I’ve been fascinated by herakles’ for years, the demi-god, the savior of civilization who murdered his own family in a fit of, it is said, madness. It wasn’t the godliness or the manliness that drew me to him, but the question he persists in: how do you act if you might be immortal? What does it mean to be brave? What does it mean to bear shame?
At times, the questions Herakles poses is viscerally personal: how do we know what we’re capable of? How do we take ownership of actions we didn’t mean, that we might not even have known we were performing, or that we performed in a knowing way that whispered what we are not not doing?
At other times, as on Indigenous People’s Day, Herakles questions reverberate through all of “civilization,” as Stokely Carmichael defined it. Teaching, living, and raising children on settled, stolen land is a Herculean task, insofar as it constitutes the ever uncertain, ever anxious process of perpetuating the vitality of empire. After all, Herakles was a favorite among the Princeps, the wannabe gods and the wannabe emperors who followed them in the Renaissance.
So from time to time, I play at being Herakles (wink), I drag his club and his lionskin and the bright blue nail polish he doesn’t bother to make a secret or a joke. I play to ask: how do I take ownership of all the violence that survives in the peace of my third-floor apartment; how do I take ownership of the violence I did not not perform?
For images of the production, and some reflections from back in the day
dan j ruppel 