Stage of Emergency: Theater and Public Performance under the Greek Military Dictatorship of 1967–1974
Gonda Van Steen
Abstract
Through theater’s probing lens, this book offers a critique of cultural life in Greece during the dictatorship years, a topic that has remained largely unexplored. It analyzes the plays and performances that took the pulse of particular moments of the so-called junta era (or the years of the Colonels), but these particulars broaden into a more general reexamination of Greek culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Thus this book situates Greek play production in the constant battle to avoid frontal assaults with the regime’s censors, but it also highlights the links between Greek theater’s “Perfor ... More
Through theater’s probing lens, this book offers a critique of cultural life in Greece during the dictatorship years, a topic that has remained largely unexplored. It analyzes the plays and performances that took the pulse of particular moments of the so-called junta era (or the years of the Colonels), but these particulars broaden into a more general reexamination of Greek culture of the late 1960s and 1970s. Thus this book situates Greek play production in the constant battle to avoid frontal assaults with the regime’s censors, but it also highlights the links between Greek theater’s “Performative Turn” and the global student and youth movement of the late 1960s. The Greek countercultural student movement achieved international prominence by fall 1973, and theater played an active role in escalating tensions. Performance combined with student activism allowed Greek stage practitioners to subvert the regime’s histrionics and censorship and also to experiment with a novel language of political dissent. The extraordinary vibrancy of the Greek stage of emergency turned performance into a dynamic transcultural project during a period marred by a crisis of political legitimacy. The reinvigorated Greek stage displayed a high degree of historical consciousness and embraced revisionist cultural critique as well. The chapters and case studies shed light on these theatrical developments but also on the politics of culture and censorship affecting the Greek public.
Keywords:
modern Greece,
military dictatorship,
Colonels,
junta,
stage of emergency,
censorship,
modern Greek plays,
Performative Turn,
youth movement,
student activism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198718321 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2015 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718321.001.0001 |
