ALEXANDER'S JOURNEY

 

In the annals of our diasporic cultural production, few works attain the intellectual gravitas, aesthetic cohesion, and spiritual resonance exhibited by Alexander’s Journey, a compelling dramatic oratorio that transcends mere theatrical performance to assume the dimensions of an ontological meditation on identity, destiny, and the communion of civilisations. Conceived with lyrical profundity and historical acuity, and brought to life under the aegis of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, this work constitutes not only a homage to the great Macedonian exemplar par excellence, but an articulation of the Hellenic soul refracted through the prism of its greatest and most paradoxical emissary.

The production, initiated through the cultural foresight of Peter Stefanidis, President of the Association, is at once reverent and interrogative. It neither succumbs to triumphalism nor reduction, but rather situates Alexander within the rich tapestry of civilisational memory: a locus where myth, historiography, and existential inquiry converge. Structured as a sequential procession of monologues delivered by historical actors and diverse witnesses to the Hellenistic efflorescence, be they Babylonian scribes, Armenian sages, Greek elders, Indian monarchs, and the sovereign mother Olympias herself, the play constructs a palimpsest of perspectives, each inscribing upon the other the imprint of encounter, transformation, and enduring legacy.

From its inception, the play adopts a tonal register of solemn invocation. The prologue, uttered amid the ruins of ancient Pella by a figure that allegorically personifies Macedonia, assumes the quality of a threnody: a lamentation against the erasure of a people’s Hellenic lineage by the caprice of contemporary narratives. “Macedonia does not beg for its place in Greek memory—it is Greek memory,” proclaims the speaker, a refrain that constitutes the ideological keystone of the entire work. This is not a provincial cry for inclusion, but a juridical assertion of cultural continuity, anchored in dialect, ritual, art, and the consciousness of a shared heritage.

The dramaturgical edifice of the play may be composed of fragments, but these fragments cohere through a deeper metaphysical unity. Each monologue is an artefact of memory, suspended in time and space, yet suffused with a common yearning: to comprehend the phenomenon of Alexander, not merely the conqueror or legislator, but the man who strove to collapse the dichotomy between East and West, self and Other, Greek and Barbarian. His is a journey not only through geography, but through the interior realms of vision, loss, and transcendence.

The dramatis personae, carefully selected, serve as vessels of historical consciousness. The Babylonian scribe does not simply recount Alexander’s entrance into the sacred precincts of Marduk; he testifies to the ethical revolution implicit in that act. When Alexander dismounted at the Gate of Ishtar and bowed before the ziggurat of Esagila, he enacted a liturgy of reverence. His conquest, the play suggests, was sacramental and not iconoclastic. Likewise, in the Armenian highlands, the figure of the historian speaks of Alexander not as an invader, but as a figure who offered syncretism in place of subjugation, and whose presence, or at least the legend of that purported presence, sanctified, rather than profaned.

The play depictions demand a more nuanced interpretive framework. Theoretically, the play may be situated within a counterpostcolonial discourse, wherein the hegemonic paradigms of cultural imperialism are overturned by a model of dialogic encounter. Unlike the Orientalist typologies critiqued by Edward Said, Alexander’s engagement with the cultures he encountered is rendered not as a voyeuristic exercise in domination, but as a sincere and generative act of translation, between rituals, cosmologies, and ontologies. Accordingly, Alexander’s Journey, is not the harbinger of decline, but the midwife of hybridity.

The philosophical undercurrent of the play is nowhere more powerfully conveyed than in the monologue of Alexander himself, delivered on the eve of his traversal of the Hellespont. It is in these lines that the internal architecture of his psyche is most luminously unveiled. He declares: “What is a king if not a servant to vision?” This formulation reconfigures kingship from the coercive to the sacrificial. It elevates Alexander from a figure of martial prowess to one of metaphysical vocation. His campaign, the text intimates, was not against Persia, but against limitation: the boundary of the known, the parochialism of tribe and polis, the sclerosis of tradition untempered by encounter.

The choreographic interludes that punctuate the monologues, comprising dances performed by the Pontian, Macedonian, Armenian, Assyrian, and Indian communities of Melbourne, serve not as ornamentation, but as kinetic exegesis. Each movement, each rhythm, becomes a corporeal mnemonic, a non-verbal continuation of the dialogue Alexander initiated with the world. Here, the play calls upon the semiotics of the repertoire, in Diana Taylor’s formulation, where embodied performance carries meanings inaccessible to the written archive. Through dance, the communities represented are not merely echoing Alexander’s legacy. Instead, they are actively inscribing themselves within it.

The monologue of Porus, the Indian king vanquished at Hydaspes, exemplifies the ethical dialectic the play seeks to construct. In a moment of arresting sobriety, Porus recounts his defeat, subsuming his bitterness with his overarching admiration for his erstwhile adversary. Alexander, he affirms, did not humiliate his adversary but honoured him instead. “He admired strength not only in himself—but in others,” Porus reflects, suggesting a nobility that transcends both victor and vanquished. It is in this moment that the Hellenistic vision, conceived not as the domination of the world, but its reconciliation through a common ethos, is most fully realised.

The character of Olympias, so often relegated to the margins of historiography as either a shadowy manipulator or a footnote to the deeds of men, is here retrieved from historical silence and granted a voice of profound agency. In Alexander’s Journey, she emerges not merely as the bereaved mother of a fallen hero, but as a sovereign in her own right, a priestess, a queen, and the formative influence behind the man who would be called Great. Her monologue functions both as a personal lament and a political testament, articulating grief not as passive suffering, but as an act of defiance against the historical structures that have silenced women and elided their contributions to civilisational development. Through the dramaturgical space afforded to her, Olympias is emancipated from the distortions of classical misogyny and male-centred imperial narratives. Her voice, unflinching and oracular, proclaims: “Let history do its worst… Macedonia is the soul of Hellas. Alexander was not its end. He was its beginning.” In granting her the final word, the play enacts a feminist intervention into the canon, reclaiming a woman whose influence was foundational and whose pain, too long muted, is rendered audible, so that mourning becomes not only memory, but power.

Consequently, the production evokes a tragic aesthetic, akin to that found in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, wherein greatness is always entwined with sacrifice. Alexander’s ambition may have been luminous, but it consumed him. His desire to unify the oikoumene, to bring all peoples under the aegis of a singular civilisation, rendered him both a builder and a destroyer. It is this duality, of creation through conquest, of elevation through erasure, that the play interrogates with rare moral intelligence.

One may draw from Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian as a lens through which to interpret Alexander’s existential orientation. Like the Dionysian archetype, Alexander is driven by a will to transcend the Apollonian bounds of order and containment. Yet unlike the ecstatic chaos of Dionysus, his project is rationalised, ordered, radiant. In this, he embodies the synthesis of both archetypes, bringing to the world a cosmology wherein multiplicity is not abolished, but subsumed within a higher harmony.

In an age increasingly defined by insularity and the reification of national boundaries, Alexander’s Journey thus emerges as a timely and necessary intervention. It posits that identity is not a zero-sum construct, but a palimpsest, with each layer enriching, rather than erasing, the one beneath. The multiculturalism of the play is not superficial tokenism. It is an ontological statement: that the Hellenic spirit has never been static, but always already open to the world, capable of transformation and interrogation, without dissolution.

The Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, in staging this ambitious and spiritually resonant work, has accomplished more than a celebration of ancestral memory. It has facilitated a reclamation of civilisational purpose. Peter Stefanidis and his collaborators have demonstrated that cultural stewardship is not a passive act of preservation, but an active engagement with the legacies that define us.

In its totality, Alexander’s Journey transcends the confines of historical dramatization to become a profound meditation upon the nature of sovereignty, the transmission of legacy, and the transformative potential inherent in the convergence of civilisations. It interrogates the ethical dimensions of conquest, probing whether domination, when tempered by vision and reverence, may be transmuted into communion; whether alterity can be not merely tolerated but integrated; and whether a solitary figure, possessed not of hubris but of transcendent purpose, might indeed reconfigure the trajectory of the world. This is no simple chronicle of martial exploits; rather, it is an exploration of civilisational synthesis as sacral vocation.

For Alexander, as the drama solemnly proclaims, “did not march to punish Darius alone. He marched to rewrite the world.” Thus, the figure of the conqueror is elevated to that of a mythopoeic agent, one who channels the metaphysical aspirations of an epoch, collapsing the binaries of this time. In this capacity, Alexander’s Journey, through the luminous stewardship of the Pan-Macedonian Association of Melbourne, becomes not merely an act of remembrance but a summons. It calls upon the contemporary viewer not only to recollect, but to transcend; not only to witness, but to participate in the ever-unfolding dialectic of Hellenism. For through Alexander, we do not merely encounter the historical; we confront the numinous—and are compelled, in turn, to aspire.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

Alexander’s Journey will be performed at the Clocktower Centre, Moonee Ponds on 29 June 2025 at 2:30pm. For tickets visit: https://clocktowercentre.com.au/alexanders-journey

First published in NKEE on Saturday 21 June 2025