Difficult poetry in performance: sense-making, pleasure and the parodos of Aeschylus’ 'Agamemnon'

A workshop organised by Saskia Peels (s.peels rug.nl) and Felix Budelmann (f.j.budelmann rug.nl).

In Archaic and Classical Greece, poetry was for the most part performed rather than read. Some of this poetry is extremely challenging. How then did audiences make sense of – respond to, relate to, process, parse, visualize, disambiguate, puzzle at, get affected by – this difficult poetry in performance?

The workshop brings together classicists and experts in other areas (psychology, linguistics, a theatre practitioner) to explore these issues from different perspectives with a focus on a choral ode from Aeschylus' Agamemnon. There will be panels on complexity, neologisms, religion, ambiguity, intertextuality/intervisuality, performance, and sound.

Programme and registration: https://www.classicsconferences-groningen.nl/programme