Episode 3: Prometheus Bound

 
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  Welcome to Ancient Greece Today. My name is Naomi Weiss. I’m a professor of classics at
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  Harvard University and I am your host for this podcast series which brings together scholars
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  and artists to think about the ancient Greek world and its afterlives. Each episode we first
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  look at a piece of ancient Greek literature and then at an example of how it’s been used and
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  reimagined in the present day, especially in the US. This season is Tragedy Today. Last episode we
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  talked about Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy. Today we are talking about Prometheus Bound, another
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  Aeschylean play. I say Aeschylean or Aeschylean because even while it’s come down to us as by
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  Aeschylus, there’s still a long debate about whether it really is his. Now, for another play
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  by Aeschylus for this series, there are several wonderful options to choose from. Persians,
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  Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants. So why did I choose Prometheus Bound? Well, one reason is that
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  Prometheus and his play have been incredibly influential across art, politics and science
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  even. I’ll mention just a few prominent examples of that influence. In the late 18th century,
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  abolitionists started using Prometheus, Zeus’s Titanic victim, as an image for their cause. In 1818,
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  Mary Shelley published Frankenstein with the subtitle The Modern Prometheus. In 2025, just last year,
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  we have yet another Frankenstein movie. The title of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s biography of
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  Oppenheimer is American Prometheus. Christopher Nolan’s 2023 movie, inspired by their book,
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  begins with a reference to Prometheus. J.A. Marinsky and L.E. Glendenin, who discovered the element
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  Prometheum, chose the name because, they said, “it symbolizes the dramatic way in which the element may
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  be produced in quantity as a result of man’s harnessing of the energy of nuclear fission,” but also
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  “warns man of the impending danger of punishment by the vulture of war.” But there’s another reason why I
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  want to talk about Prometheus Bound, and that’s because, quite simply, it’s a really extraordinary
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  play. It’s nothing like the others we’ll discuss on this podcast. There’s no tragic hero like Oedipus
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  or Medea or Antigone here. We’re at the furthest reaches of the world, with a cast of mostly gods,
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  focused on the tortured body of an old god, a titan, Prometheus, who has defied Zeus by giving fire to
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  mankind. It is a spectacular play in the true sense of the word spectacular, extreme action, unusual masks
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  and costumes, a play that invites the use of impressive sets and stage machinery still today.
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  And yet, despite all this, and despite raising questions that continue to be so compelling for us
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  it is one of the least read in the modern classroom. I have two exciting interviews this episode, one with
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  Professor Mark Griffith from UC Berkeley on the ancient play itself, and then one with theatre director
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  Annie Dorsen on her reimagining of the play’s sequel through what she calls algorithmic theatre.
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  That interview in particular will pick up on some of the ideas I already alluded to about Prometheus and the
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  benefits and dangers of technology. But first, let me give just a quick overview of what happens in this
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  tragedy. As I’ve said, we’re at the edge of the known world. The play begins with Kratos, which means power,
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  directing the god Hephaestus, the god of fire, to hammer Prometheus, as I said, a Titan, an old god,
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  to a rock. This is a really gruesome form of punishment for going behind Zeus’ back and giving fire to man.
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  Hephaestus reluctantly does this, and Prometheus stays pinioned to the rock, facing the audience for the rest of
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  the play. He has a series of visitors. First, a chorus of Oceanids, Ocean’s daughters, shocked at what
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  they see. Prometheus reveals to them that Zeus, the new god-king, the tyrant he helped to get on the
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  throne, will soon need his help, for Prometheus alone has knowledge of how Zeus may fall from power
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  by marrying Thetis and being overthrown by his son. But Prometheus refuses to give Zeus’ information,
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  even as he receives visitors who try to persuade him to do so. Ocean, and then later the god Hermes,
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  who describes what awaits Prometheus if he does not relent. An eagle will forever gnaw at his liver.
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  Between the visits of Ocean and Hermes are two amazing scenes. First, Prometheus lays out at length all he
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  has done for humans. He’s given them not just fire, but literally every skill, every technology to enable
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  their survival. Then, out of the blue, Io enters. Originally a princess from Argos, she’s now a maddened
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  half cow, another of Zeus’ victims, desired by him and punished for it. As Io sings and dances frenetically,
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  Prometheus, still fixed to the rock, describes her traumatic past and future, and how one of her
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  descendants will be Heracles, who will eventually set Prometheus free. After Hermes’ visit, the play ends
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  with a cataclysm, thunder, lightning, and earthquake sent against the Titan by Zeus.
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  How might we understand all this? Well, I can’t possibly answer that question alone,
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  so I’m going to turn to Mark Griffith, an expert on the play, to help me.
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  I am delighted to be joined by Professor Mark Griffith, Klio Distinguished Professor Emeritus
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  of Classical Languages and Literature and Professor Emeritus of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies
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  at the University of California, Berkeley. His many publications include his seminal book,
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  The Authenticity of Prometheus Bound, from 1977, editions of and commentaries on both Aeschylus’
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  Prometheus Bound (1983) and Sophocles’ Antigone (1999), and an invaluable book on Aristophanes’
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  Frogs from 2013. His forthcoming book, Music and Difference in Ancient Greece, will be available
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  open access from the University of California Press soon. But beyond all of that, there is a personal
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  reason why I’m delighted to welcome Mark on this podcast, and that is because he is why I’m where I am
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  today. I came to the U.S. to work with him for my Ph.D. at Berkeley. So, Mark, thank you very much for
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  being here, and welcome to Ancient Greece today. As you know, we are talking today about the tragedy,
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  Prometheus Bound, on which you are very much an expert. I’ve already given a brief outline of the
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  play, but I’m turning to you to think about what this tragedy is, what it is about. So, maybe,
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  first of all, I could ask you, what do we have here, or what do we not have? Can we reconstruct where
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  this tragedy came in its tetralogy, or the larger story it’s part of?
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  Yes, we have seven plays that survived to the modern era in manuscripts that we can read entire, and Prometheus
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  Bound is one of those seven attributed to Aeschylus. Several of his plays were combined into trilogies of three
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  tragedies followed by a set of plays, so a tetralogy altogether. And we happen to have, in the case of the
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  Oresteia, we have the complete trilogy. In the case of several others of his surviving plays, we know what the
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  other plays in the trilogy were, and we have little bits of them in some cases that help us show how the
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  whole, in a trilogy is something like a three-act play, a big three-act play. That’s the way, probably, to think about it. So, the three parts are normally really closely connected. In the case of the Prometheus, we happen to have a list. In one of the medieval manuscripts, there’s a list of the complete number of Aeschylus’ plays. And it lists about 80 plays,
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  including Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Being Unbound (Prometheus Luomenos), Prometheus Fire Carrier or Firebringer. Those three are all mentioned. We also have in marginal notes that we have in the manuscripts of the Prometheus Bound, we have remarks a couple of places. In the next play, blah, blah, blah, in the next play, he is released.
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  And then we have several other references in other works of Greek literature to Aeschylus and his Prometheus Unbound says blah, blah, blah, or whatever. So, we have pretty strong, not absolutely inconvertible, but pretty strong evidence that there were three plays connected, and that particularly the Prometheus Being Unbound, the Luomenos,
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  of which we have a number of quotations, which fit pretty neatly into some of the predictions that are made in Prometheus Bound, about Heracles showing up and shooting the eagle, and Prometheus talking to him about a chorus of titans that come, that’s his brothers who come and visit him, and talk to him in rather the same way that the oceanids do in Prometheus Bound. So, there are a lot of resonances,
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  resonances, there are quite a number of so-called fragments of the Prometheus Unbound. There’s very little that’s directly connected in the quotations to Prometheus the Fire Carrier. So, whereas it seems pretty certain, Prometheus being released was a sequel, and followed on Prometheus Bound. And we can piece together fairly well how it works. And incidentally,
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  there’s another really key little detail here that the introduction that survives in the manuscripts for the Prometheus Bound remarks, the characters in this play are, you know, and it lists them, then it includes Heracles and Gaia, Mother Earth.
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  That’s his mother. And it seems very, very likely that those have crept in because they’re in the next play, because Heracles does indeed show up there.
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  And if Gaia shows up, a bit like Ocean may be showing up in Prometheus Bound, that would fit really.
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  So we have lots of evidence for those two plays. We have frustratingly little evidence about the fire carrier, because the fire carrier could either be,
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  as it would seem most obvious. It’s about Prometheus saving human beings from Zeus’s extermination plan and bringing them fire.
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  That’s what Prometheus is really, really famous for, isn’t it? But there are one or two other references in antiquity to a festival of Prometheus, where he and Athena and Hephaestus all celebrate fire together and so on.
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  And possibly there was a third play in which he’s carrying the fire. So that’s the bundle of evidence, which can be taken different ways. Some people have even
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  separated out and said, well, okay, Aeschylus wrote the Prometheus Unbound and somebody else wrote the Prometheus Bound. It seems to me that’s pretty far-fetched, but it’s not impossible.
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  And you yourself, what do you think happens after this play? Oh, heavens. It’s really tantalizing, isn’t it? Because we can’t get away from the fact that in the play that we have, in Prometheus Bound, there are different predictions made that contradict each other, as to whether he will or won’t ever be released, whether Zeus will or won’t be released.
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  ever be released, whether Zeus will or won’t fall from power. And that prediction, as you know, has been picked up by…
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  I think that this prediction, as you know, has been picked up by…
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  I think that this prediction is, is he going to be bound and tortured for 30,000 years, which is what one of the marginal notes says, or 10,000 years, or just 13 generations.
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  So, there’s some uncertainties as to how that’s going to work, and whether Zeus particularly…
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  It’s made clear, isn’t it, in the play we have, that somebody on the 13th generation that we recognize as being Heracles is going to come and release him from his pains.
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  The question of whether Zeus has agreed to that, and by now is ready to forgive or make friends with or whatever, reconcile with Prometheus, or whether Heracles comes and does that unilaterally.
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  And then later on, somehow, Zeus and Prometheus have to be reconciled in a separate deal around perhaps the prediction about the marriage…
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  About the danger of marrying Thetis and having a son mightier than his father.
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  All of those questions.
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  All of those questions.
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  So, you asked me, “What do I think happened?”
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  I really…
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  I think probably, even though it still had its own problems, that somehow after that long period, and under the duress of a threat of himself being overthrown,
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  Zeus, to some degree, learned to be a bit more diplomatic or pragmatic.
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  And when his son has intervened and shot the eagle, 
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  he starts revising his attitude with Prometheus a bit, and in the negotiations around the imminent prospect of his marrying or raping, whatever one calls Zeus’ engagements with women, with females,
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  that he decides to release Prometheus and become somewhat more friendly towards him.
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  And perhaps add to… There’s another dimension which I would like to include, which I think is probably likely to be part of the plan.
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  And this comes from Plato’s Protagoras, where the character Protagoras tells the story of Prometheus and the creation of humans.
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  And in that, Prometheus gives humans fire and technology, but it’s Zeus and Hermes who give them justice and the principle of consideration for others.
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  So, social living and political living is something that, in that version of the story, we owe to Zeus and Hermes.
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  Whereas the technology for survival against the elements and dangers and all of that is something we owe to Prometheus.
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  So, there’s a kind of alliance there, which doesn’t necessarily depend on a close, warm friendship between Zeus’ principle of power and dominance,
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  and Prometheus’ principle of intelligence, but it involves some kind of a cooperation between the two.
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  So, that’s what I’d be inclined to think.
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  I’m tempted by some of the interpretations that have more of a humiliation of Zeus, but that’s just my enjoyment of dramatic pizzazz.
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  I can’t say that there’s enough evidence in the play to know quite how Zeus is brought to reconciliation and support of Prometheus’ project.
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  Yeah, that’s great.
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  Thank you.
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  And we’ll come back to questions about Zeus’ character in a bit.
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  Maybe we could move on to how surprising, at least for modern readers and modern audiences, this play is.
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  After all, it’s a play that begins on the very edges of the known world where there are no humans.
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  The first character who speaks is Kratos’ power, accompanied by Bia, violence or force, and Kratos’ power.
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  Female policeman, which is not common in antiquity.
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  I think that’s true.
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  I didn’t even think of that, yes.
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  And then Kratos giving instructions to Hephaestus to hammer Prometheus, a Titan, into a rock.
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  I mean, that is how the play begins, which seems, again, to a modern audience, but I would like to think also to an ancient one, rather dramatic and surprising.
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  And, of course, we can think of lots of other kinds of surprises in the play, not just the characters, although Io certainly is quite extraordinary as a half-human, half-cow hybrid.
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  But also the sorts of stagings that it must have involved, for example, the final cataclysmic scene.
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  And then the plot of the play, too.
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  I mean, on this podcast, we’ve just been talking about the Oresteia in the previous episode.
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  We’ll be moving on to Oedipus the King and Medea.
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  We’re on a very different plane here in all kinds of ways.
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  So I was wondering, what are the most surprising and unusual aspects of this play for you, and how might we think about them?
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  Well, I agree.
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  It is a phenomenal, extraordinary, dramatic venture.
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  I mean, the whole cosmic scale and the chronological scale, particularly if it’s a trilogy covering hundreds, thousands of years, the edge of the planet, all the elements.
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  So Prometheus’ first speech addresses the air, the sun, the waters of the sea, the earth, and so on.
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  So it’s sort of elemental.
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  And then it’s about the really early days of humankind, battles amongst the gods for who runs the whole universe.
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  And Zeus, as a new ruler, kind of consolidating his power and bullying his perceived enemies, left, right, and center.
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  Zeus, the rapist, chasing after women and violating or threatening to violate them.
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  So it’s…
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  And then the torture of Prometheus, which is absolutely grisly.
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  I mean, it seems from the text we have that the sort of climax of the torch, you chain him up in this place where it’s going to go through sleep deprivation, hot, cold, you know, sort of from the seasons and the temperatures.
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  And then you drive a metal stake right through his chest.
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  It’s a technique of torture and execution, particularly referred to as impaling.
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  And different monarchies in the Near East practiced it.
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  Greeks seem not to have regularly practiced it.
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  But in any case, this is the king of the gods.
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  This is what he does to people that he feels angered by.
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  Why?
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  Because they help somebody that he wanted to wipe out.
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  It sounds eerily familiar with some of the rulers on the planet today.
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  And then the different reactions.
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  And then completely out of the blue, I mean, we have literally out of the blue, we have a chorus of oceanids flying in to meet him, which presumably there’s a moment where you wonder, oh my goodness, is this the eagle already?
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  There’s something he hears flying around coming towards him.
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  No, it’s not.
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  That’s going to come later.
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  The eagle won’t be even more for me.
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  Torture.
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  It’s like, you know, eternal punishments from God after you die.
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  So gods can be pretty cruel, but you don’t normally stage that for a character whom you’re being brought to sympathize with, because he is a lover of humans.
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  He’s a human.
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  He’s a friend of humans.
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  They use the Greek word, philanthropos, which we can recognize.
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  He has saved human beings.
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  He’s given us these gifts.
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  And Zeus can’t stand that.
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  It’s a pretty staggering concept.
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  How you get out of that, how you manage to get the two divinities to sort of make friends again, and what the human race is going to enjoy after the trilogy is over, there’s a lot that’s got to happen.
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  So in some ways, I think, you know, you could almost say it’s a fortunate twist of manuscript traditions, which plays happened to have made it through the Middle Ages, and which plays just didn’t get copied and rotted away, and we don’t have them.
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  We just have the little fragments.
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  In some ways, it’s all, I mean, I hate to say it, but you could say it’s almost a blessing that we have this one play, which then leaves us having to figure out, now what?
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  Well, at the end, when he sinks down into the earth as this sort of earthquake tsunami thing goes on all around him, the chorus either do or don’t join him.
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  I don’t think, probably in the version we’ve got, I don’t think the chorus can be included in that sinking down, but they say they want to stick with him anyway.
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  And the audience likewise, you might feel you like to join him, but we can’t.
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  We’re sitting in our seats, and we’ve got to go home and cook dinner, whatever, afterwards.
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  But Prometheus, so what’s going to happen next?
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  How do we follow up on that?
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  And what’s Zeus going to be doing for evermore, including, as it were, now?
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  You know, if this is our god, and this is how he started out, what’s he going to grow into?
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  Or has he changed?
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  Has he improved?
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  How did that all happen?
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  And where do humans sort of fit in the great plan?
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  Whose plan is it?
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  What was Prometheus’ plan?
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  Why does he care about us so much?
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  So all these questions, I think, having just the one play, and then having to figure for ourselves, what do we do next with this material?
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  And then you look at the different versions that, from the 19th century on particularly, well, actually all the way through.
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  I mean, there’s a tremendous long tradition of different versions of the Prometheus story as to what happened.
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  And some of them very famous, the two Shelleys, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, you know, Percy Shelley with the Prometheus Unbound, where Zeus is deposed.
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  And Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein creation, use of intelligence technology and so on, you know.
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  So people have done pretty extraordinary things with the story, in some ways all the more easily, because we don’t have the next play that we know existed, but we don’t quite know how it went.
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  So I’m not entirely disappointed that we don’t have the other play.
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  We can fantasize and remake it over and over, and we won’t all make it the same way.
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  Yeah, I think that’s completely right.
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  One of the most tantalizing things about this play, but also one of its most extraordinary is as a result of its being a single play, where the different directions we might take it in have profound consequences.
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  I don’t think there’s any other single surviving play where if we imagine what the sequel might be, it would have such consequence for who we are, what we are, what the gods are.
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  I mean, they’re just very big questions as well.
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  I wondered if I could just pick up on one of the things you mentioned there about Prometheus being philanthropic, from the Greek, philanthropos.
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  Could you maybe unpack for us a little bit what that is in this case?
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  Because we all think of Prometheus bringing fire, and that is the first image that we have of him in this play.
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  But then he delivers this extraordinary speech where it turns out he’s basically given humans everything or every technical thing, including writing, for example, or how to ride a horse, all the basic things that you need, as you said, to survive.
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  Is that surprising too, the way that Prometheus is presented in this respect?
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  Yes and no, I would say.
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  During the 5th century BCE, the interest in how human society evolved and how different political systems sort of evolved,
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  was something that several Greek thinkers start engaging with and writing about and speculating and arguing about.
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  So the idea that technological skills, technology and social, political planning and organization, and language, and then writing and culture and the arts,
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  the purpose of those and the origins of those were quite widely discussed.
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  And obviously authors, thinkers, philosophers, and artists are particularly interested in where does writing and thinking and philosophy and art come from.
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  And to that extent, the idea that somehow humans have some gifts, skills, attributes that they acquired that other creatures don’t have was and is.
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  I mean, I think it’s not that surprising that it’s a matter of real curiosity and fascination.
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  You know, the book of Genesis is quite interested in where human beings stand in relation to other animals and God’s plan, etc.
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  So the question of the nature of divinities and where gods or the god or whatever comes from and how he, she, they, whatever came to be there.
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  Well, in many societies, it isn’t the case, there’s always just been one from the very beginning.
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  In many religious systems, there’s more than one divinity.
30:46 –> 30:52
  Sometimes there’s been a genealogy of divinities taking over from other divinities or sharing things.
30:52 –> 30:55
  And then the question of where did humans come from?
30:55 –> 31:17
  Why are human beings and particularly either who made us or how did we evolve and why, if we have these special gifts that we are able to plan things and talk to each other and write stuff and build houses and cook.
31:17 –> 31:26
  Why did somebody have a plan that that should be the case that we’d be exceptional?
31:26 –> 31:28
  Did that just happen?
31:28 –> 31:35
  If so, is it something that humans have a sort of divine, a special spark of intelligence?
31:35 –> 31:40
  And the Greek word for intelligence will be something like metis.
31:40 –> 31:45
  Um, and pro metis is “forthinking.”
31:45 –> 31:52
  So the, an allegorical reading would say, well, human beings have prometheia.
31:52 –> 31:57
  They have smarts and they can do certain things.
31:57 –> 32:14
  And if you are religious, which most people have been until the last couple of hundred years, at least in the societies we know, um, then you may wonder, would the gods feel threatened by someone who is,
32:14 –> 32:24
  who is really smart and getting smarter all the time and figuring stuff up and trying to build towers up to heaven and master all the languages and whatever it may be.
32:24 –> 32:30
  So all these stories about the limitations of humans or God’s attitude to humans.
32:30 –> 32:36
  But then the question of maybe God planned humans as something that he was really fond of and proud of.
32:36 –> 32:42
  That’s what we used to, um, that’s what we used to on the whole, most of us of the Abrahamic traditions.
32:42 –> 32:48
  God creates humans as a special deal or something really like himself.
32:48 –> 32:53
  Um, in other traditions, humans come from somewhere else.
32:53 –> 33:02
  Um, the Greek tradition often says, but not always that Prometheus created humans out of mud.
33:02 –> 33:03
  He’s a potter god.
33:03 –> 33:10
  So making pots, you put the mud together and you shape it.
33:10 –> 33:20
  And then you use fire to turn it into this beautiful, useful object that you live with and make use of.
33:20 –> 33:24
  So is Prometheus the creator of humans?
33:24 –> 33:28
  And he’s fond of humans because we’re his kind of deal.
33:28 –> 33:35
  In which case Zeus and other Olympian gods are not as invested really in human beings.
33:35 –> 33:45
  So we’re never told in Prometheus Bound why Prometheus cares so much about humans and saves them from Zeus’s plan.
33:45 –> 33:50
  We never told either why exactly did Zeus want to annihilate.
33:50 –> 33:56
  Great word, aïstosai, make them invisible, to obliterate the human race.
33:56 –> 33:59
  And there are quite a lot of stories in Greek mythology.
33:59 –> 34:04
  I’m sure many of you have read them, um, about wiping humans out.
34:04 –> 34:07
  You know, the flood is one version of it.
34:07 –> 34:10
  The Trojan war to reduce the human population.
34:10 –> 34:11
  Zeus was annoyed at him.
34:11 –> 34:18
  So there are quite a number of different stories in which human races get wiped out and then new ones are created or whatever.
34:18 –> 34:26
  Um, Prometheus in this case has intervened in part of the civil war.
34:26 –> 34:33
  There’s been a sort of military coup in which Zeus has, with Prometheus’s help.
34:33 –> 34:43
  Of course, Prometheus is smart enough to figure out some plan, we’re told, that he is able to overthrow the older generation of gods,
34:43 –> 34:53
  which Prometheus himself actually belongs to, which is also kind of startling and puzzling as to why, how is this all going on?
34:53 –> 34:58
  Um, and then, so he’s helped Zeus with his coup.
34:58 –> 35:05
  Zeus has taken over, handed out various goodies and benefit, you know, you can be minister of this, you can be minister of that.
35:05 –> 35:12
  And then his particular pet enemies, okay, well, we’ll chain this one to a rock and drive a stake through in the middle of it.
35:12 –> 35:14
  You know, that’ll teach him.
35:14 –> 35:22
  Um, and Prometheus, meanwhile, though, has intervened to save the humans that he really cares about.
35:22 –> 35:25
  And Zeus is absolutely livid.
35:25 –> 35:32
  Again, in trying to make sense of this Zeus, um, was he just impatient?
35:32 –> 35:34
  Was he just, we’re told he’s young.
35:35 –> 35:37
  So he hasn’t kind of settled down yet.
35:37 –> 35:40
  He’s just an adolescent sort of a bit out of control.
35:40 –> 35:47
  And there’s also, I mean, there’s a really uncomfortable deal, isn’t it?
35:47 –> 35:59
  Around Zeus’s pursuit of women and his stalking and, um, torment of Io.
35:59 –> 36:00
  Yeah.
36:00 –> 36:02
  And how that’s going to turn out.
36:02 –> 36:05
  And he’s not apparently going to give up that habit.
36:05 –> 36:23
  And to be frank, you know, if you look at Greek culture and antiquity and most of the cultures we can study in, not just in antiquity, but arguably up to the present day, the extremely rich and famous and royal and powerful.
36:23 –> 36:33
  And the guys tend, the guys tend not to behave very decently towards women.
36:33 –> 36:35
  I mean, it’s obvious.
36:35 –> 36:38
  And the Greeks recognize that.
36:38 –> 36:48
  So their gods are part of that ruling class that dominates, um, pursues its own desires at the cost.
36:48 –> 36:52
  And so Io is put on stage as one of those victims.
36:52 –> 36:56
  Thetis is another in the future that he’s still pursuing.
36:56 –> 37:01
  And that’s very disconcerting for modern audience the way a lot of other things in this play are disconcerting.
37:01 –> 37:02
  Yeah.
37:02 –> 37:07
  We’re not sure what an ancient playwright and his audience made of that.
37:07 –> 37:17
  There are some cultures where accepting that as normal male behavior seems to be pretty widespread.
37:17 –> 37:24
  Um, so it may be that people thought of the Greek male gods as just being guys.
37:24 –> 37:28
  And the female gods actually aren’t that different.
37:28 –> 37:30
  I mean, Aphrodite and others.
37:30 –> 37:42
  So the sexual mores are different, but it seems from this play, doesn’t it, that we are meant to feel horrified and disgusted at Io’s situation.
37:42 –> 37:43
  Yes.
37:43 –> 37:46
  And that is not just because Hera has intervened.
37:46 –> 37:54
  It’s because Zeus is selfish in positions of his own desires are, um, revolting.
37:54 –> 37:58
  And, and again, this playwright has given us that.
37:58 –> 38:08
  And Prometheus is helping Io as best he can sort of deal with it and trying to reassure, well, at least you’re going to get something good out of it in the end.
38:08 –> 38:09
  Yeah.
38:09 –> 38:16
  So again, it’s, um, why does he care so much?
38:16 –> 38:18
  Why does Prometheus care?
38:18 –> 38:20
  Why is he so philanthropic?
38:20 –> 38:37
  And is, there have been one or some critics who’ve tried to claim, I mean, a bit in the sort of Mary Shelley trajectory, you could say, that, um, technology, we’re meant to get to understand that technology.
38:37 –> 38:51
  And engineering skills, you know, building houses and shipping and mining, et cetera, um, aren’t actually the key to living as good human beings.
38:51 –> 38:57
  And that it’s a sort of danger or overstepping of human natural limitations.
38:57 –> 39:05
  So we’re meant to recognize that Prometheus has sort of upset the natural order of things.
39:05 –> 39:23
  So perhaps, I mean, this isn’t Mary Shelley, but, um, there have been one, two readings of the play that have suggested we’re meant to see that Zeus actually has a good plan that human beings should be decent and smart and kind and invent democracy.
39:23 –> 39:26
  And that’s what’s going to happen in the long run.
39:26 –> 39:28
  And that Prometheus doesn’t quite get that yet.
39:28 –> 39:29
  Mm-hmm.
39:29 –> 39:31
  That’s why he has to be taught a lesson.
39:31 –> 39:38
  And I don’t, um, I don’t myself think that the dynamics of this play really convey that.
39:38 –> 39:47
  Um, it seems Zeus is arbitrary and fierce and cruel and vindictive behaviors.
39:47 –> 40:06
  And the models of his power, you know, the agents, Kratos and Bia, you know, are so, um, crude and fierce and unfeeling, um, or not even unfeeling.
40:06 –> 40:31
  Kratos seems to enjoy inflicting, even, um, you know, sadistic that those, um, elements of Zeus’s character and behavior and administration of power, um, as well as his treatment of Io and her family, you know, we’re going to wipe out the whole of this, her family, if she doesn’t succumb to his desires.
40:31 –> 40:32
  Yeah.
40:32 –> 40:41
  Um, that, that would make it really hard for us to see Zeus as having a benevolent plan for how the planet can best flourish.
40:41 –> 40:57
  Um, and so Prometheus as his victim and the sympathy that he finds to show for him and that others show for him, the chorus shows for him, um, it seems hard not to feel that we as an audience share that.
40:57 –> 40:58
  Yeah.
40:58 –> 41:02
  We are grateful to him for whatever he’s done, why ever he did it.
41:02 –> 41:07
  Now, it may have been, there was a first play that makes quite clear why he’s pro human.
41:07 –> 41:08
  Maybe he did create humans.
41:08 –> 41:10
  Um, but it’s odd.
41:10 –> 41:14
  He doesn’t mention pottery amongst the gifts that he gave humans.
41:14 –> 41:23
  So yeah, it’s one of the things we can fill in through the lucky, unlucky chance that this one play stands just by itself.
41:23 –> 41:29
  And we have to kind of put, put in the prequel and the sequel to make it make sense for ourselves.
41:30 –> 41:31
  That’s, that’s fantastic.
41:31 –> 41:32
  Thank you.
41:32 –> 41:39
  And, um, gives us a very good sense of the complexities of Prometheus and how to understand him and also of Zeus.
41:39 –> 41:47
  And how also to, if we wish, create a political reading of this play, um, as a result.
41:47 –> 42:01
  Um, I also really appreciated that you draw our attention to Io, who, if you watch the play or you read the play, you realize how much space, how much time she takes up.
42:01 –> 42:05
  And the scene with her is a very long and significant one.
42:05 –> 42:14
  But of course, Prometheus in our imagination is, is Prometheus without Io, um, when we go beyond this play.
42:14 –> 42:20
  Um, I should draw this to a close, uh, but Mark, thank you so much for taking part in this conversation.
42:20 –> 42:24
  It was really fantastic to hear your thoughts on this remarkable play.
42:24 –> 42:26
  Well, thank you for inviting me.
42:26 –> 42:34
  And, uh, it’s really been fun and, um, it’s always, yeah, it’s a, it’s a play to think about.
42:34 –> 42:40
  Um, you talked about coming to Berkeley to your work.
42:40 –> 42:52
  My own dissertation was on this play and I haven’t spent the whole of the last 50 years talking about this play, but it’s wonderful to get back and think about it after all this time.
42:52 –> 42:53
  Thank you.
42:56 –> 43:11
  It was wonderful for me to hear Mark’s thoughts on this extraordinary play.
43:11 –> 43:23
  If you would like to hear more of them, we also discussed issues of staging, we talked more about poor IO, then you can access the full recording of our conversation on the website.
43:23 –> 43:35
  But now let’s move on to thinking about Prometheus Bound rather differently from the perspective of how we might play with it now, or rather with its trilogy now.
43:35 –> 43:40
  Stay with me for an interview with theatre director, Annie Dorsen.
43:50 –> 43:59
  So I’m joined by Annie Dorsen, who is a renowned theatre director and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award among many other accolades.
43:59 –> 44:16
  She is perhaps best known for co-creating the Broadway musical Passing Strange, but also for her algorithmic theatre, her experimentation with the interface of humans and technology through art, algorithmic art and live human performance.
44:16 –> 44:31
  Her prolific work in this area includes Hello, Hi There from 2010, A Piece of Work from 2013, Yesterday, Tomorrow (2015), and most recently Prometheus Firebringer, which premiered in 2023.
44:31 –> 44:38
  Thank you very much, Annie, for taking time out of an incredibly busy schedule to join me here today.
44:38 –> 44:39
  It’s my pleasure.
44:39 –> 44:56
  So I’ve invited you to this podcast because in this episode, we are thinking about Prometheus Bound, the Escalian play about, you could say broadly, power, victimhood, knowledge and technology.
44:56 –> 45:03
  And of course, there are many adaptations and reworkings of that play and the figure of Prometheus that could be discussed.
45:03 –> 45:08
  We could talk about Promethean the element or Frankenstein.
45:08 –> 45:26
  But I have been really inspired by your use of Prometheus to create a version not of Prometheus Bound, which is our fully surviving play about this figure, but Prometheus Firebringer.
45:27 –> 45:40
  And I think this piece can really expand our ways of thinking, not just about the themes of the ancient play or plays and their relevance for the present, but also about the nature of performance itself, ancient and modern.
45:40 –> 45:44
  So very excited to talk to you.
45:44 –> 45:56
  I wondered first if you might be able to explain to our listeners, what is algorithmic theatre and how has your experimentation with it developed over the last 15 years or so?
45:56 –> 46:00
  Yeah, that’s a good place to start.
46:00 –> 46:07
  So I began working with algorithms and performance in 20, well, 2008, actually.
46:07 –> 46:09
  It took two years to make Hello Hi There.
46:09 –> 46:17
  And that was, of course, before such a thing as generative AI was available commercially or known to anyone.
46:17 –> 46:19
  So I was doing things really the old-fashioned way.
46:19 –> 46:36
  I was working with computer programmers and we were doing, you know, designing and writing our own algorithms that would take some kind of data set or some kind of corpus of text and recombine it according to different algorithmic logics.
46:36 –> 46:51
  So I was really inspired by, you know, I kind of thinking about chance operations, thinking about John Cage, thinking about algorithmic visual art and music and wondering, you know, what would happen if I would apply those same techniques in theatre?
46:51 –> 47:03
  And of course, the questions are very different in theatre because, you know, visual art and music are not primarily storytelling art forms.
47:03 –> 47:14
  So when you start dealing with language and dramatic language and the notion of character, all of a sudden there’s all kinds of new problems for, you know, computations to wrestle with.
47:14 –> 47:19
  And that was, you know, that was kind of what I was doing.
47:19 –> 47:36
  I was sort of doing various kinds of experiments, you know, with the pieces that you mentioned and a couple of others that were really trying to think like what happens when you apply a certain algorithmic process to a certain content.
47:36 –> 47:50
  And what dramaturgical, I don’t know, propositions can I develop or invent or, you know, that suggest themselves to me.
47:50 –> 47:55
  And then along came generative AI, as we know it.
47:55 –> 48:00
  I started getting glimpses of it pretty early.
48:00 –> 48:09
  You know, I sort of joke that like another way of looking at the history of my algorithmic work is as a kind of prehistory of large language models.
48:09 –> 48:20
  Because starting in about 2011, I started to learn about new kind of statistical techniques that were being used with large data sets of language.
48:20 –> 48:27
  But I didn’t really understand how it would all come together until about 2018.
48:27 –> 48:31
  And then I got quite nervous about what it would mean.
48:31 –> 48:39
  But at that time, of course, no one had any inkling that these big tech companies were about to just release this stuff into the world and try to make a profit selling them.
48:39 –> 48:44
  So it was still understood as a research project.
48:44 –> 48:51
  When ChatGPT, well, I guess first was the image generators and stable diffusion.
48:51 –> 48:55
  And then came ChatGPT in 2022.
48:55 –> 49:00
  You know, this is a dumb joke.
49:00 –> 49:01
  It’s a terrible joke.
49:01 –> 49:06
  But the dumb joke is that I was like the first artist who was put out of work by generative AI.
49:06 –> 49:12
  Because I thought, you know, all the kinds of experiments that I had been doing were no longer really interesting.
49:12 –> 49:21
  But there’s this new thing which is not particularly compelling to work with as an artist, in my opinion.
49:21 –> 49:25
  You know, for reasons, but we don’t need to get into them too much, I guess.
49:25 –> 49:28
  But, you know, that turned me off the project a little bit.
49:28 –> 49:35
  But I did think at some point I’m going to have to make a piece that addresses this new stuff.
49:35 –> 49:40
  And that became Prometheus Firebringer.
49:40 –> 49:41
  That’s great. Thank you.
49:41 –> 49:51
  It really puts in crystal clear context where Prometheus Firebringer comes from and at what moment it comes into being.
49:51 –> 50:00
  Could you now describe Prometheus Firebringer both as a performance and in terms of some of the questions it explores?
50:00 –> 50:05
  Yeah. So, you know, I always think, I think kind of like a historian.
50:05 –> 50:11
  So I always feel like the best way to describe my pieces is to talk about, like, how they came about.
50:11 –> 50:17
  You know, so I thought that I was going to have to deal with generative AI at some point.
50:17 –> 50:21
  I also thought at some point I’m going to have to deal with the Prometheus story.
50:21 –> 50:32
  Because it is such a foundational myth about technology, the pros and the cons, the benefits to humanity, or is it or what.
50:32 –> 50:43
  And when I went back to reread Prometheus Bound, what I was really struck with at this moment was the relationship between technology and state power.
50:43 –> 50:53
  So that became very much the focus of my thinking around this project.
50:53 –> 50:59
  And I was also, I had sort of never really noticed that there was a third play.
50:59 –> 51:02
  You know, I mean, I knew Prometheus Bound.
51:02 –> 51:08
  We know there’s Prometheus Unbound, which Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a version of.
51:08 –> 51:10
  So there’s fragments of that play that exist.
51:10 –> 51:19
  And then somehow in my reading, I finally understood that there was a third play and that there was only one little line that still exists.
51:19 –> 51:29
  So I started going around making, again, bad jokes about how I was going to use a, you know, machine learning program to fill in the missing play.
51:29 –> 51:32
  And I was kind of amazed because people took me seriously.
51:32 –> 51:47
  They thought somehow that ChatGPT would be able to do that, you know, that there’d be something authentic about a reconstruction of this play by, you know, a large language model.
51:47 –> 51:50
  Anyway, so at that point I thought, okay, so this is where we are.
51:50 –> 51:51
  We’re with this third play.
51:51 –> 51:57
  Then I researched more and I realized, wow, they don’t, nobody knows anything about this play.
51:57 –> 52:14
  I mean, even to the point of not being sure if it’s the first play in the trilogy or the third play in the trilogy, if it was actually part of some original Prometheus trilogy that was in competition or whether it’s something else, a kind of bastard child of that.
52:14 –> 52:21
  Whether it was a sadder play, whether it was a tragedy, whether, you know, and there were so many questions about it.
52:21 –> 52:31
  And as I talked to more classicists like you, they said, yeah, but you know, the secret is that actually all the Greek plays that we have, nobody really knows very much about them.
52:31 –> 52:38
  There’s a lot of things that are inferred or kind of speculated about and that sort of become the way we approach these plays.
52:38 –> 52:42
  But in truth, you know, there’s always a kind of reconstruction going on.
52:42 –> 52:48
  So that made me feel very free and easy about doing something with it.
52:49 –> 52:54
  And then I thought also, you know, what if we had always had all three plays?
52:54 –> 53:04
  So let’s imagine for a second that Prometheus Firebringer was not a lost play, that Prometheus Unbound was not a lost play, that they had been parts one, two, and three of a trilogy.
53:04 –> 53:12
  What would our understanding, what would our formative understandings of technology be?
53:12 –> 53:22
  Maybe we would have grown up with a completely different set of questions, mythologies, defaults, assumptions, you know.
53:22 –> 53:35
  We get the first part of the story, or maybe we do, that leaves us in this moment where Prometheus is figured as a kind of hero who doesn’t give in to the tyrannical Zeus,
53:35 –> 53:43
  who takes his, you know, torture and continues to somehow do it all for humanity, right?
53:43 –> 53:48
  So that kind of romantic notion is what Shelley was attracted to.
53:48 –> 53:50
  It’s also what Karl Marx was attracted to.
53:50 –> 53:53
  It’s what a lot of people have been attracted to in the romantic era.
53:53 –> 54:12
  But what if we’d always known that actually by the end of it, Prometheus gives it up and that Prometheus capitulates or Prometheus becomes a tool of the state, becomes a tool of the tyrannical Zeus.
54:13 –> 54:15
  That’s kind of where we are now.
54:15 –> 54:34
  Or that there’s this complicity, let’s say, between state power and the power of technological innovation, control over information and control over violence, you could say.
54:34 –> 54:44
  So Prometheus Bound begins with the sort of Zeus’s minions coming on stage and they represent state violence, right?
54:44 –> 54:52
  The ability to actually tie up Prometheus to control his body, which, as we know, is eventually the power of all states.
54:52 –> 54:55
  It’s the power to control the body and lock you up.
54:56 –> 55:13
  So, you know, instead of figuring Prometheus as a hero, I started thinking, well, how do we get from the end of that play to a place where Prometheus is sitting at the Trump inauguration?
55:13 –> 55:19
  Not to be too stupid about it, but I like to start with stupid ideas like this.
55:20 –> 55:25
  And, you know, that was kind of the jumping off point.
55:25 –> 55:30
  So I started working with all commercial products.
55:30 –> 55:37
  So I said, you know, for whatever, 15 years, I only worked with programmers and we wrote all our code.
55:37 –> 55:38
  We wrote our own algorithms.
55:38 –> 55:41
  We never touched a kind of commercial product.
55:41 –> 55:45
  For this piece, I thought I’m only using commercial products.
55:45 –> 55:58
  So it was ChatGPT and it’s, you know, off-the-shelf text-to-speech software or voice, you know, LLM-based voice simulator.
55:58 –> 56:06
  And I used one of the image generators to create some of the visuals for the piece.
56:06 –> 56:08
  So it was all off-the-shelf software.
56:08 –> 56:11
  And I thought, okay, that is going to be the sort of fictional part of this.
56:13 –> 56:18
  There’s going to be the story somehow of the play with Prometheus and a chorus.
56:18 –> 56:23
  And that will all be made by generative AI.
56:23 –> 56:29
  And then on the other side of the stage, well, you know, what happens, of course, in rehearsal is you start listening to the stuff you made.
56:29 –> 56:35
  And you think, oh, God, this is not really good enough to carry attention for the whole performance.
56:35 –> 56:36
  It really needs contextualization.
56:36 –> 56:37
  It needs something else.
56:37 –> 56:52
  So I put myself on stage, on the other side of the stage, and created a kind of lecture that was in some way doing something like what machine learning training is doing.
56:52 –> 57:04
  Which is to say, everything I said was borrowed or stolen, if you like, from an already existing published text by any number of different authors.
57:04 –> 57:20
  So I thought of it, you know, there’s some theorist or commenter on AI who talks about how LLMs are a way of navigating the enormity of all of the language that exists online.
57:20 –> 57:24
  So I thought, okay, well, that’s kind of how I’ll construct my lecture.
57:24 –> 57:28
  So I’ll navigate through thickets of other people’s language.
57:28 –> 57:40
  And that raised lots of questions about how does language operate in the world, public discourse, what does it need to have ownership over intellectual property?
57:40 –> 57:43
  Of course, I was in law school at the same time I was making these.
57:43 –> 57:45
  So I was thinking about a lot of those questions, too.
57:47 –> 58:00
  And fundamentally, you know, what is our encounter with stories, with language, with each other, with the stage, with theater, all about?
58:00 –> 58:02
  You know, what do we want from it?
58:02 –> 58:06
  What are we hoping for when we go see a play?
58:07 –> 58:12
  And I thought the paucity of the generative AI tools was super, super clear.
58:12 –> 58:27
  I almost thought it was so clear that I didn’t think about it as a competition between me and it, because I just thought it’s so obvious that the AI-generated material is, you know, banal and sort of pathetic.
58:29 –> 58:59
  But I did think it was something interesting, maybe, about using these really ridiculous scenes that the model would output and sort of having my, I don’t know what, borrowed thoughts in relationship to those, I don’t know, statistically averaged thoughts is one way you can think about what the difference is.
58:59 –> 59:14
  Yeah, no, that’s great. And also the combination of the juxtaposition exposes human processes in really interesting ways in terms of our own information gathering.
59:14 –> 59:29
  And then I’m also thinking about this from a classic scholar perspective, where in order to reconstruct the fragments of a play like this, we go to other plays and other fragments and then kind of put it all together.
59:30 –> 59:42
  So it’s really interesting how on the one hand, this performance creates a clear division between human and tech and what each can produce.
59:42 –> 59:45
  And on the other hand, it really muddies that at the same time.
59:46 –> 59:57
  It does. And, you know, I always am responding to technologists or sort of AI hype beasts who say, but, you know, what an LLM does is the same thing as what humans do, right?
59:57 –> 59:59
  We read a lot. That’s how we learn.
59:59 –> 01:00:12
  And, you know, there’s not that many of them in spoken language. There’s, you know, potentially infinite set because we can construct new coinages.
01:00:12 –> 01:00:18
  But basically spoken language, written language, you know, there’s a kind of a set of the words we all use.
01:00:18 –> 01:00:20
  They all come from this. They get reused over and over again.
01:00:20 –> 01:00:25
  And to me, this misses the point completely.
01:00:25 –> 01:00:34
  You know, it’s really what humans are doing, even in the example you just gave about researching other plays, finding fragments,
01:00:35 –> 01:00:42
  seeing what you can understand from those that shed light, that might shed light on what you’re looking at.
01:00:42 –> 01:00:46
  This is a thinking process. This is not an ingestion process.
01:00:46 –> 01:00:55
  And it’s not about statistical, mathematical representations of the relationships between words.
01:00:55 –> 01:01:03
  It’s about the relationship of what the words are saying.
01:01:04 –> 01:01:14
  So, you know, what I found fun to play with way back when, you know, in 2010, 2012, 2013,
01:01:14 –> 01:01:21
  was that there was very little semantic capability for natural language programming.
01:01:21 –> 01:01:23
  You know, it was pretty rudimentary.
01:01:23 –> 01:01:25
  There was some, but it was pretty rudimentary.
01:01:25 –> 01:01:34
  So, you’d constantly bump up against, you know, a kind of nonsense that obeyed the rules of grammar, but didn’t make sense,
01:01:34 –> 01:01:41
  or that obeyed the algorithmic rules, but was just completely alien to how human beings talk.
01:01:42 –> 01:01:51
  Now, of course, we have a much better imitation of human language with the statistical models, but they’re still doing the same thing.
01:01:51 –> 01:02:04
  They’re still just probabilistically guessing, you know, what word should follow what word according to the vast training corpus that it’s looked at.
01:02:05 –> 01:02:08
  To me, this is completely unlike what humans do.
01:02:08 –> 01:02:10
  Completely unlike.
01:02:10 –> 01:02:15
  There’s, we don’t ingest billions of lines of text.
01:02:15 –> 01:02:16
  We sure don’t.
01:02:16 –> 01:02:20
  You know, we pick what we think is valuable to read.
01:02:20 –> 01:02:22
  We go looking for things.
01:02:22 –> 01:02:26
  When you go to the library, you talk to the library, and you say, I’m looking for something like this at the library.
01:02:26 –> 01:02:30
  And maybe people say, well, I know of a couple things that might be like that.
01:02:30 –> 01:02:33
  This is an entirely different process.
01:02:33 –> 01:02:43
  So, the process of my writing the lecture that went alongside was not a process of, you know, it was not a mathematical process.
01:02:44 –> 01:02:47
  It was, you know, I thought about structure, but that’s something else.
01:02:47 –> 01:03:01
  I thought about audience experience and when information should come out and how to, you know, finesse some of the things that I wanted to say were kind of thorny theoretical.
01:03:01 –> 01:03:05
  So, I didn’t want too much of that because a little goes a long way when you’re listening.
01:03:05 –> 01:03:14
  So, you know, how to balance things and make variety and variety of eras, a variety of speakers and types of language genres.
01:03:15 –> 01:03:30
  It couldn’t be more unlike, but, of course, the framing of generative AI has been since 1950 that we’re trying to create a computer that can imitate a human.
01:03:31 –> 01:03:43
  So, that puts us in a certain mind frame of looking for those similarities and saying, well, how different is it really?
01:03:43 –> 01:03:50
  But it always seemed to me that I’m not sure why we’re looking for something that can imitate humans.
01:03:50 –> 01:03:51
  We are already humans.
01:03:51 –> 01:03:53
  We don’t need something that does what we do.
01:03:53 –> 01:03:54
  We can already do what we do.
01:03:54 –> 01:04:01
  A useful tool would be one that does something that we can’t do, not something that we already can do.
01:04:02 –> 01:04:06
  So, anyway, that’s how I think about that question.
01:04:06 –> 01:04:21
  I should say maybe just in terms of description so that the AI-generated material was performed just by voices and masks that were also generated by, you know, an image model.
01:04:21 –> 01:04:22
  I think we used runway in the end.
01:04:22 –> 01:04:29
  So, if you’re wondering, people listening, sort of what are you actually looking at on stage?
01:04:29 –> 01:04:34
  You have on one side of the stage, you have me at a desk talking on the other side of the stage.
01:04:34 –> 01:04:49
  There was a sort of installation of, you know, AI-generated, ancient-looking kind of weird, cursed images of theater masks that were speaking the text.
01:04:49 –> 01:04:52
  Thank you.
01:04:52 –> 01:04:57
  Yeah, and I’d love to come back to those masks, that chorus, in a second.
01:04:57 –> 01:05:19
  I just first wanted to very quickly go back to what you said about choosing the play itself and knowing this complex and irresolvable debate about where this play comes in maybe one particular trilogy,
01:05:19 –> 01:05:29
  or maybe it’s part of an older trilogy or tetralogy, maybe it’s a tragedy, maybe it’s actually a satyr play and it could be kind of obscene and comic.
01:05:31 –> 01:05:48
  But one of the reasons why I find it so alluring, this play, is because it fundamentally affects our understanding of this story, the role that Prometheus plays, the technology he brings, the punishment he suffers.
01:05:48 –> 01:05:59
  And I think that’s a lot of times, if there’s a lot of times, if there’s a lot of times, if there’s a celebration of him as Firebringer at the end, with this play all being about that, that has a much more optimistic tone than if it’s at the beginning.
01:05:59 –> 01:06:07
  So I know that those questions weren’t there, you know, for your, you weren’t expecting an audience to know that.
01:06:07 –> 01:06:23
  But, but it’s really interesting to think with that, that the meager fragments we have hold out all of these possibilities and, or ChatGPT, as I know from my search just earlier today, just decides on one of them.
01:06:24 –> 01:06:44
  But there are all of these different options to sort of work your way through, which all bring about different responses to, or feelings about who Prometheus is, whose uses, and the technology that he brings, all the technology he brings for humans.
01:06:44 –> 01:06:52
  Exactly right. And I’m not sure where I got the idea from. It must have been a scholar that I read, because I don’t make these kinds of things up.
01:06:52 –> 01:06:59
  But somebody suggested that the third play would be the reconciliation or capitulation of Prometheus with Zeus.
01:06:59 –> 01:07:06
  So that stuck, obviously, because I thought, well, that’s, I can work with that, you know.
01:07:06 –> 01:07:16
  But yeah, you’re right. I mean, the not knowing means, what did Aeschylus want to tell us about technology and power? We don’t know.
01:07:16 –> 01:07:21
  And that’s why it’s so, sorry, that’s not meant to be a pun, but so generative.
01:07:22 –> 01:07:45
  Yeah. So to get back to the masks. So as you were saying, it’s not just that the text that was appearing on the screen was AI generated, but there were these voices that were also AI generated.
01:07:45 –> 01:07:56
  And they were coming from masks that were modeled through AI as well. So that is a chorus of some sort.
01:07:56 –> 01:08:03
  As I was just wondering, yeah, what about the Greek chorus appealed to you?
01:08:03 –> 01:08:12
  Was it just a way to refer to the Greek model? Or were you thinking about the role of these sort of disembodied heads more deeply?
01:08:12 –> 01:08:29
  So, you know, they’re very much the chorus. And sometimes they even, you know, every performance is a new set of outputs for the prompts. So the text can be quite different night to night and the songs that the chorus sings can be quite different night to night.
01:08:30 –> 01:08:51
  But they sometimes even sing, you know, we are the chorus. And it’s very cute. That seems super important to me. It’s really, if you’re trying to think about the Prometheus story, there’s three figures. There’s Zeus, there’s Prometheus, and there’s humans.
01:08:52 –> 01:09:09
  And, you know, in Prometheus Bound, of course, it’s a completely static situation. And Prometheus gets these visitors. And I think none of them are human, right? They’re all sort of mystical, mythical creatures.
01:09:09 –> 01:09:13
  The closest to human is a cow. A cow woman.
01:09:13 –> 01:09:17
  Yeah, right. The closest to cow woman in Europa, right? Or Io.
01:09:17 –> 01:09:17
  Io.
01:09:17 –> 01:09:33
  Yeah. And so I thought, you know, like, it’s all about whether humans are empowered by this gift of fire or not. And so we got to have humans there.
01:09:35 –> 01:09:53
  So then somehow in my experimentations, this I will say, I will confess, that I think the original notion of the chorus being a group of orphaned children was maybe showing up in a chat GPT output.
01:09:54 –> 01:10:08
  And I thought, well, we keep that. So that’s the chorus that we’re dealing with. And that, of course, allowed for some of the scenes to be scenes of suffering with the little orphaned children.
01:10:08 –> 01:10:36
  And it also allowed for a certain kind of vulnerability. And it allowed for the orphaned children to not know what the future would bring and to be kind of cast out in a state of uncertainty, which was helpful sort of that, you know, kind of transitional state that a lot of Greek choruses are in, where there’s an untenable situation of some kind, but it’s unclear how it’s all going to play out.
01:10:36 –> 01:10:40
  So they spent a lot of time thinking, what’s going to happen? I don’t know.
01:10:40 –> 01:10:42
  Yeah. And they never know. Yeah.
01:10:42 –> 01:10:48
  They never know. And then things happen and they react and they say, but now what’s going to happen?
01:10:48 –> 01:10:56
  So, you know, that sort of gave us a lot to play with in terms of thinking through kind of what the story would be.
01:10:56 –> 01:11:05
  And it also felt like it gave the stakes for the audience in some kind of way as we are hurtling towards unknown futures ourselves.
01:11:06 –> 01:11:15
  That, you know, Prometheus and Zeus are having this battle and the humans, of course, are the ones who are going to get it in the end.
01:11:15 –> 01:11:20
  So that seemed real. Relatable.
01:11:22 –> 01:11:34
  That’s great. I know I need to draw this to a close. So thank you. Thank you so much for taking this time. I really enjoyed speaking with you.
01:11:49 –> 01:12:06
  Thanks to Mark and Annie. We have ranged from gods to humans, from Prometheus as philanthropos, to Zeus as a tyrant with sadistic minions, from ancient ideas about humans and their technologies to modern ones.
01:12:06 –> 01:12:13
  And we have seen how this figure and this play inspire some of the most innovative theatre of our day.
01:12:13 –> 01:12:22
  Next episode, I’ll be leaving Aeschylus behind and turning to Sophocles, specifically Oedipus the King.
01:12:22 –> 01:12:28
  I’ll be joined by Dr. Lindsay Coo from the University of Bristol to discuss the ancient play.
01:12:28 –> 01:12:42
  And then I’ll talk to Janet Eilber, Artistic Director of the Martha Graham Dance Company, about Night Journey, where Graham reimagines through dance the Oedipus story from the perspective of Jocasta.
01:12:42 –> 01:12:47
  So thank you for listening today and do join me for episode four.