Neitzsche, Attic Tragedy & the Drive Towards Artistic Creation

During week 5, Dr. Reddick was explaining the origin of the theatre, stating that the Greek tragedy originated from the Dionysia, a festival in worship of the Greek god of wine. In the woods, drunken Maenad women ate an effigy of Dionysus near a central fire. The entire village would then dance around the fire in a circle referred to as an orchestra or dancing place, in order to enter an ecstatic state. As the ritual continued to change over time, they made a backdrop, called a scenae, from which we inherit the word scene. Then, part of the village split off from the ritual to become audience members rather than dancing themselves, and they would sit in an area called a theatron, or the place from which you see. The smaller group who engage in dancing were referred to as a chorus. Next, the ritual evolved so that one of the members of the chorus stands aside and became a narrator; the narrator then became two, the protagonist and antagonist; and finally, the chorus was transformed into actors, with the ritual coming to approximate the form of the Greek tragedy. The continuity between the development of this Greek ritual and the traditional artistic forms of today, demonstrated in the continued employment of these Greek terms to describe musical and theatrical performances, shows that art is born out of an effort to express the urge towards religious ecstasy in ways that conform to controlled standards of aesthetic beauty.

The story of the development of tragedy was drawn upon by Neitzsche in order to argue that two antithetical urges exist within the human drive towards aesthetic creation: the Appolonian, which is the urge towards order, reason, light, rationality, competence, and symmetry, and stasis; and Dionysian, which is the urge towards intoxication, revelry, emotion, darkness, chaos, sensuality, and change. He states in The Birth of Tragedy that the Greek tragedy is the highest form of art because it incorporates elements from both the Appolonian and Dionysian, noting "the two creative tendencies developed alongside one another, usually in fierce opposition, each by its taunts forcing the other to more energetic production, both perpetuating in a discordant concord that agon which the term art but feebly denominates: until at last, [....] the pair accepted the yoke of marriage and [...] begot Attic tragedy, which exhibits the salient features of both parents” (11). In this passage, Nietzsche uses the metaphor of marriage to describe the way in which art is the product of an erotic conflict between the drives towards ecstasy and control, with the 'marriage' between these two divine sponsors of creation serving as an illustration of this phenomenon. 

Furthermore, throughout the history of art, a push and pull can be observed between movements that could be described as relatively more Apollonian or Dionysian than that which proceeded it; For example, renaissance art sought to revive classical ideas by focusing on realism and perspective, reflecting a movement towards the Apollonian; this was followed by Baroque art that embodied drama and emotion through techniques such as chiaroscuro and the employment of asymmetrical, curved shapes, demonstrating a reactive emphasis on more Dionysian aspects compared to its Renaissance precursors. The same dynamic of shifting relative to the artistic movements that proceeded it can be observed in the moves from Rococo to Neoclassicism, Neoclassicism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Realism, and Realism to Modernism. The Postmodern could be seen as a deviation from this dialectic, with an emphasis on challenging traditional forms of art and modes of artistic creation.