(dedication of El Palo Alto, 1926; Palo Alto Railroad Station 1894 courtesy of the Palo Alto Historical Association Photograph Collection)

Performance project for Bay area students of (1) how they make everyday decisions, and (2) how recording, scripting, and thinking about these everyday events changes the ways they are performed.

Plato's Republic--its arguments and myths--provide the backbone for our performance project which examines mythmaking and what sort of stories about our past, present, and future support particular visions of a perfect world.

Beginning with the formative role of song and story in ancient education… The political turmoil of 404 BCE when a democratic army faced an oligarchic army and the herald of the Eleusinian mysteries stood between the lines and said,

Fellow citizens, why are you driving us out of the city? Why do you want to kill us? We have never done you any harm. We have shared with you in the most holy rites, in sacrifices and in splendid festivals; we have danced in choruses with you and gone to school with you and fought in the army with you, braving together with you the dangers of land and sea in defense of our common safety and freedom. (Xen. Hell. 2.4.20)

Poetry was the medium for communicating ethical teaching even to adults: Aeschylus claims that "children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets" (Frogs 1054-6).

But Homer, "the educator of Greece" (Rep.606e), must be banished to make way for a new liberal education, because we are divided, because our leaders are corrupt, because we are struggling to find what ties us together, to find a just and happy way to live. Poetry sets up the wrong kind of constitution in the soul as it does in the city (605b-c). It corrupts us, makes us neglect justice and the rest of virtue (608b). We must expel the source of corruption. The only poetry acceptable in the ideal state will be that which imitates the good man in accordance with certain guidelines (398a-b).

Book X (607d-e): We will allow poetry back if the lovers of poetry can show that poetry is not only pleasurable but beneficial to civic society and human life.

So what about Socrates' stories: similar to or different from the stories that Socrates condemned in Book III? (Everyone can read these selections, and we can meet in the winter to discuss them and analogs in contemp culture)

• End of book III ("the necessary lie," the story of the origins of the guardians—myth of metals, 415a—and the success of Plato's ideal society when the guardians find more happiness fulfilling their duty rather than grasping at what are commonly thought to be the good things of life (419-420)),

• Book VI (the ship of state),

• Book VI (the divided line—a different kind of "story"),

• Book VII (Allegory of the Cave),

• End of Book X (the Myth of Er)

What are the stories which we share as a community? Which are beneficial to both civic society and human life? Which are harmful? If we undertook the project to create a utopia, what would this world look like (what would we need to be just and happy (Book II)), and what stories would we require to make it function?

Meeting February 27, 2007

Meeting March 15, 2007