“We saw the parallel in La Haine because in the French suburbs people are often foreign, or immigrants, or from immigrant families and there is this sense that they’re not properly French,” says Davis Kline, a junior in the Classics department. Students said the final projects prompted them to consider “tragedy as part of the Greek world.' A graduate student produced an architectural analysis of Medea’s home, or oikos. One group of students explored lighting and movement in Medea, while another reimagined the play in a French banlieue, inspired by the movie La Haine. These final projects, developed in conversation with Shah, included several different approaches. Students worked on line-by-line translations of the original, and were tested in translation exams, but they also produced a final project engaging Medea in a creative way. Professor Holmes invited Shah to collaborate on designing the final project assignment for the class on Medea last semester in a bid to show students that precise knowledge of an ancient Greek text is always counterposed by the polysemic responses it produces around the world. Students will be invited to watch extracts of a new film and participate in discussions about Classical theater and pedagogy with Shah and other members of his production team. Uprooting Medea will arrive in Princeton next week, on February 24-25. “We are trying to create a rounded approach by making new work and encouraging new perspectives on Classical theatre without making it into a bastion of ‘western civilization,’” Shah says.

Francesca Amewudah-Rivers and Shah’s award-winning adaptation of the ancient Greek tragedy, which features a global majority cast, explores underplayed themes about belonging and otherness, race and identity in the play. Professor Holmes rethought Princeton’s intermediate-level translation class after writer and producer Shivaike Shah reached out to discuss their upcoming tour of Uprooting Medea. “There are so many re-adaptations of these narratives and myths, which is itself an empirical demonstration that they are amenable to multiple forms of storytelling.” “There are multiple ways of knowing the text,” Professor Holmes says. They also speak to the pedagogical method used by Classics Professor Brooke Holmes to teach Euripides’s Medea by introducing students to different modern adaptations. The 3D image of the sculpture is replaced with words from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1969 film, Medea: “A vessel full of knowledge that is not mine.” The words seem like a perfect commentary on the video-art, which a roomful of Princeton students watch, hushed.

A dark screen transforms into a cosmic expanse as a meteoric sculpture scrolls into view.

Medea euripides full text