Once in a while there comes an ancient drama's transformation of such stunning creativity and vision that it deserves immediate scholarly attention: Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding's …(Iphigenia) is one such event. A ‘jazz opera’ that radically reimagines the myth of Iphigenia dramatized in Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia in Aulis, …(Iphigenia) is a collaboration between two musical greats: saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter and jazz bassist, singer, composer, and lyricist esperanza spalding, who also plays a leading role in the drama.Footnote ¹ Iphigenia in Aulis was Euripides’ final work, written between 408 and 406 BCE, the year of his death. In a poignant echo across the centuries …(Iphigenia), which premiered on the east coast of the USA in November 2021 and on the west coast in February 2022, would turn out to be Wayne Shorter's last production; he died on March 2, 2023, and we dedicate this volume to him in gratitude and admiration.

This special issue of Ramus is designed to provide a record of, and responses to, …(Iphigenia). The production was presented as an ‘open rehearsal and work in progress’ and as yet the libretto and music have not been published. Mario Telò and I are immensely grateful to esperanza spalding who generously agreed to be interviewed for this volume by Debarati Sanyal and myself, and who has allowed us to publish excerpts from her libretto. We are also grateful to Frank Gehry who discussed his set design with Catherine Flynn and to Jeff Tang, executive creative producer, who provided the images, facilitated discussion, and helped in other ways. Shorter and spalding had hoped to return to and develop the production further, when funding allowed; we do not know whether Shorter's death will mean that this will not happen. This situation adds another ellipsis to that already in the title: we will have to wait for the next stage of …(Iphigenia).

The articles in this issue present perspectives on the production from colleagues from different disciplines—Ethnic Studies, Global Arts, English, French, Rhetoric, Comparative Literature, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, as well as Classics. Mario Telò drew together the contributors, many of whom (including myself) first came together two days after seeing the opera in Berkeley for an academic panel discussion at the university, a debate that was continued at the home of Debarati Sanyal. This event—and now this special issue—have demarcated a space for transversal analysis: analysis that cuts across disciplinary boundaries to address the ideological, political, musical, visual, and performative dimensions of the production, thereby ‘creating connections and cultivating resonances among positions that may at first sight appear incompatible’.Footnote ² One example of this: when most of us saw the production, we looked intently at the drama on the stage. When Lionel Popkin saw the production, he was attuned, as a choreographer and performer as well as an academic, to what was going on in the orchestra pit, and to the monitors that were intended to be viewed by the performers, positioned behind the audience. His and Alex Purves's analysis of the radical dynamics of conducting in …(Iphigenia) chimes with, and adds another dimension to, the analyses of form, somatics, and race, in other articles in the volume.

This special issue steps out of the confines of conventional academic journal publishing and knowledge production. It comprises thirteen short scholarly articles and two interviews. Contributors were asked to write about an aspect of the production that struck them as most illuminating, not to write ‘reviews’ of it. We were without the usual supports for scholarship: no recording, published score or text (the excerpts from the libretto were provided after the articles were compiled, and the interview with esperanza spalding was conducted towards the end of the process so her intrepretative frameworks were not available to the contributors), and no academic publications directly on the production, except for an important critical essay published online by Vanessa Stovall after she saw the production at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in December 2021 (see Fig. 1).Footnote ³ This means that quotations from and descriptions of the production are from memory (or notes scribbled during the performance), and that occasionally there is some overlap across the articles themselves. We decided to retain these moments of repetition rather than edit them out; it is instructive, as a snapshot of audience reception, where and how contributors’ responses chime despite diverse approaches, and where they do not, and we also thought the reiteration of certain points might prove helpful to the reader.

Figure 1. Still from …(Iphigenia), performed at the Kennedy Center (Washington, DC), December 10, 2021. Curtain call. © Elena Park.

Classicists have some well-established critical moves when it comes to analyzing adaptations of ancient texts: what we often call ‘reception studies’. For …(Iphigenia) we might expect exploration of how the production receives, adapts, or appropriates Euripides’ ‘original’ Iphigenia in Aulis, and some discussion of its relationship to other ancient representations of the sacrifice of Iphigenia, such as that recounted by the chorus in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. Mark Griffith and James Porter do some of this work in their articles in this volume (though that is not all that they do). One of the issues that they, and Telò, emphasize is that this kind of analysis is complicated by the fact that the ending of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis—how the play ends—is uncertain.

His tragedy revolves around the sacrifice of a young woman, Iphigenia, the daughter of King Agamemnon, commander in chief of the Greek fleet, and his wife Clytemnestra. The Greek armada is poised to set sail for Troy to avenge the taking of Menelaus’ wife (and Agamemnon's sister-in-law) Helen by the Trojan prince Paris, and to reclaim Helen. They are unable to embark because the seas are calm; there is no wind. A prophesy has decreed that the winds will only come when Agamemnon has sacrificed his eldest daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis. The play opens with the brothers debating the morality of carrying out the sacrifice, and the morality of not carrying out the sacrifice. Iphigenia arrives with her mother and brother. They have been lured under false pretenses: they were told that she is to be married to the Greek warrior Achilles. When it becomes clear what the real scheme is, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra plead with Agamemnon to change his mind, and Achilles, who was not privy to Agamemnon's plan, prepares to defend the girl by force. Iphigenia realizes that she has no means of escape. She ‘chooses’ to offer herself for the sacrifice (‘a choiceless choice’: Sanyal in this issue) and goes to her death singing a hymn to Artemis. The manuscript as we have it ends with a messenger reporting that Iphigenia was replaced on the altar by a deer (as she was said to have been, by the will of the goddess, in Euripides’ other play about Iphigenia, Iphigenia in Tauris, aka Iphigenia among the Taurians), but this is likely to be an interpolation.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, there are so many possible constructions of the text that, as Sean Gurd puts it, ‘[t]here is not one Iphigenia in Aulis, there are many Iphigenias in Aulis’.Footnote ⁵ …(Iphigenia), then, is a provisional, processual adaptation of a provisional, processual tragedy.

This approach to reception studies sometimes brings to bear other texts in a ‘chain’ of reception, as do a couple of the contributors here: Griffith discusses Cacoyannis's 1977 movie Iphigenia, and Judith Butler offers a brief reflection on Ann Carson's Iphigenia among the Taurians. However, this method alone of analysing adaptations risks downplaying reception as an embedded, political, and historical process.Footnote ⁶ The most immediate context in which the final years of the production took place, and which shaped the audiences’ experiences, was the Covid-19 pandemic. In February 2022 the pandemic still dominated the news and our lives. For me, going to see the performance meant traveling on an airplane for the first time in two years. There was a palpable anxiety and excitement among the crowd while we waited in line to have our vaccination status checked outside the theater.

The play's central theme of the ethics of the sacrifice of individuals for ‘the collective good’ had a bitter resonance in the broader political context where elderly and immuno-compromised people, and those whose work necessitated close contact with others, seemed to many people to be expendable. Kim Solga's question about Katie Mitchell's 2004 production of Iphigenia in Aulis, ‘What happens to a body when circumstance demands that it enact its own forgetting?’ was as much a question for the audience in their lives outside, as well as in their experiences inside, the theater.Footnote ⁷ The production highlights something that is there in Euripides too—the sour, rotten, indigestible component of laws that require death in order to restore the social order. How many deaths are acceptable in service of this restoration, we asked ourselves, as we sweated into our masks trying to get our heads round the cognitive dissonances between ‘business as usual’ and the knowledge that this meant that more people would inevitably catch the disease and die. Euripides points out the necessity of the universal good annihilating the subject in order to preserve the social order. Shorter and spalding, in giving us a chorus of Iphigenias (about which more will be said below) press us to ask, how many subjects is it acceptable to sacrifice?

The pandemic exacerbated inequities along racial grounds (including the inequities of who lived and who died), in a country where not being able to breathe was a symptom of police brutality against Black people, as well as a symptom of the pandemic. Roshanak Kheshti's discussion in this volume of air and breath in the production and these wider contexts is important here, as is Mario Telò's reading of Iphigenia in Aulis in his book Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis.Footnote ⁸ One point that Telò makes is that the political and medical management of the pandemic in the United States was coded as a military exercise. It was imbued with the discourse of nationalism, as the former president named the virus through the use of a racial slur, and the discourses of invasion by virus and refugees merged.

A crucial context for understanding …(Iphigenia) is this heightened nationalism and racism in the United States at the time of the production. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis is a drama that has been long celebrated for its nationalism. Aristotle quoted with approval the sentiment voiced by Iphigenia in her patriotic speech towards the end of the play that ‘it is right that Greeks should rule barbarians’ (‘barbarian’ is a common ancient Greek word for foreigner).Footnote ⁹ Her claim that Greeks are naturally superior to foreigners is used to lend support for Aristotle's argument that the foreign person and the enslaved person are essentially the same, and that slavery was a natural practice. The play's nationalism and patriotism are still celebrated today in Greece and Cyprus, where it is part of the high school curriculum (although we should have faith that instructors teach the text in different ways).Footnote ¹⁰

That racism and anti-racism are crucial frameworks through which to understand the ideological resistance of …(Iphigenia) is something that several contributors discuss or mention: Roshanak Kheshti (in relation to jazz and the tradition of ‘whiting up’, the racial relationships of jazz, Greek tragedy, and opera), Salar Mameni (who exposes the mutual reinforcements of ‘race’ and ‘species’ in relation to bodies, hybridity, and race in the production), Debarati Sanyal (along with the ‘critical fabulations’ of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval),Footnote ¹¹ Danielle Stephenson (on Black feminist ‘poethics’), Judith Butler (on femicide),Footnote ¹² Stephen Best (on the traditions of Black Classicisms), Mario Telò (on Afrofuturist and Afropessimist perspectives in relation to the ending of the production), and Ella Haselswerdt (on Afro-fabulation, taking up Tavia Nyong'o). The arguments are rich and complicated, more so than my gestures towards their content indicate; I cannot do them justice here. In her interview, esperanza spalding discusses how the legendary African American hero and enslaved disrupter John de Conquer (sometimes known as John the Conqueror) was an inspiration for the dynamics of the second act of …(Iphigenia).Footnote ¹³ My framework of understanding at that stage in the interview was the dea ex machina from Greek tragedy: this was totally inadequate. spalding's discussion, in relation to the formal construction of …(Iphigenia), of John de Conquer's creation of a caesura in time and space in which enslaved people could dream, hope, and thereby survive, not only dilates the context for absorbing her production, but could also prove rich material for future theorizations of tragedy.

Tracing embedded political and ideological contexts are, of course, not the only axes for understanding the production; indeed, the title …(Iphigenia) with its perplexing ellipses and parentheses jibs against any kind of fixity, as Stephen Best and Mario Telò discuss in their articles. Indeed, one thread that runs through many of the contributions is Shorter and spalding's striking play with temporality. The character acted by spalding is named Iphigenia of the Open Tense; she appears like a creature from the future, a luminous figure in an iridescent silver outfit (like a spacesuit from a science fiction movie), and the production collapses time through both libretto and music. Roshanak Kheshti and Ella Haselswerdt reflect on this, using Tavia Nyong'o's theorisation of Black queer temporality; Stephen Best also discusses it, building on Vanessa Stovall's essay, and Danielle Stephenson argues for the ‘tenselessness and timelessness’ of the Black radical tradition, and the ‘artful disruption of the presumed futurity’ that jazz creates. Catherine Flynn invites us to view the production as a meditation on the current ongoing environmental catastrophe, with the cycle of slaughter of the Iphigenias in the first act being ‘analogous to our observation of the rapidity and ease of environmental depredation: The cycle repeats itself as we watch, uncomfortable, but passive’. Her focus on temporality, informed by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School theorists, is on repetition and the production's cycle of relapse. Her discussion of the disruptive power of Shorter and spalding's version of opera chimes with Danielle Stephenson's analysis of disruption, from a different perspective. With these analyses of racism and of environmental catastrophe, we loop back to the political and ideological contexts that this production expands upon.

…(Iphigenia) can be viewed as belonging to the cultural movement that writer, broadcaster, and curator Ekow Eshun describes as ‘the Black fantastic’.Footnote ¹⁴ Sharing commonalities with, but differing from, magic realism and Afrofuturism, the Black fantastic is ‘a way of seeing, shared by artists who grapple with the legacy of slavery and the inequities of racialized contemporary society by conjuring new narratives of Black possibility’.Footnote ¹⁵ Eshun quotes scholar Michelle D. Commander who explains that within the Black fantastic, Black artists are ‘renarrativizing master accounts, and creating and representing new worlds and alternate existences’.Footnote ¹⁶ This is especially evident in the second act of …(Iphigenia) when Shorter and spalding create time and space away from the ‘master narrative’ of the Greek myth, with its attendant misogyny and nationalism, and conjure a kind of dream world outside of the myth where the chorus of Iphigenias sing and vocalize and imagine a different reality. (I will say more below on this, and see also the comments of Best, Butler, Sanyal, and Stephenson as well as the interview with spalding in this issue).

Iphigenia of the Open Tense stands out from the other Iphigenias. She wears futuristic garb and, in one scene, has a hybrid appearance, wearing a deer's antlers or being a kind of hybrid human-deer (on which see the analyses of Mameni and Haselswerdt). Her singularity and luminousness, as well as her position as a woman under threat from a king, perhaps evokes Saint Ephigenia, an Ethiopian princess whose biography contains some similar elements to the myth of Iphigenia, and who was, in one account, merged with the daughter of Agamemnon whose name is echoed in hers.Footnote ¹⁷ Shorter and spalding's new paradigm of Black woman's agency in a constrained, cruel, and callous world summons old paradigms from different cultures.

I have three further points to make: about the aurality of the women in Act II, about Clytemnestra, and about the transition from the second to the third act. However, before that it might be helpful to give a brief summary of the drama, even though it is necessarily partial, subjective, and from memory; it cannot possibly do justice to the score, libretto, or choreography, which, as I noted above, is provisional and likely to change.