Date: 20th June 2017

Time: 01:00 pm

Venue: IDS, Building 8, GTU, 75 Kostava Street, Tbilisi 

Event: Design Thinking in Antique Greek Theatre 

Format: Illustrated Lecture

Speaker: Prof. Levan Berdzenishvili, Writer, Historian and  

Philosopher, Ilya University Tbilisi

Poster © Giga Khatiashvili

As expected, an eagerly anticipated lecture from one of the most brilliant Georgian scholars, Prof. Levan Berdzenishvili of IlyaUni, Design Thinking in Antique Greek Theatre – the title he himself choose after learning about the IDS concept and philosophy - did not disappoint. Levan delivered a brief account of the origins of the Greek theatre, noting, in his plain English with a characteristic Georgian accent, that there had effectively been three stages of its development from c. 700 BC. With its center in the city-state of Athens, where it was first institutionalized as part of a festival called the Dionysia honoring the god Dionysus, in the late 500 BC the theatre moved to the form of tragedy, after 490 BC - to comedy, and finally to the satyr play. Classical Greeks valued the power of a spoken word, preferring it to a written language. Around 532 BC Thespis became the earliest recorded actor, the exarchon, of the dithyrambs performed in and around Attica, but it is Solon who is credited with creating poems in which characters speak with their own voice to deliver Homer's epics by rhapsodes. Until the Hellenistic period, all tragedies were unique pieces written in honor of Dionysus and played only once, but in the Fifth Century BC - the Golden Age of Greek drama, the annual Dionysia became a competition between three tragic playwrights at the Theatre of Dionysus. Each submitted three tragedies, plus a satyr play, and then each playwright submitted a comedy. While Euripides maintained mono-actor structure, Aeschylus added the second actor (deuteragonist), and Sophocles introduced the third (tritagonist). Thus, the modern understanding of the Antique Greek Theatre - the one Prof. Berdzenishvili associated with the Design Thinking philosophy because of the spatial arrangement and planning structure of the Athenian theatre of Hellenistic period – was born. The plays had a chorus from 12 to 15 people, who performed the plays in verse accompanied by music, beginning in the morning and lasting until the evening. The performance space was a simple circular space on a flattened terrace at the foot of a hill, the orchestra with an average diameter of 24 meters, where the chorus danced and sang: it brought the name “theatron”, literally "seeing place". Later, the term "theatre" came to be applied to the whole area of theatron, orchestra, and skené. Mathematics played a large role as the designers had to be able to create acoustics so that the actors' voices could be heard throughout the theatre, including the very top row of seats. The Greek's understanding of acoustics compares very favorably with the current state of the art: hence the early example of “design thinking”.