‘Epic’ Performances

This opening chapter explores what identifying ‘epic’ in performance entails. This is essential given Brecht’s avowedly anti-Aristotelian ‘Epic Theatre’, which is for the most part very far from what the editors and most of the contributors to this volume understand by ‘epic performances’. This general introduction also examines what an ‘epic’ source means—in broad terms a long narrative hexameter poem, composed in either Greek or Latin—and will explore exactly how mediated that source can be before it ceases to be an ancient ‘epic’ source. It also begins to ask how one might account for the recent ‘epic turn’ in performance. It ends with a discussion of certain recurrent formal elements in the epic performances under discussion in the volume and concludes that there are more overlaps with Brecht’s ‘Epic Theatre’ than might have initially been imagined.