Sixties avant-garde performance uniformly returned to Greek tragedy as its primal source

Evidence

Greek drama was eternally primal and newly avant-garde. Peter Brook staged an experimental version of Sophocles’ Antigone in 1962, the same year that Grotowski began performances of his ritualistic Acropolis (a Stanisław Wyspiański play that drew on Greek myths). Herman Nitsch had his version of Oedipus Rex. Gregory Markopoulos’s Twice a Man was inspired by Euripides’ Hippolytus; The Illiac Passion, finished in 1967, draws on Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus. The same year, the Living Theatre was improvising on Aeschylus’ Oresteia. After the Performance Group’s Dionysus, Romanian émigré Andrei Serban staged Medea at La MaMa and Charles Ludlam parodied The Bacchae in The Enchanted Pig. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1987

Categorization

• XREF: This clustering — the same source text reworked simultaneously across an entire scene — parallels the density-of-invention argument the reader is building: shared material conditions (cheap space, performance venues, cross-pollination) producing synchronized cultural output.