Dionysus after Nietzsche

Theater and Crisis

“…Although Schechner's performances highlighted a sexual dimension to Dionysiac revelry, Soyinka interprets the Dionysiac spirit in terms of a deeper revolution that might be expressed sexually but that is more fundamentally the potential transformation of the culture at large. 10 Whereas previous treatments of Schechner and Soyinka convey the latter's re-racing of Dionysus in a broadly African context (Lecznar 2020), I would like to press upon Dionysus as an embodiment of an American racial revolution, which was as much a cultural process as a potentially military one. In the U.S., such a revolution would involve race, but it is not enough to say that American Dionysus would be a racial embodiment.…”

“…A classic among classics, Euripides' play is the object of the critic's longeststanding fantasies: "Having been chilled and finally overpowered by it in the reading, I've been waiting half my life to hear and feel its harrowing rhythms on stage, now conclude I'm not going to." See Lecznar 2020 (Richard 1994: 26). His contemporaries compared him to Julius Caesar (92), and his pseudonym was Phocion.…”

“…See Adichie 2006: 324. Soyinka voiced an overall skepticism about the postcolonial project of negritude that had captured the imagination of his contemporaries across the African continent (Lecznar 2020), the same ideas Baldwin had encountered in 1956. Nevertheless, he wanted to repossess theater as an African phenomenon, especially as it pertained to ritual and performance.…”