Dionysus Unbound. Ingmar Bergman Stages The Bacchae by Daniel Börtz Cover Image

Dionizos wyzwolony. Ingmar Bergman inscenizuje Bachantki Daniela Börtza
Dionysus Unbound. Ingmar Bergman Stages The Bacchae by Daniel Börtz

Author(s): Jan Balbierz
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Gender Studies, Music, Recent History (1900 till today), Sociology of Art
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Ingmar Bergman; opera-studies; modernist reception of antiquity; Greek tragedy; Swedish theatre;

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the opera The Bacchae from 1991, a collaboration between Swedish composer Daniel Börtz and Ingmar Bergman. It was one of the three operas Bergman ever directed. The paper examines The Bacchae in a broad context of modernist reception of Greek tragedy and mythology – an especially important frame of reference is the Dionysian, post-Wagnerian opera – and against the backdrop of Bergman’s other film and theatre productions that deal with his highly ambiguous relation to religion. Bergman incorporated some major themes of European Modernism in his staging. The Bacchae can be read as a part of the “invented tradition” of the black, antilogocentric, violent, obscene antiquity, created around 1900 as an opposition to the bright Winckelmann – inspired version of the past. This dark vision of the archaic roots of human culture corresponds with other modernist topics such as the crisis of language and the attempt to create alternative, body- based modes of expression, the blurring of gender identities, the transgressive nature of art and religion and the conception of music as a representation of the “oceanic” unconscious.

  • Issue Year: 11/2016
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 139-153
  • Page Count: 15
  • Language: Polish