Miming is our aptitude for the pleasure of learning. Regardless of the nature of miming, be it foul or elevated, we still derive a certain pleasure in recognizing what was hidden or sensing that we have understood something hitherto veiled from us, by the action of mime we can ourselves experience what is only observed objectively by the eye. Poetry as such seems only to have chanced its way into being by various improvisations of mimes on a variety of subjects; the first poet to have touched almost all of them: Homer. Experimenting with different metres (sections of rhythms) gave poets even before Homer the experience and feedback from auditors which metre goes most well with respective theme: comedy, tragedy, epic poetry etc. It seems certain to say that all that was to become Tragedy started in improvisation.

 

The tragic quality in a performance is at first sight counter-intuitive; in real life we shun the view of corpses, decay and death yet in artistic representation we take great pleasure in them since they remind us of pity and fear but in an unrealistic way. This release of pity gives the sense of catharsis.

 

The focus on pity, which in turn together with fear, releases catharsis will be the focal point of investigation in Shakespeare’s play Othello. It is remarkable that very few post-Classical so-called “tragedies” do not act out a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense. Oedipus Rex being the example par excellence most plays afterwards are only remnant of the true elements of pity and fear.

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PITY will examine the meaning and perhaps meaninglessness of the emotion of pity through the lens of Shakespeare’s Othello as a tragedy which conforms superbly with the Aristotelian criteria of a Tragedy

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PITY will take the shape of five performances focusing on the traits of the five characters Iago, Othello, Desdemona, Emilia and Brabantio.

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