Mario Telò:

Maybe we can just talk about your general thoughts and your general impressions of seeing this performance of …(Iphigenia).

At Howard University, the only historically Black university in the United States with a Classics department, campus leaders decided in 2021 to eliminate that department after a three-year review of its academic programs. The response was vehement and swift, with students, faculty, and alumni condemning the decision as a case of administrative overreach. The philosopher Cornel West described the divestment from the Classics curriculum as a ‘spiritual catastrophe’ for the institution. Few missed the irony that Toni Morrison, one of Howard's most celebrated alumni, studied with Frank Snowden, Jr., a renowned professor of Classics, and received a ‘minor’ in that field as an undergraduate; or that the central inspiration for Morrison's Beloved was a fugitive slave woman named Margaret Garner who became known as ‘the modern Medea’ for having decided (in 1856, in flight from her master's agents) that it was better to kill her children than see them returned to enslavement in the American South. Others would point to the long tradition of transformational Black thinkers who admit to having been inspired by the classics, including Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Vitruvius’ book is chock full of bodies. It is by means of his oiled body that Dinocrates gains an audience with Alexander (2.praef.1), and by means of his naked one, and the equivalent body of water that it displaces, that Archimedes solves his well-known quandary (9.praef.9f.). The body is a living, vital thing (7.praef.2f.), even as it is a book, a body of work (7.praef.10), arising from a body of education (1.1.12). Most important of all, Vitruvius outlines a ‘body of architecture’ (corpus architecturae, 6.praef.7) to propagate and extend the reach of the deified Augustus, commander-in-chief (1.praef.1), and this idea arguably gives rise to that of the ‘body politic’ (corpus imperii). Vitruvius’ text has been interpreted in terms of these bodies in important studies by Indra Kagis McEwen and John Oksanish; both authors treat the body as replete with meaning, the site of contact between architecture and the political, between text and author. This chapter adds to our understanding of the repertoire of bodies in Vitruvius by looking at those earlier incarnations of circular and square bodies which Vitruvius inherits, and in terms of which he construes the human body as a site of ideal proportions.

It is difficult to watch …(Iphigenia) and not think of abolition. To bear witness to Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's opera is to experience the collision of classical and jazz idiom, the interruption of violent cycles, the emergence of liberation. Yet as much as …(Iphigenia) is a story of abolition, it is also a story about the staying powers of sacrifice and myth. Winds that turn the wheel of oppression are the same blessed winds that propel ships out to sea. Furthermore, the interruption of inexhaustible, parodic virgin sacrifice is framed by the bodily toil that results from rejecting that cycle. We might easily observe …(Iphigenia) as a retelling that moves myth forward, into the future. The last Iphigenia, of the Open Tense (performed by esperanza spalding), ultimately refuses her seemingly inevitable fate, retching out the words that might otherwise temporarily satisfy the whims of the bloodthirsty men around her. …(Iphigenia), however, is a piece ‘at war with itself’. Perhaps in this way more than any other, it is able to communicate the tenseless timelessness of the Black radical tradition. The cyclicity of oppressive violence is the same cyclicity that dissolves artifice, the same cyclicity that produces solidarity as a substrate.

Vitruvius’ famous description of the homo bene figuratus possesses a slightly paradoxical nature. The description is meant to illuminate a fundamental but very abstract principle underlying the building of temples: symmetry or proportion. For the purpose of illumination, an analogy is drawn between temples and the human body. But even though the description serves an illustrative purpose, it does not at first sight appear to have a specifically illustrative nature since it largely consists of numerical fractions and proportional relations. Additionally, it seems quite difficult to tell what the homo bene figuratus actually looks like because the figure hardly possesses any individual features. And yet, the description inspired a rich reception of drawings during the Renaissance and later (of which Leonardo's version is certainly the most famous). The passage even seems to have taken on a life of its own since in those drawings the homo bene figuratus is usually treated independently of its original purpose and remains unconnected with temples or other buildings. Apparently, the passage—somehow—has an easily comprehensible or even perhaps vivid quality, despite the fact that it mainly lists abstract numerical details.

‘Music is mass and it builds things’, esperanza spalding said she dreamt one night as she struggled with the libretto for …(Iphigenia), the phrase forming the turning point for the work. The oneiric formulation extends the material nature of music, granting sonic vibrations architectural abilities. This paradox approaches a paradoxical aim at the heart of Frank Gehry's building practice: to imbue solid matter with motion. His free-form sculptural designs, instanced most famously in the spectacular designs for the Guggenheim Museum at Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, have granted him global auteur status. However, the set design for …(Iphigenia) offered and continues to offer him an attractive state of unknowing, one in which emerges the possibility of non-directed constructive form.

In the first chapter of De architectura book 3, Vitruvius famously expounds upon the theory of proportionality, ultimately crafting the analogy of the human body as a composition of ideal ratios. In this exposition, the architect repeatedly makes use of technical jargon, implementing terms found nowhere else within the Latin literary corpus. Amidst this series of rare Latin vocabulary, however, Vitruvius also includes a striking twenty-seven Greek borrowings—of which twelve are novel terms not found in the corpus before this passage, and seven are terms not found again. While many of these Grecisms are explicated by Vitruvius through the use of subordinate clauses or apposition, the very existence of Latin equivalents and the resultant redundancy of terms renders Vitruvius’ linguistic vacillation strictly unnecessary and rather obfuscating in effect. After all, why borrow a term that requires definition when a corollary already exists within one's primary, ‘matrix’ language? Likewise, once one has committed to adopting a second language of technical vocabulary, why bother translating? Other, similar lexical borrowings are evident throughout De architectura, yet the opening of book 3 offers a unique opportunity to analyze Vitruvius’ method of code-switching in close detail, revealing how the author uses the technique to draw attention both to the technicality of his art and to the Greek tradition evoked by these words.

Vitruvius is a full-figured text. Bodies proliferate endlessly—as touchstones of measurement, as images of ideal proportions, as analogies for building, empire, discipline, or text—and they dance just as deftly around the scholarship. If we had to pick a metaphor by which Vitruvius lived in writing, we could do no better than corpus. He is perhaps antiquity's greatest embodiment of body. But what I would like to argue in this article is that the Vitruvian body is not uniform; not alone; not ideal; and as an instrument of scientific discovery, it is not enough. It is lacking—and it needs to lack.

Early in the first act of Shorter and spalding's …(Iphigenia) the carousing band of Argive soldiers cum frat boys dumps the body of a deer stage left, close to the audience. A spotlight is trained onto the carcass, and there it remains: as the bodies of Iphigenias pile up alongside it through Act I; as the Iphigenias are revivified and we enter a new conceptual plane in Act II; as the mythic plot reconvenes in Act III; and during the curtain call, when the cast, musicians, and crew come onto the stage to take their bows. At one point, I half expected the ensemble to smile wide and extend their arms towards the rigid body of the deer, inviting audience applause for their fellow performer, still, even now, fixed motionless under a spotlight.

For the historian of early modern Italian architecture, Vitruvius is unavoidable. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, the study of Vitruvius, in conjunction with the surviving physical models of ancient buildings, was a project that united architects. With the difficult tract as their guide, architects teamed together, often with learned aides, to understand the principles of ancient design. Comparing Vitruvian dicta with antiquarian fragments, architects endeavored to recreate the forms, numbers, and proportional rules prescribed by the ancient author. And using pencil, charcoal, and ink, they created images, filling in the voids of the famously unillustrated text.

Like Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis, the Shorter-spalding opera is open-ended and unresolved—partly because, again like the Euripidean version, it is multi-authored and somewhat incomplete. Euripides’ play, in the form(s) in which we possess it, presents at least three different endings, none of which is likely to come from Euripides’ own pen; other authors certainly contributed to various sections of the final scene. Euripides himself also had a musical collaborator, Cephisophon, who presumably continued to work on finishing and rehearsing the play after Euripides himself died, up to its first production. The Shorter-spalding opera, …(Iphigenia), likewise is the result of collaboration—often at a distance, and over several years—between musicians, writers, and designers (as Morales describes in her Introduction to this issue). At least six different authors altogether are identified in the program notes as contributing to the libretto, including the three poets whose lyrics were sung in Act II: Ganavya Doraiswamy, Joy Harjo, and Safiya Sinclair, respectively South Asian, Native American, and Jamaican. As for the opera's ending—the most notoriously uncertain aspect of this myth ever since archaic Greek times—esperanza spalding states in her notes on the opera that the process of creating an ending has been one of constant adjustment, wholesale rewriting, and improvisation, and that even through the rehearsals the singers themselves onstage, as well as the instrumental jazz trio, were still trying out new things, right up to and including perhaps the performance that we saw. (I attended the Berkeley performance on February 12, 2022.) The opera is, we may say, unfinished.

As an anthropologist, I am no stranger to the importance of myth to both meaning-making and as connective tissue with ancestral forms of knowledge. Claude Levi-Strauss is synonymous with the study of myth in twentieth-century anthropology. Zora Neale Hurston, however, has only recently been reclaimed by the discipline of anthropology, even though she was both a student of Franz Boas—the so-called ‘father’ of American anthropology—and she conducted tireless ethnographic research in the US South and Caribbean for over forty years, focused on what she preferred to call folklore, or lies. Hurston is an important lens through which to interpret …(Iphigenia) because Hurston's corpus catalogues the mythocentrism of African American and African diasporic culture. She created a mind-bendingly prolific body of both fiction and non-fiction work centered on myth and provides an important context for the connections being drawn in this opera between jazz and Greek tragedy: that of sound.

In the second decade of the fifteenth century, the book-hunter Poggio Bracciolini and two friends recognized Vitruvius’ De architectura among the moldy manuscripts at the monastic library at St. Gall in Switzerland. Although their find was not the first copy of De architectura to be identified, the reception of Vitruvius among Italian humanists tends to be afforded special attention in academic, public, and popular culture alike. Commonly shuffling at the center of that attention is L'Uomo Vitruviano of Leonardo da Vinci, usually dated to the 1490s. In Italian, and in his famous mirror writing, Leonardo mentions Vitruvius by name in the first word of his notes above his rendering of the homo bene figuratus and engages with the content of De architectura 3.1.2f. above and below it.

On September 16, 2017, the then-thirty-three-year-old Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales presented her oil painting Virtuous Woman at her first art gallery exhibition, called ‘Black Imaginary To Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.)’, at the Simard Bilodeau Contemporary in downtown Los Angeles. The work is based on Leonardo da Vinci's famous visualization of Vitruvius’ description of the homo bene figuratus, that is, of the ‘ideal’ or ‘well-formed’ human being on whose symmetry and proportions the construction of temples should be modeled (Vitr. De arch. 3.1; fig. 5.3). Rosales retains the presentation of a nude human figure in an interlocking square and circle on a background covered in handwriting. Yet Rosales’ rendition of the lettering is even less easily legible than the Italian paraphrases of, and expansions upon, Vitruvius’ Latin that the left-handed Leonardo had written in mirrored script around his sketch. Moreover, Rosales’ painting fills not the page of a book, but a large canvas damaged at the edges and marked by red-orange blemishes. Most importantly, the person at the center is no longer the stern and, to a modern viewer, White-presenting man of da Vincian fame. Instead, she is a Black woman (fig. 7.1).

Iphigenia is the archetype of virgin sacrifice, a daughter dispossessed of her voice and body, killed for the gods, the father and the nation. From Euripides to Racine, from Gluck's opera to Cacoyannis's film, across time and media, Iphigenia has embodied the paradox of a voice that emerges as the condition of its annihilation. Hers is a choiceless choice: to consent to her sacrifice with varying degrees of fervor and possible rationales, to submit to an economy the terms of which are set by capricious gods, a reckless king, a pusillanimous father and a masculine military baying for blood. The daughter embraces her death so that the father's reputation remains intact, so that no more lives are lost in vain, so that the army can set sail. Iphigenia's sacrifice is a familiar cultural script regarding the transactional value of girls under patriarchy. Her sacrifice is the price of entry into a ‘hero-industrial complex’ that positions her simultaneously as protagonist and victim, savior and scapegoat.

…(Iphigenia) is built around an obscenity of (a) death, the death(s) of Iphigenia, whose body, at first seemingly alive, then rendered a corpse (several times over), and later appearing as a revenant in humanimal form (human but horned), occupies center stage for the full length of the performance. The scene is all too familiar. It is multiply told and retold in Greek mythology and tragedy through a string of variations, and it recalls a further proliferation of violences done to women in our own time. With each telling, Iphigenia is murdered again and again.