Michael Walton

Chorus and dance in the ancient world

The cosmic dance The performance of ancient dance is largely irrecoverable. Any attempt to recover it involves many technical problems and this essay does not make the attempt. Nor will I provide an encyclopaedic summary of information and views about ancient dance in its immense variety in time and place. My main focus will be on the ways in which the functions and the associations of dance in ancient society differ from those of dance in modern society. A crucial place in this argument will be occupied by theatrical dance. In Hindu religion Shiva dances the Anandatandava (the dance of bliss), symbolizing the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, the rhythms of birth and death and the perennial movements of the cosmos. In the hymns of the Veda, the dawn, Ushas, is described as a dancer who appears on a stage. This has no parallel in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But in Sophocles Antigone the chorus invoke Dionysus as a choragos (dance-leader) of the fire-breathing stars (1146-7). Plato ( Timaeus 40c) describes the heavenly bodies with their juxtapositions and their approximations...circling as in dance, and in another work ascribed to Plato the stars are said to move through the figures of the fairest and most glorious of dances ( Epinomis 982e). Five centuries later Lucian writes that: Dance came into being contemporaneously with the primal origin of the universe, making her appearance together with Love – the love that is age-old. In fact, the concord of the heavenly spheres, the interlacing of the errant planets with the fixed stars, their rhythmic agreement and timed harmony, are proofs that Dance was primordial. ( On the Dance 7)

The socio-political dimension of ancient tragedy

In this chapter I will argue that the socio-political dimension of fifth-century Greek tragedy amounts to its engagement with the collective ideology and competitive ethos of the democratized classical polis on the one hand, and more traditional Homeric and mythic conceptions of religion and heroic self-assertion on the other. In addition, I will consider the Greek tragedians interest in framing dilemmas of action with debates over the merits and meanings of certain key fifth-century socio-political concepts. I will address the pressing question of how far Greek tragedys socio-politics speak to watching Athenians and their guests from other Greek states as polis -dwellers in general as opposed to singling out the democratic aspects of the Athenian civic experience. We will see that while Greek tragedy sometimes used tales of monstrous royal goings-on and heroic extremism to highlight the civilized values of Athens, this citys democratic citizenry rarely watched a play which would not have unsettled their senses of social and political well-being. However, any claim to the effect that Greek tragedy had real socio-political bite for its audience has to be tempered with a recognition that Greek tragedys overarching mythical idiom should preclude any reading of it as a vehicle for specific messages or manifestos. Having dealt with the case of classical Athens, I will briefly argue that the social and political force of tragedy did not diminish after the classical period. Neither the facts of Hellenistic or Roman appropriation nor the paucity of available evidence should prevent us from realizing that Roman Republican tragedy spoke provocatively and productively to its audiences specific sociopolitical milieu.

Masks in Greek and Roman theatre

We know with certainty that the mask was an essential feature of theatrical performance in ancient Greece and Rome. We are frustrated by the paucity of evidence relating to why it was adopted and how it functioned. We are encouraged by the fact that, like the actors of old, we can don similar masks and learn from the experience of performing in them something about their use and significance in the ancient theatres. Over a period of fifteen years, I conducted a series of productions and workshops of tragedy and comedy with a view to discovering what we might learn through performance. Specifically, each production was designed to test certain hypotheses about theatrical performance in ancient Greece. It was clearly understood that it was impossible to recreate the original productions or their context. But particular aspects of those performances could be tested in isolation. The tragedies and comedies performed or workshopped in whole or in part were Sophocles Oedipus Tyrannus , Oedipus at Colonus , Antigone , Philoctetes and Ajax ; Euripides Medea and Bacchae , Aristophanes Women at the Thesmophoria and Lysistrata and the lyrical Homeric Hymn to Demeter .

Ancient theatre and performance culture

Definitions and methods Aristotles definition of tragedy may seem odd to modern viewers for whom psychological drama is the norm: Tragedy is a representation ( mimesis ), not of people, but of an action ( praxis )... They do not act so as to represent character ( ethe ) but they include character on account of the actions ( Poetics 1450a20-23) Yet the formulation deserves renewed attention in light of the advances made by critics and theorists in the last few decades. Tragedy - and, we might say, drama as a whole - is primarily about action . Aristotles own reference to the etymology of the Greek word drama (from the verb dran , act, do) asserts this in another way, although he simply includes the suggestion in his report on possible non-Athenian origins for theatrical activity ( Poetics 1448a30-38). To say that tragedy, comedy and satyr play are actions is not to deny that they are also masterpieces of verbal artistry. For readers since late antiquity, it is as texts that these dramas have most often been encountered. Well into the twentieth century, the fascination and power of Greek plays have been found in their textual qualities, whether imagery, rhetoric, sound or structure. (The comparative undervaluation of Roman drama in the twentieth century stems from this fixation, abetted by New Criticism and related interpretive modes.) At the same time, however, the increasingly fruitful rediscovery of classical drama as live performance, starting in the late nineteenth century, has generated a body of valuable work, by scholars and producers, on stagecraft, spectacle, the actors body, masking, the meaning and use of space and other features of theatre beyond the purely verbal.