The Department of Classics extends its congratulations to the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group, whose 2019 production of Herkales has been hailed as, “[…] something truly special — even beyond the obvious specialness that BCAD treats its audience to every year by performing classical plays in their original languages at such a remarkably high level — and the vision of the director, Caleb Simone, is to thank for bringing this year’s production together in such an innovative and compelling fashion.” Read the entire review, via Medium, here.
Via The New York Review of Books: “‘Nobody has ever made head or tail of Greek music, and nobody ever will,’ said the musicologist Wilfrid Perrett in 1932, quoting a classicist friend. ‘That way madness lies.’ In a sense this last statement was on the mark, for it was the “piping” of Madness, the malign deity of Euripides’s Herakles, that BCAD’s director and composers set out to replicate. Thanks to their efforts, a handful of lucky New Yorkers witnessed something remarkable this month: the awakening of a theatrical tradition that has lain dormant for more than two millennia.”
View a video of the production here.
Photo credit: Pamela Sisson