Harvard University Press Blog

Athletic Beauty, Divinely-Infused

In celebration of the Olympic games, we offer the following excerpt from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In Praise of Athletic Beauty, a thoroughly charming meditation on our love affair with athletes and their pursuit of excellence.

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If you take a car from Athens to the Isthmus of Corinth, and then drive across the winding mountain roads of the Peloponnese Peninsula to the distant village of Olympia, some thirty miles inland from the Ionian Sea, you will soon begin to feel what a commitment it was to walk or travel on horseback to the ancient Olympic games. Yet hundreds of athletes and tens of thousands of spectators, protected by an Olympics truce, made the journey every four years, over the span of a millennium or more—from 776 BC to 394 AD (the conventionally accepted dates of the ancient Olympic games). As you try to imagine this bodily effort, for which there is simply no equivalent in the modern world, you may begin to wonder what the specific attraction of those five days spent at Zeus’ most famous sanctuary could have been.

One answer, a modern answer but valid nevertheless, comes when you arrive at this shady green valley, where the Kladeos and Alpheios rivers join under lush foliage, a place so different from the arid stony landscape through which you have traveled, with growing impatience, during several hours. For ancient guests who had walked for days and even weeks, this contrast upon arrival must have triggered intense feelings of sensual pleasure and relief. Unlike modern tourists, who have the luxury of returning to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night, the crowds in ancient Olympia (all men, except for the priestess of Demeter and her maidens) endured narrow quarters, a shortage of water, and blistering heat. And yet their lives held nothing more glorious or more desirable than being precisely there, in that place, to watch athletes compete.

Olympia was just one of the traditional places, along with Delphi, Isthmia, and Nemea, where free men from the various Greek states and colonies came together for panhellenic games, but it was the oldest and most charismatic site. So outstanding was Olympia’s fame that the four-year rhythm of its games became the most widely accepted measure for marking time in ancient Greece. Each Olympiad (four-year period) was named for the winner in the first athletic event of the five-day competition. Unlike the spectators (and also the artists, musicians, and orators who came to showcase their talents on the margins of sporting events), athletes spent at least a month before the games at Elis, thirty-five miles from Olympia, where they trained to reach the peak of physical conditioning.

The five days of the Olympic festival were organized as a complex sequence of athletic events and religious rituals (though we miss the specific appeal of Olympia if we insist too much on the distinction between the two). The first day was dedicated to heralds, musicians, and athletic competitions for adolescents. The second day featured horse races, chariot races (including chariots drawn by mules), and, in the U-shaped 200-yard-long stadion, the core event—the pentathlon, consisting of a foot race, long jump, discus, javelin, and wrestling. All stadion races that were not part of the pentathlon took place on the third day. The fourth day was devoted to wrestling, boxing, and the pankration (a very aggressive, almost sadistic type of wrestling or kick boxing), mostly taking place at the palestra, a rectangular court surrounded by arcades. Back at the stadion finally, spectators could enjoy the hoplite run, a middle distance race for men in full armor.

Athletes in the panhellenic games performed naked, and since nakedness only became a condition several centuries after this athletic tradition began, we know that performing naked was a cultural rule, not a symptom of an archaic state of society. Before competitions, athletes would spread oil all over their skin, and some historians have explained this practice as a competitive strategy, especially for the wrestling contest, or as a performance enhancement. I am not convinced that strategic advantage was the most important reason, however. The oil made the naked bodies of athletes glisten with reflected sunlight, and this very palpable aura set them apart from ordinary men.

Unpacking "The Shipment"

This weekend I trudged over to Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art for a performance of "The Shipment," followed by a discussion with the cast and Young Jean Lee, the play’s writer and director.  "The Shipment" had its debut at the Wexner in Columbus nearly two years ago, moved on to New York for a run, and has since been touring, though this seems to have been its first Boston staging. Lee, who is Korean American, says she came to the project via her usual approach of asking herself what sort of play she would least want to have to write. The answer, this time, was a play about African American identity politics. And who could blame her? It’s a topic that is so delicate, and a project so inherently fraught, that I won’t even dare reach for a metaphor to describe the challenge. I’ll just say this: Young Jean Lee’s got chutzpah. 

"The Shipment" is a challenging piece. It’s essentially a variety show, featuring five African American actors juggling stereotypes and preying on perceptions. The opening number has two smiling, tuxedoed black men dancing to “Fascinating New Thing,” a pop song by the white-as-can-be Semisonic. The next section has a comedian in the Def Comedy Jam mold, profanely riffing on race and solidly stomping across the taste line for bits on incest and pedophilia, all while bemoaning the constraints of being a black man in comedy.  "The Shipment" proceeds from there, but the first two sections clearly outline the territory to be covered: with their echoes of blackface minstrelsy, the dancers and the comic prepare the audience for a discomforting evening of race on stage. 

Though "The Shipment" is a very smart play, its merits and achievements are entirely debatable – it feels like I’ve done nothing but debate them in the thirty-six hours since I saw it. The play is successful to the extent that it compels its audience members to critique their responses, and fails insofar as it lets them off the hook. To my eyes, too many people in the Boston museum crowd who’d blithely cackled during the play’s opening scenes were left without enough red on their faces when the houselights finally came back up. 

As a theatrical event, the meaning of what’s happening on stage during "The Shipment" is entirely inseparable from what’s happening in the seats. The play is not self-contained commentary on race in America, and it's not a document that asks us to reckon just with our national past. Presented for a predominantly white audience, in a country with its first black president, the staging of "The Shipment" this Saturday night was not simply about blackface minstrelsy – it was on top of it. The two exist entirely in palimpsest. 

Now, this blog is not often a space for theater reviews. But, throughout "The Shipment" and my processing of it, I’ve thought a lot about a brilliant book on blackface performance published by Harvard well before I came to town. In Raising Cain, W. T. Lhamon Jr. traces the evolving endurance of this sort of racial performance, “from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.” He brings back the concept of the “lore cycle,” which he’d developed in Deliberate Speed, his earlier text on American culture in the 1950s. To Lhamon, culture is transmitted through the cyclical repetition of practices, the passing down of these units of “lore.” Ideas, scenes, dance moves, motifs, and other layered memes are refitted through the years to match the changing circumstances, but the original meanings are never erased; rather, each new layer is merely compressed into the old, resulting in what Lhamon calls an “irresolvable compaction.” “What’s being transmitted is hardly any one thing,” Lhamon writes. “Culture transmits codes that are complex. People decode them differently.” 

It’s the latent meanings inevitably carried over that make a performance like "The Shipment" so risky to stage and so compelling to watch. If you’ve seen and appreciated "The Shipment," I recommend checking out Lhamon. If you’ve read Raising Cain but not seen the play, it’s worth trying. And if they’re both new to you, track down the DVD, swing by the bookstore or library, and block yourself out a challenging weekend.

MLK as a verbal artist

A quick round-up of coverage of Jonathan Rieder's The Word of the Lord Is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr., coinciding with the sad anniversary of Dr. King's assassination in Memphis. We've got reviews from the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, and a revealing interview with Rieder in Pine Magazine.

Hampton in the LA Times

See David Ulin's review of Howard Hampton's Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses from yesterday's Los Angeles Times Book Review.

||| Read an excerpt from Born in Flames.

Howard Hampton--Born in Flames

Check out Charles Taylor's excellent review of Howard Hampton's Born in Flames: Termite Dreams, Dialectical Fairy Tales, and Pop Apocalypses in the December 24 edition of the Los Angeles Times. The article serves not only as an introduction to the book, but also as a sort of primer on Hampton the critic, whose "blurring of form, genre, and high and low culture, by tossed-off puns and one-liners that shake the dust of reverence off revered subjects" signals a refusal to bow to traditional notions of what criticism is and how critics should function in our society:

So is it a matter of being aware of what gives you pleasure? "Pleasure has gotten bad connotations," he said, as if it were "something cheap and tawdry."

An aesthetic of pleasure runs through Hampton's writing. He derives the most joy from "things that operate on different levels, with depth and layers and unexpected pleasures. I like something where there's this overabundance, where all these contradictions boil and come to the surface."

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The best criticism forms an unconscious self-portrait of the critic. When Howard Hampton describes the work that matters most to him as having "a personal touch that brings something unique and special, always that sense of discovery, of finding things they didn't anticipate and going further than they thought," he's perfectly described his own.

Born in Flames is available in bookstores now. Read an excerpt or sample the table of contents to get an idea of just how wide-ranging and unexpected Hampton's taste really is.

BONUS: Check out Hampton's op-ed piece on "It's a Wonderful Life" from the December 24 edition of The Boston Globe. The title is classic Hampton--"It's a cruel, depraved, anything-but-wonderful life," reads the headline.

Stage fright

Those of you who caught John Lahr's fascinating New Yorker article on stage fright (sadly not online) will have noticed that he repeatedly cites Charles Rosen's seminal essay on the subject, "The Aesthetics of Stage Fright:"

The entertainer's journey through fear is the burden and the blessing of performance; it's what invests the enterprise with bravery, even a kind of nobility. "There was no other treatment than the well-worn practice of wearing it--the terror--out," Olivier wrote. The battle takes many strange and creative forms. Some performers drink to give themselves courage; some pop beta-blockers; some meditate or practice various other tension-reducing exercises; some play inspirational videos in their dressing rooms; some, like Charles Rosen, simply see stagefright as an inevitable and appropriate result of a virtuoso's perfectionism. "Stagefright is not merely symbolically but functionally necessary, like the dread of a candidate before an examination or a job interview, both designed essentially as a test of courage," Rosen writes. "Stagefright, like epilepsy, is a divine ailment, a sacred madness....It is a grace that is sufficient in the old Jesuit sense--that is, insufficient by itself but a necessary condition for success."

"The Aesthetics of Stage Fright" is reprinted, along with seventeen other essays on the history of music (see the table of contents for more), in Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New, available from HUP in paperback.

So next time you're up in front of a large group of people and your knees start knocking, just remember what Charles Rosen told you--it's the fear that makes you great.