Jan Fabre’s Mount Olympus: To Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (A 24-Hour Performance)
Jan Fabre’s 24-hour response to the œuvre of extant tragedy, Mount Olympus, is in many ways an archetype postdramatic tragic reception. Chapter 7 explores the production’s radical take upon both the form and content of ancient tragedy, and how its phenomenological impact encouraged the audience to interrogate the practice of receiving antiquity. It focuses upon how the production combined postdramatic techniques with tragic source texts to interrogated ideas of voyeurism, the institution of the City Dionysia, and the notion of catharsis. It utilizes Jacques Rancière’s work on politics and art, and his notion of the emancipated spectator, as a theoretical framework to consider how the production raised questions surrounding cognitive versus embodied agency and the limits of emancipation. It argues that Rancière’s emancipated spectator is best employed as a hermeneutic tool to unpack the politics of spectatorship rather than to create a totalizing thesis about the ideal conditions for a politically efficacious performance.