Seth Jeppesen's class, Ancient Drama and Performance

Here's what NEH Summer Scholar Seth Jeppeson is up to this semester!


This semester at BYU I am teaching a course entitled Ancient Drama and Performance, which is based to a large extent on my experience with the NEH Institute on Roman Comedy in Performance. One thing that the institute demonstrated quite well is how important performance is to the understanding of ancient drama. Though most people would agree with this statement, it is still rare in the field of Classics to find classes that incorporate performance in the course work and assessment to a significant degree. In teaching this class, I hope to illustrate that such an approach can work. Riffing off of my experience in the institute, I came up with the following plan: with a group of Classics, Humanities and Theater students, we will read a number of plays in translation - Greek and Roman, tragedy and comedy - and then read a survey of scholarship about how these plays were performed anciently and how they have been translated, adapted, and performed in the modern world. Using the tools gained through this survey of the primary and secondary material, the students will choose scenes to perform at the end of the semester.

We will document our process along the way on our blog: http://technitaidionysou.blogspot.com/



Please feel free to look over our posts on the blog and provide comments on what you see. Thanks!