Dionysus Dendrites: Wood and Carpentry in Greek Tragedy

This project traces the significance of wood and carpentry to the poetics, objects and stagecraft of Aeschylean, Sophoclean and Euripidean tragedy. It combines an exploration of how human labour informs the materiality of objects and poetic images used on stage with an ecocritical focus on interactions between performances and wider envrionments and ecosystems. By exploring the role of wood and carpentry in the Athenian imagination, I demonstrate the significance of this matter to performance, and question how exploration into human interactions with wooden matter, both on stage and in Athenian culture, inform an understanding of tragic performance.