Lon Winston, TRTC's Founding Artistic Director and Valerie Haugen,
Founding Associate Artist, were invited by the Classics Association of New England (CANE)
to participate in their Summer Institute (CSI). CANE is housed at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.During the 2004 CSI, Winston and Haugen taught a course in ritual acting for teachers and professors, and then Winston gave a talk at the banquet on their production of Greek Shards - Medea, and Haugen performed a monologue from the play. They were invited back for the 2005 CSI, and taught a course entitled, "Aristophanes and Michael Moore: The Golden Boys of Art and Social Criticism." The article below appeared in CANE's 100th Anniversary book celebrating their history. The article is by Heidi Wilson, Ph.D., and Director of the CSI.
The year 2004 barely qualifies as part of the "history" of CANE, but it included an event that, for me, foreshadowed CANE’s continued creativity for the next hundred years. At the 2004 CANE Summer Institute, participants experienced some much earlier history – they were able to enter into the emotional experience of Athenian tragedy, carrying on CANE’s mission of keeping antiquity a living presence in the modern world.
At that CSI, Lon Winston and Valerie Haugen of the Thunder River Theatre Company taught a theatre workshop, helping teachers introduce Greek tragedy to their students through maskmaking and acting. Lon and Valerie were also booked for a performance after the closing banquet, based on the company’s recent Medea, an original play encompassing all facets of the myth of Medea in the ancient world. Sign-ups for the workshop were a bit light – after all, these were New Englanders, not given to vigorous public expression, far less performance. At registration, one of the workshop group noticed the announcement of the banquet performance and asked me nervously, “I don’t have to be in that, do I?” I reassured her that the workshop and the banquet presentation were unconnected.
As the week went by, the class made plaster masks and, wearing them, worked on scenes from Medea, reaching for an inner experience of the myth and an understanding of its place in the tragedy. Banquet night came. The crowning moment was Valerie’s performance of Medea’s monologue as she kills her children (onstage in the modern production.) All lights were out except for the spotlight on the stage. The terrible murders were committed, and Medea rushed out of the light, crying, “Aie! Aie!” And from the surrounding darkness, one by one, cries went up, softly at first and then louder, “Aie! Aie!” Slowly, white-masked figures rose at every table, a “chorus” of grief that raised the hair on the back on my neck. In only four days, the workshop students had entered so far into the myth that all of them had volunteered to be part of the banquet performance. And the whole audience found themselves, not safely seated in the “front of the house” but in the midst of the chorus at the crisis of a Euripidean tragedy.
This was my “peak experience” as Director of CSI and, for me, real proof that after one hundred years, CANE is a continuing force for the use and experience of antiquity, not merely for its preservation.
Heidi Wilson, Ph. D.
Lon Winston, Artistic Director
Thunder River Theatre Company
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