The Burnt City in Development: Abstracting Ancient Literature

The relationship between Punchdrunk’s masked performances and their source texts divides opinion, as the company’s predominantly dance-based language and their approach of abstracting their source texts renders the connection between source text and target artefact opaque. In this chapter, which is the second of the two rehearsal studies contained in this volume, I consider how Punchdrunk engaged with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hecuba in rehearsal. My analysis of the rehearsing of four specific moments of The Burnt City, namely the sacrifice of Polyxena, the emerging relationship between Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the production’s finale, and the meeting between Clytemnestra and Agamemnon (the so-called carpet scene), reveals that a rigorous investigation into text underpinned The Burnt City. In each phase of rehearsal, the company entered into a dialogue with their source texts, responding to the particular narrative beats, emotional and psychological dynamics, and the linguistic colour of the two Greek tragedies. I argue that Punchdrunk’s handling of their tragic texts is consequently a form of intermedial or intersemiotic translation. Although the representation of classical literature in The Burnt City may continue to split critical opinion, when the process behind the company’s eventual product is understood then there can be no question about the level of interrogation underpinning the work.