Popular celebration and cognition in Karolos Koun’s stage interpretations of Aristophanic comedy.

In his essay ‘The Popular and the Realistic’ (1938) Brecht defines popular as that which is ‘intelligible to the broad masses’. Brecht sees popular as a variable concept which refers to a people who are an active force in the changing of their environment. This perception is not irrelevant to his understanding of popular art as a transgressive form of expression which enables active thinking. Aristophanic comedy, is highly relevant to Brecht’s understanding of popular art due to its discontinuous style of expression which permits a creative engagement of the audience in the meaning-making of the play.

Drawing on research in the field of cognitive science which has shown that ‘thinking’ is not detached from embodiment, affect and the environment my paper aims to consider how the performance environment in the modern staging of Aristophanes could facilitate the understanding of the comedy’s discontinuous features making it accessible and more engaging to a wider audience. My research will use as examples performances from Karolos Koun’s staging of Aristophanes’ Acharnians (1976) and Peace (1977) in Athens which created a celebratory atmosphere on stage inspired by folk traditions. I will show how the creation of a positive mood (e.g. joy) triggered through particular celebratory elements of the comic performance (music, dance, song) could enhance the audience’s ability to process semantic information from the comedy in a creative way. Positive affect has been linked with an increased capacity for creativity, integration of diverse information and novel thinking (B. Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and A. Isen’s experiments on the effect of positive affect on cognition).