ballet.
And their mirror neuron system, or
mirror neuron mesh we should call it,
fired as if they were doing the dancing.
When they put Capoeira dance is
watching ballet, nothing happened and
the same when they switched.
So if you're familiar with
that art form you're watching,
you're gonna have a very
intense relationship with it.
For those of you interested
in the science, there it is.
Now we know that pretty much every single
Athenian in the audience would have
performed, statistically, would have
performed at least once in a dithyramb or
a tragedy.
So these guys were expert dancers.
Go to see ballet with a ballet dancer,
they kinda twitch while they're watching.
I said to my wife, you're twitching.
What, no, I'm not, you are,
will you stop twitching.
She's doing those jetes
whether she likes it or not.
I mean, it's an amazing experience.
So again there is a much deeper
connection between that original audience
watching that performance and perhaps
us watching that performance today.
We have problems with choruses.
I think the chorus for
the ancient Athenians were one of the most
exciting elements in watching tragedy.
And look, notice the overextended hands,
the feet.
Here's some of my masks in operation in a
production of Pirandello's Six Characters,
and the actors are inherently
using their bodies far more.
How much time do I have,
am I good, Walter, for a bit?
Okay, you guys all right for
a little bit more of this stuff?
>> Yeah.
>> All right, so
let's get controversial now, right.
Ekman, six basic emotions.
I hate this theory, right?
I work in the theater, I hate the theory
that there's six basic facial emotions.
But I'm gonna show you in a minute
that the mask can only do
those six basic emotions.
However much I try and make the mask
do other emotions, it can do those six.
And I've done these
experiments all over the world.
So even though there's some
cultural difference in the way that
we perceive emotions.
One can think of David Konstan's
book on the emotions in the Greeks,
at the end of the day most of us with
recognize these six basic emotions, right?
Which are anger, fear, disgust,
surprise, joy, and sadness.
Ekman's added some
non-facially shown emotions.
Amusement, contempt, contentment,
embarrassment, excitement, guilt,
pride in achievement, relief,
satisfaction, sensory pleasure, and shame.
But the mask really can't show
these things on their own.
And then there is Aristotle's
wonderful list of emotions,
which are sort of opposites,
right, from the rhetoric.
Anger and mildness, love and
enmity Fear and Confidence and so on.
But, these re not theatrical emotions,
these are the emotions of persuasion.
I'm gonna come back to this.
I think I need to show you a mask, right?
Yeah, what I would normally do
is put a mask on you, but for
time I'll do it, okay?
Remember I'm not an actor, so forgive me.
Here's a mask that was done for
Six Characters in Search of an Author,
by David Nez.
But we constructed these masks based
on evidence from ancient vases.
So they're not reconstructions of ancient
masks, they're a sort of modern version.
David completely disagreed with me
about how a mask should be made.
And the first group of masks
were completely wrong,
because he read the play,
that was the mistake.
What do I mean?
Greek masks are not neutral, nor are they
a fixed character, they're not a stamp.
They're ambiguous, they have an ambiguous
expression which is capable of change.
So, I'll put this mask on,
which is a female mask.
And give me some emotions, and I'll try
them, all right, whatever you think.
>> Fear.
>> Okay, so fear is the first one.
See that?
You buy that as fear?
>> Mm-hm.
>> Okay, good, another one.
>> Surprise.
>> Yeah?
>> Mm-hm.
>> Another one.
>> Joy.
>> My phone.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Yeah I'll call you back.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Sadness.
>> How about some known non-Ekman ones?
>> Satisfaction.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Maybe, but
you said satisfaction,
so you know, any more?
>> Shame.
>> Shame, that's hard, let's try it.
I'm actually feeling anger,
which is interesting.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Any others?
>> Repentance.
>> Wow.
>> [LAUGH]
>> I can't do it.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Any more, yeah?
>> I notice that you're moving your body.
>> Yes.
>> And that's highly suggestive,
>> That's right.
>> Can we do those motions without?
>> I don't believe so.
I think I have to move my body,
and that's exactly right.
That's exactly what's happening.
And I think that your
cognitive system is seeing and
suggesting the mask moving, all right,
that could become an old lady
or a young man,
doesn't really change, right?
So this is my favorite.
>> [LAUGH]
>> That's how you do children in Greek
tragedy, right?
There it is.
So I'll come back to them, but
I wanna just show you what I mean by that.
An fMRI study done in
Japan with Noh masks.
Look at these masks,
thick bottom lip, smooth areas around
here, large brim, similar functions.
This mask is the same mask in
three different angles and
seems to have a different expression,
right?
But the face can't do that.
Now, one thing I was gonna do,
but it was a bit complicated,
there's a software called CERT
that reads your face and emotions.
You can download it and
play with it, you can sit there and
it will read your face and it will tell
you your six basic emotions, right?
And it's really interesting because you
should have it on when you're working
because it's very telling.
>> [LAUGH]
>> When you put a mask on
it reads surprise, surprise,
surprise, surprise, surprise.
Even though I could go through the six
basic emotions which you all saw, right.
The computer can't do it, right.
The computer can not, thank goodness
the computer can't do it, right?
So this is of course Gregory's great
experiment about the turning mask.
Let's watch this, right.
So watch this mask turn.
There's the back of the mask,
but hang on, what just happened?
Let's do that again.
Stop that happening.
You know that's the back of the mask,
but wait.
Whether you like it or not,
your evolutionary system is going
to make you see faces, all right?
Everywhere, Jesus in a tortilla, right?
>> [LAUGH]
>> Guy got a lot of money for that.
One of the most famous
photographs of portraiture of
Churchill in everybody's
room in World War II.
Great story,
Yousuf Karsh was trying to take
a photograph of
Winston Churchill in Ottawa.
He did not want his photo taken.
He was mildly drunk.
And he was coming out of
a meeting smoking his cigar and
Karsh grabbed the cigar and
snapped this photo.
Churchill was just really angry that
he's had his cigar taken away, right?
But what comes across is defiance
against the Nazis, right?
>> [LAUGH]
>> I mean, that's sort of,
that's what we get, right?
>> [LAUGH]
>> Perfect caricature.
Now, science has proven
that we prefer caricatures.
In fact, we prefer schematic versions.
If you take children and you put them in
a room with a couch, and you have a toy,
and then you create an absolute facsimile
of that room as a pure model, and
a facsimile of the toy and you hide
the toy under the facsimile couch.
Then you send the kid into the room,
the kid won't find the toy.
But if you draw a rubbish sketch
of the couch and the toy,
[SOUND] the kid will find it straightaway.
We love doing lines in sand,
we love doing exograms, right?
And it's the same thing with faces,
is that we prefer caricatures.
When you show people caricatures of
people they know or famous people, and
then showed them photographs, they
recognized the characters much faster.
So there's Churchill, right?
Four more years.
That does not look like me.
>> [LAUGH]
>> These
are Aaron Schurger's Mooney Faces,
and from the merest of information
we can see ethnicity, we can see gender
and we can see age, it's remarkable.
Well this has been called, of course,
the uncanny valley, right?
And those of you who saw Avatar, right,
know that James Cameron said
I've crossed the uncanny valley.
What's the uncanny valley?
Well, we Masahiro Mori in 1970 said
there's this gap here, this valley, right,
where basically here's a sort
of healthy person here,
right, and here's a puppet and
here's a corpse.
Something that looks like a human
up to about 96.5% we really enjoy.
Once we get into the valley, we're
looking at a zombie and we're repelled.
And nobody yet
has crossed the uncanny valley.
It's the great, there's gonna be people
here working on video games right?
Trying to create something that
crosses the uncanny valley.
This is one attempt.
I personally wanna stove her head
in with a pickaxe handle, right?
That's right there in the uncanny valley.
Let me show you, I think I've got here.
Yeah, some of the game theory.
Doing the basic emotions, right?
It's horrible, isn't it, right?
They are way in the uncanny valley,
but look at this.
>> [LAUGH]
>> Look at her, is this gonna start?
Yeah, this is Image Metrics,
this is cutting edge.
She's computer generated.
But look at her eyes.
Get the pickaxe handle,
it's a zombie, right?
So we're not there yet, right?
We haven't crossed the uncanny valley,
we prefer representations.
She's good but.
So the reason why you were seeing those
mask changes is because you're wired
to do that.
And I say I've done this
all over the world and
it works, we see those six basic emotions.
If we had some text we would get far
more out of them, text is important.
And just to finish, right, cuz I should,
I'll show you one more experiment.
This is the famous Kuleshov effect,
fans of Alfred Hitchcock will know this.
We need text, we need costumes.
We need narrative because we need context
to get out of those six basic emotions to
give us more depth of intensity.
Watch this, this is from about 1915.
Watch it again.
This is an exercise in editing.
So there's some soup.
He's maybe hungry.
That child, very sad.
Beautiful woman.
Aroused, well it's the same clip,
all right.
The clip is the same three times.
And this was an example to Kuleshov's
students of contextual framing,
which is absolutely how that mask
works in that amazing environment.
This is Mobbs' version
of contextual framing.
Here's the science, right?
The anterior temporal regions
store contextual forms, memory.
This is compared to information gathered
by the superior temporal sulcus,
which is responsible for
gaze direction and emotional processing.
Back to the eyes again, this
information is tagged by the amygdala,
part of the brain's limbic system
responsible for memory and
emotion, which in turn is
influenced by top-down
signals from the prefrontal cortex
responsible for executive functions.
So I'll just translate
that into mask cognition.
There's the narrative information
that we get on stage.
The mask and body as you said
are altered by the performer.
The mind processes the contextual frame.
The spectator places
the expression on the mask, and
this elicits a deeply personal response.
I believe the mask was far more
expressive than the human face.
And though there were 5,000 of you sitting
out there You were having an individual
relationship with that masked actor,
incredibly powerful and deeply moving.
On a level that perhaps
we can't quite understand
by going to watch these plays
performed now in modern theaters.
Thank you very much.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much, [INAUDIBLE].
>> This concludes the official
portion of this presentation.
But if there are any questions left,
please feel free to ask.
>> Yeah.
>> I'm just struck, and
I wanted to challenge you on
the text thing for a second.
>> Yeah, of course.
>> I was struck when you put the mask on.
>> Yeah.
>> And before you started acting out the
emotions, I found a similar effect when we
had the two people with one saying
[INAUDIBLE] and one doing it.
It was when you call out the emotion,
I saw the emotion,
that's the experience I felt.
If, therefore the recitation of the text
with the mask actually then brings out
what you want them to see.
And the text does become
important on some level.
>> That's good,
let's try one we can do without text,
to see if we can identify it.
Cuz I think it's a very good point,
let's use one we've had before.
What do you see?
>> Frustration and anger.
>> Yeah, frustration and anger, so.
>> Fury.
>> Yeah,
I think the six work without words, for
time I was just going through them.
I think if we wanted to do love,
I can't do love without words.
So yeah, I think, I'm not negating text,
text is incredibly important.
I think it becomes more
important as a piece of drama,
if we understand it working in tandem
with the visuality of the mask.
And I think, certainly as a director,
a lot of people go wrong
with classical drama.
Because the text becomes this
sort of [INAUDIBLE] document
that can't be changed.
And I that think even us, as classicists,
sometimes get locked into this idea of
the text, the text, the text, the text.
I don't think the Greeks would have any
concept of what we were talking about.
To them, this was language
delivered live in a theater, and
I even think the language is embodied.
I think when Clytemnestra talks
about chalkou baphas, in that
great moment where she's denying there's
been any infidelity with Agamemnon.
We hear chalkous, and
we hear baphas and the veil of Iphigenia,
and the language itself is embodied.
And I think Greek, as we all know,
is a fantastically embodied language.
So I think that for me, it's a way
of laying the text to one side and
finding some other tools
to reach some conclusions.
And then adding the text, which for
me makes it a richer experience.
So I was being a bit facetious in saying,
let's get rid of the text, but
I'm trying to find a different route into
this material from cognitive science.
Yeah, thanks, great point.
Who wants to put a mask on?
>> [LAUGH]
>> Yeah?
>> Quick question, I'm wondering,
in terms of getting rid of the text,
can you in Greek?
Like the Cambridge Greek play,
or things like this.
And I'm wondering, if so,
how do you work with a text
that presumably no one in
the audience understands?
And do you use, that seems like
it's sort of a middle ground.
>> No, it's a great question.
I do an exercise where I ask people to,
I give each person objective.
I say, you've gotta get a thousand
dollars back, your life depends on it.
And the other person I say,
you've never seen this person
before in your life, right?
And they play out the scene and
it's kind of boring cuz they're acting.
And then I take language away and so
you can only use letters of the alphabet
in random order to express yourself.
And suddenly their bodies come into play,
and they want their money, and
it's alive, and it works.
And I think that actually,
sometimes, like the McGerk Effect,
language gets in the way, you know?
And with actors, they start acting, and
we're aware that they're acting and
this isn't real.
The mask is really interesting because
you have to coordinate language.
Everything you say is part of the embodied
experience of acting in a mask.
You can't fudge anything in a mask, and
of course,
most of Greek tragedy is sung, right?
Well that's a good thing because
there is a construction, and
if it's not sung it's certainly
closely metered in a metrical form.
And I think that's really important
to understanding the way it would
have been delivered in a mask.
And maybe that's why when
we hear dramatic Greek,
it just sounds very alien to us,
and strange.
But I think the form of the meter was
very, very important, and there's
been a lot of work done on meter in poetry
in neuroscience, and also in music.
In fact music was one
of the first art forms
that neuroscientists were interested in.
And we mustn't forget that
these things sung and danced,
and what we call the text
was really music.
There was a musicality
to what was going on.
So I think your point's very good,
it's valid.
My problem sometimes with
those sort of British public
school kids doing Greek plays.
It doesn't sound like Greek anymore,
it sounds like some horrible,
it sounds like a text.
Isn't it great when you
have Greek students?
Maybe they don't know ancient Greek,
but you say read that bit of Homer and
it suddenly just sounds like a language.
I think Greek is so
beautiful and I think coming out of
these masks, imagine this thing singing.
I mean, just imagine Euripides aria,
you know, it just would have been sublime.
So yeah, yeah.
>> I've been thinking about
the issue of anticipation.
>> Yeah.
>> And the issue of people knowing stories
before they come in to the theater.
>> Yes.
>> And I'm wondering,
textually speaking, because I think
here we really just can't
know about the embodiment.
In text are there any moments
you can think of where what's
been built into the text is actually a
sense of contradiction of the expectation.
>> Sure.
>> And how,
if suddenly you have to pay attention
to the text because what Aeschylus
is making somebody say is not necessarily
what you anticipate them saying.
How that then plays into
what might be happening.
>> Well I think you could take
two examples, you could take
an example where the audience knows
exactly what's gonna happen, and
Aeschylus frames it by
using the embodied space.
So the watchman's speech that
opens the aristeia is that we know
about the beacon,
we know about this right.
But what he does is he gives
us this disheveled guy
popping up on the roof of a.
May have been one of
the first times a was used.
The first word is Gods, right?
Well that's a way to get
an audience's attention.
So he says that religious word in
that religious space, in the sky, and
then the first image he gives us is
of the night sky and the cosmology.
So by the time we meet the beacon,
it's in the context of how well I've come
to know night's congregation of the stars.
Well here is now a woman-made star
being hung in the male firmament.
So straight away we start to see
this beacon very differently than
we might come to expect it.
And then of course you can
think of Euripides' Medea where
Jason's banging on the door and
he's saying, claim the door.
Like roll out what's inside, but no,
you're gonna get the mechane,
and there it is, above you.
And we talked about this earlier,
we have to be careful.
I don't even think Oliver necessarily
believes this anymore, but Oliver Taplin's
great work where he said everything that
happens in stages is implicit in the text.
That's not true.
In fact in most theatrical traditions,
if you say it,
you don't do it and
if you do it, you don't say it.
So there may be a whole level of irony and
movement that's running counter to
what's being said on stage and we can
only wonder what that may have been.
But I do think that thinking about
embodiment and movement gives us a whole
kind of richer area that the original
audience may have experienced these plays.
So I definitely think
you see the playwrights
deliberately kind of trapping the audience
and leading them down these routes,
and pulling the rug out from underneath
them and surprising them all the time.
There's another great example
in the Aristotle where
Cassandra is going to go into the house,
right?
And she's repelled and
she says I can smell the blood and
the coroners say that's only
the smell of sacrifices and
of course as the audience we're watching
the play they would have been sacrificing,
you know, up to what, 800 at one point?
Animals, in the altar behind.
Well, if you didn't eat meat that often,
the smell of burning flesh and blood,
that's a very, very powerful smell.
And so there's a sort of meta-theatrical
embodiment thing going on at that moment
with Cassandra.
So thinking about those textual
moments in a wider cognitive context,
for me really brings these plays to life.
Yeah.
>> Wondering whether mask effects
the actors' own perception
of their own body.
>> Completely.
>> Kind of emotions that they express and
how they express it.
And how this in turn effects the audience.
>> Completely.
Most actors now hate acting in masks.
I've had actors have
nervous breakdowns in them.
They hate it.
I have learned never to
rehearse in front of a mirror.
Because, if you put a mask on,
and the actor looks in a mirror,
they become very self conscious,
and it's over.
You actually have to sublimate
yourself to the mask.
And being an actor in a mask
is like being a dancer.
I did a project with Roman dancers,
where I had dancers act and actors dance.
It was a nightmare.
Because dancers are used to being told
what to do by a choreographer and
killing themselves to do exactly what
the choreographer tells them to do.
And their artistry comes out of that,
right?
An actor is used to having an opinion and
telling an actor,
particularly in the American tradition,
this is what you're thinking and doing,
and I want you to put your foot there.
Actors aren't going to have this, right?
Well, when you wear one of these
things and there's no mirror,
you are totally dependant
on the outside eye.
You need to be choreographed and
it's back to that again.
Right?
So, it's very disorienting.
It's very difficult.
And, some of the tools that actors rely
on, emotional recall, the method, or
whatever you want to call it,
are denied you in a mask.
And yet, you have to do these
incredible emotional performances.
But, they have to be ordered,
and they have to be constructed.
As dance may have been.
So I think ancient acting
is closer to dance.
And again, I think that's where
the meter and the music comes in
because we have this whole emotional
richness that's conveyed by the music.
That takes the pressure
slightly off the actor.
Doesn't mean they don't have
to have great artistry but
perhaps their interpretation of
how they might react to a scene
is not as important as how
this verse should be sung.
So maybe opera has more of a clue there
that you can have sublime opera performers
who aren't actually very good actors.
Doesn't really matter because
they're hitting those notes.
Yeah?
>> I want to ask where we draw the line
between interpretation of cognition and
this comes from your comment that
cognition is affected by culture.
>> Yes.
>> So when were trying to reconstruct
the cognition how much do we have to worry
about the pressure of interpretation and I
think particularly the photos of the vases
and the masks and you said look at
the big eyes versus the big nose.
But I think from viewer to viewer
you'd notice something differently
unless the east Asian culture trying
to reconstruct re cognition but
then we have a totally different account.
>> I think, I mean, we are in
the business of reconstruction, right?
That's what we do as classicist and
interpretation.
And I think what's interesting is that
people working neuroscience are facing
the same issue, even on contemporary
culture, which is whose culture,
what culture, what differences are there
in culture, what about subcultures, right?
What about post traumatic stress disorder?
All these things effect how you cognate,
which I think is where the field's so
fascinating.
Let's be honest, every judgment we make
about the ancient world is a judgment
based on interpretation, right?
So I'm trying to find some new tools to
add to that process of making judgments.
Some of my work, the cognitive stuff,
leads me maybe back to a conclusion that
I might have made in the first place.
But sometimes, looking at
a Greek vase as an ancient form,
rather than aesthetic object,
is so liberating to think about.
Why was this made?
Who made it?
Who bought it?
Where was it found?
What was its function?
Why are these people looking
at each other like that?
What's this gesture mean?
Why are they holding this?
We don't often do that in our subjects, so
I think for me it's just been able to free
me into going at a subject I
love from a different angle.
I don't think that it's perfect.
Just like literary theory's not perfect.
But I think it gives us some tools.
And I think it can work in tandem with
literary theory and philology and
other elements that we
have at our disposal.
I do think that we can get
close to the ancient brain.
I do believe that.
And that's a bigger part of my project.
And I do think that we can start
to identify ancient thoughts
in texts because if an object is
an ancient thought, then so is a text.
So isn't that an exciting
way to think about a text?
Is that we have a recording of
a series of ancient thoughts.
To me as a classicist that's incredibly
exciting because now I'm in the presence
of that brain and now I'm having an
engagement that is, very fruitful for me.
So yes it's a difficult area,
and it's along the edge of it.
Right, cognitive classics,
right, this is it, but, I-
>> [LAUGH]
>> And I whistle stopped
all you through it.
But I think there's a lot there
that can be of use to us.
But no, it's not perfect.
Yeah.
>> How different was the role of the mask
in cognition in separate plays?
Am I right in thinking in the comedies,
the audience would not have known where
they were going beforehand as much.
>> Yeah, thing about comic masks,
I didn't bring one,
is they're much more expressive.
They're much more bulbous,
they've got bigger features.
And the movement in comedy is actually
much lower to the ground, and
much more, kind of weighty and
the costumes that they wore,
the bulbous stomachs and buttocks and,
it's a different art form, okay.
And the comic mask I think is
actually a different kind of mask.
The satire mask is a tragic mask
adapted for a satire play, definitely.
And of course it was the same actors that
performed the tragedy that did the satire
play and I think the satire play is a sort
of not so subtle version of a tragedy.
I think a comedy if I talk about all
comedy, is actually a different genre and
starts to speak more and more to tragedy
by actually making fun of tragedy.
Think about particularly the later
plays of Aristophanes that have huge
pastiches of Euripides' plays.
In fact, many Euripides plays are only
known to us from those pastiches.
So they start to fuse together.
And I think what's so interesting
is satire play, comedy, tragedy and
dithyramb all start to
speak to each other, so.
The new music of Euripides is
probably inspired by dithyramb music,
and I tend to think that,
I'm gonna say this in my book and
maybe I'll get attacked for it, I think
the spread of tragedy is because of music.
I think the new music
was the Rolling Stones.
I think when people heard it they were
like, my god, this stuff is like.
You look at Plato's complaints about it.
How can you do that with music?
This is Elvis, right?
This is the Sex Pistols and I think people
wanted the music which is why I think
Euripides, everybody
wants to hear Euripides.
So I think music conveys that spread of
Greek tragedy, but what's so
exciting is how how these
forms start to speak to each other and
literally embody each other as well.
Particularly toward the end
of the fifth century.
>> My wife and
I were students here in the early 70s,
and TB Webster,
who loved Euripides said that same thing.
>> He did?
Well, I'm honored.
>> He excited students by, talking
about the Rolling Stones and music.
>> Great and
he of course was a professor at UCL
where I went so that's a great comment.
Have I exhausted you?
I think so.
>> That brings us full circle.
[APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you very much.
>> {APPLAUSE}
>> For
more, please visit us at Stanford.edu.
