The Ecstasy Project: Three Interactive Community Dialogues

UNC Asheville Classics Professor Sophie Mills will host three separate community conversations exploring the power of ecstatic experience as a sacred vehicle for transcendence. The three events will be on Thursday, March 18 at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 14 at 7 p.m., and Monday, April 26 at 7 p.m. The April 14 event will be in person at Sunflower Diner in West Asheville.

The conversations will use Euripides’ “Bacchae” as the context for exploring ecstasy in different dimensions and world cultures.

The word “ecstasy” derives from a Greek word meaning “standing outside”. Feasting, story-telling, ritual, music and dancing all help us to “stand outside” ourselves and with others, to transcend our individual troubles and enter into a profound and joyous community with each other or a world beyond us.

The cultural context for this series of community dialogues is Euripides’ Greek tragedy, Bacchae, in which Euripides explores the power of ecstatic experience as a sacred vehicle for transcendence, and powerfully demonstrates the danger of ignoring or repressing our need for connection to community and to the wild, natural world. Sophie Mills, Classics Professor at UNCA, will briefly establish this cultural framework at the beginning of each of the three events. By using this Greek tragedy as the context for this series, we emphasize that the Greek classics still have something to say in dialogue with the modern world and other cultures.

As well as experts lecturing on various methods which societies have traditionally used to bring people together – storytelling, ritual, feasting, music and dance – our series will also enable our audience to engage in a lively and participatory community dialogue about bringing ecstasy, meaning and connection into their own lives. We invite our community to consciously focus onto answering questions like, “When have you felt most alive?” “What were the circumstances in which you felt most deeply connected to your community?”, “What were your peak experiences that sustain and anchor you to the deeper meaning of life?” We hope to guide them to make future choices that help them feel alive, connected to their community and grounded in purpose.

Because of the pandemic, most of our events will be livestreamed on Zoom. However, if it is safe, we hope to offer some limited live interactions in the food event at the Sunflower Diner, 771 Haywood Road in West Asheville on April 14th.

To register for any of these events, click here.