Encountering Dionysus (Spring 2020)

Encountering Dionysus: 

Mar. 31 - May 12
7:00pm - 10:00pm 

Instructor: Emma Pauly

Encountering Dionysus bridges the centuries between us and the tragic canon, pushing back against exclusion and gatekeeping that surrounds classical works. Participants will engage with Greek tragedy as a means of fueling their own creativity, using tragic texts as springboards or inspiration towards their own projects. This engagement will be done through the lens of Dionysus himself, the deity in whose honor the texts were created, a god of creation and destruction, ambiguity and contradiction, death and rebirth.

This storytelling and discussion-based class includes in-class time for generative work, as well as short writing assignments in between sessions. Primary readings will be the three plays covered (Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, and The Bacchae by Euripides), as well as short related articles and essays, with optional additional text if requested. The seminar will conclude with a showcase and while this class is primarily geared towards playwrights, it is open to any and all breed of creative practitioner comfortable with writing. 
 

If anyone has ever made you feel like Greek tragedy is ‘not for you’, this class is here to prove them wrong.