Music and the Theoroi’s Experience: The Praxis of Spectatorship in Ingmar Bergman’s The Bacchae

Abstract

In Ancient Greece, theoria referred to a journey abroad in order to contemplate an event or spectacle. The participation in the event involved a ritualized mode of spectating that had a transformative effect for the beholders, who would return with a broader worldview to the city. Music played a key role in the social, ritual, and aesthetic dimensions of the theoroi’s experience—despite the Greek sources’ focus on the visual aspect of the event. When theoria was later on reduced to an activity of the mind, the concept clearly identified that the transformation took place in the spectators’ consciousness, but it also detached such transformation from its original ritual context, thus missing its close bonds to praxis. How could an exploration of theoria in its original context help us rethink our current understanding of not only theory, but also music? What could a focus on spectatorship tell us about the role music played in the theoroi’s experience? And how could the awareness of this performative dimension of music affect the theorist’s practice? In this paper I will explore these questions through Ingmar Bergman’s adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae in his TV-opera Backanterna (1993). In the film, the world of the tragedy is created by the camera following the music. The operatic adaptation is a felicitous way of rendering the tragedy’s focus on the different experiences Dionysus generates in the characters. During moments of choreia, music transforms the dramatic performance of the bacchants into a ritual in which the Dionysian epiphany and myth are reenacted. The chorus, who represents the actual audience, shifts freely between the performative, the dramatic, and the communal levels of the performance. The film thus addresses the tragedy’s metatheatricality and the crossing of boundaries between drama and ritual, and reveals how the dramatic events are highly determined by the theoroi’s listening and musical experiences.