USOAR Reflection and Final Report

Abstract

Through the centuries, communities have maintained contact, recorded history, and learned from past mistakes through storytelling. This timeless, oral tradition first burst to life in Ancient Greece. While literature and writing were a special privilege for the elite, common people had no choice but to communicate their knowledge through words. With the help of great writers and philosophers such as Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, and Aristotle, the spoken word quickly became the backbone of their culture and made its way through history to the present day. This precedence for storytelling grew and morphed through the help of theatre and the arts. The Ancient Greek’s way of storytelling highly involved the use of body to aid in communication, and that physicality has slowly been lost throughout the years. Our research on Greek storytelling focuses on different approaches to communication; we are searching for how we can use theatre’s successful past to inform the way we capture audiences with stories in the present. Over the years, storytelling has lost its vibrancy and sunk into the background as the world of technology overshadowed it. We must ask ourselves how we can reignite the flame beneath traditional storytelling to recapture the universality it once held. By visiting the place of theatre’s origin, we hope to gain knowledge about theatre that will aid in our research and implementation of a new passion for telling stories to a technology-driven society. Hydrama Theatre and Art Centre’s summer program will allow us to explore storytelling at its core and inspire discussion among fellow artists upon our return. Through our exploration, we intend to answer this universal question--when language isn’t enough, how can we tell a story in silence?