Political theatricality and aesthetic emotion. Dramaturgical devices of the “alienation effect” in four versions of Antigone

Abstract

The classical tragic canon has been considered as a paradigm of intertextuality conducive to constructing theatrical discourses linked to historical situations and phenomena of political-social conjuncture from different eras through the dynamics of a “controlled anachronism” (Loraux, 2008). This is attested, in the particular case of Sophocles’ Antigone, by the numerous rewritings, which, based on the scheme of the opposition between human-divine law and that of the State, are based on the notorious applicability of the topic to civil wars, to struggles for justice, to the tension between freedom and oppression, to the role of women and their possibilities of influencing public life and, even, to readings from the perspectives of Lacanian psychoanalysis (about the “dysfunctionality” of the Oedipus family or death), among other possible meanings. In this paper, we will refer to the notion of “aesthetic emotion” (Damasio, 2010) within the framework of political theatricality (Dubatti, 2003; 2014; Castri, 1978; Rancière, 2005; Boal, 1980; 2004), in order to determine possible modalities of the “alienation effect” (verfremdungseffekt) and the operation of its dialectical relationship with “expectatorial empathy” (Sofia, 2015; Stern, 2010). To this end, we resort to a succinct analysis and commentary on the dramaturgical and scenic devices of Antigones by Brecht (1948), Gambaro (1989 [1986]), Folini (1998) and Watanabe (2009 [1999]). In regards to this foursome, we aim to propose not only a literary but also a scenic point of view, through the description of basic rhetorical procedures of stage management, aimed at the “cenesthetic contagion” of the spectator and its critical correlate.