- I'm Dr. Lucy Jackson
and I'm Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek Literature
at Durham University.
I'm going to be talking to you a little bit
about the ancient Greek chorus,
its context, and some of its history.
When we think of Greek plays,
the Greeks, as actors often refer to them,
our first thoughts might well be of brilliant,
terrifying, and, well, tragic individual characters.
Oedipus.
The poor guy that was told he would kill his father
and marry his mother and, despite his best efforts,
ended up doing it anyway.
Antigone, a young woman, a girl,
probably only 13 or 14,
who defies the law laid down by her uncle
and performs the necessary funeral rites
for her brother, an enemy of the state.
For this supposed crime
she is sentenced to death.
Or Medea, a woman so heartbroken
and enraged by the behavior of her husband, Jason,
that she enacts a horrific, self-defeating revenge,
murdering her and Jason's children.
Greek tragic theatre excels
in presenting these complex and elemental figures.
But there is something else that appears
in every single ancient Greek drama,
a chorus.
A group of between 12 and 15 people
who have some reason to be in the time and place
of each play, local residents, attendants
or friends of one of the named characters.
In ancient Greek times,
this group would have always been played
by male performers.
Understanding what and who the chorus is,
and how they add to and shape the performance
of ancient Greek theatre
can often be a challenge for contemporary audiences.
On the one hand, we're used to seeing choral groups,
choirs of singers, the choruses of opera
if opera's your bag, musical choruses
when the stage is flooded with a bunch of people
singing and dancing in unison,
perhaps the corps in ballet,
or banks of unison dancers behind artists
like Beyonce at Coachella.
Often these groups are in the background,
and they're frequently regarded as far less important
than the stars of the show, the ballet, the opera,
the music video or concert.
But for the ancient Greeks,
the chorus was the beginning of drama,
the centre of everything,
and the feature of drama that gave the stories
and myths that were played out on stage
an immediacy to their own lives.
We know very little about how ancient Greek drama
came into being.
We rely on a few hastily written sentences
from Aristotle and his oft-quoted work, the Poetics.
As a side note, I find it mildly horrifying to think
Aristotle never intended this work for publication.
It is so unclear and patchy,
and yet it has become the authoritative text
for so much of what is said and has been written
about European traditions of theatre.
But I digress.
In the Poetics, Aristotle tells us
that tragedy grew out of the performance tradition
known as the dithyramb.
This was a certain kind of song and dance
where myth was related by a chorus of performers.
Aristotle implies that tragedy was invented
when an individual separated themselves from this chorus,
allowing there to be a conversation
between this individual, and the myth-telling,
all-singing all-dancing group.
Later writers, on the basis of very slim evidence,
would give a name to this individual, Thespis,
often hailed as the first actor
and the inventor of tragedy.
He's the reason why we call those
of an actorly persuasion thespians.
Aristotle goes on to say that it was only with Aeschylus,
a playwright active during the first half
of the fifth century, that tragedies
became more spoken than choral,
that is, for a long time, Greek tragedy
seems to have consisted predominantly
of choral performance.
As the fifth century progressed,
so Aristotle says,
individual characters started to become
more and more prominent
and more responsible for driving the action of the play.
We might be tempted to extrapolate
from Aristotle's account of the development of tragedy
that as the art form became more sophisticated,
and also more and more popular,
we have evidence for ancient Greek drama
being performed in northern Africa, in Sicily,
and as far north and east as Odessa
in modern-day Ukraine.
So with this sophistication and increased popularity,
individual actors became more important,
while the chorus had its role cut down
and their significance for the play reduced.
Many august and well-respected scholars
have said as much,
talking about the steady decline
in the importance of the chorus in Greek drama.
However, there is a ton of evidence
from the fourth-century BCE,
the century following the deaths
of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides,
and Sophocles, that the chorus continued
to be an innovative element,
deployed by poets for stunning dramatic effects.
Aside from artistic interpretation, money talks,
the chorus, then as now,
might often be the most expensive element in a production.
15 salaries, although we're not quite sure
how ancient choral performers were paid,
15 sets of costumes and props,
hiring a big enough area to rehearse so large a group,
the time to rehearse music and choreography,
hiring specialist trainers of choral song and dance.
The resources put into staging the chorus
in Classical Greece demonstrate
that it was always a valuable and valued part
of the theatrical production.
The chorus then was a major element in Greek tragedy,
throughout the Classical period
in the ancient Greek world.
But what is it that the chorus
of Greek drama actually does?
We may have heard, and it is often said,
that the chorus are there to comment
on the action of the play.
The chorus in Greek tragedy, however,
contrary to what many of us are told,
do a great deal more than just comment.
An extreme example of this
is the chorus of Aeschylus to play Eumenides.
This is the third in a trilogy of plays,
known as the Orestia.
In that third and final play,
the chorus are the Furies,
female spirits of vengeance
who are pursuing the Prince of Mycenae, Orestes,
punishing him for the crime of murdering his own mother.
Here then, the chorus is a protagonist,
driving the action of the drama
and only allowing it to end
when their claim for retribution
or restitution has been met in some way.
The chorus of tragedy can get physical
with characters on stage.
In Sophocles' last play, Oedipus at Colonus,
produced posthumously in 401 BCE,
the chorus appear to surround Oedipus' daughter Antigone
in an attempt to protect her from Creon,
who's come to find and take her by force back to Thebes.
We have to infer some of this physical activity
from the text.
The texts of Greek tragedies don't include stage directions.
But it is clear that the chorus are physically intervening
on behalf of Antigone and her aged father, Oedipus.
A chorus of tragedy can also be responsible
for giving characters crucial information
and setting off a chain reaction of other events.
In a play by Euripides, the Ion,
the chorus hear of a plot to install
a new prince at Athens,
and tell their queen, Creusa,
warning her that she is about to be duped by this plot.
With this knowledge, Creusa then plans
to murder this new prince,
who is, in fact, unbeknownst to her, her own son,
the eponymous Ion of the play.
Disaster does not quite ensue,
but here we see again that the chorus
profoundly shapes the course of action in a play.
At other times, their speech and silence
likewise allows certain, usually tragic, action
to come to pass.
In Euripides' Medea, the chorus have heard
of Medea's plan to kill her own children
but don't tell anyone who might be able
to prevent this awful act.
This is a decision
and not some inevitable by-product
of theatrical convention
that the chorus doesn't intervene.
We've seen in Eumenides that they can and do intervene.
These are just a few examples of how the chorus
in Greek tragedy often acts as a character
in its own right, with its own motivation,
backstory, character,
and development throughout the drama.
For the ancient Greeks, the chorus in tragedy
would have had an additional power,
one that is less accessible for us today.
In every play, the chorus sing and dance
what we call odes, songs, or stasima,
if you're using the technical term.
These songs will have been connected to the plot,
although these connections are sometimes
deliciously and poetically suggestive
rather than directly relevant.
But the songs would also have deployed imagery,
tunes, rhythms, and even prayers,
that the audience would recognize
from their own song and dance practice
outside of the theatre.
For the ancient Greeks, every major event in life
was celebrated by coming together with others
to sing and dance traditional songs.
When a baby was born, at marriages, and funerals,
and celebrations of war victory, athletic victory,
and festivals for the gods.
Most people, whatever their innate
musical and dancing ability,
would participate in these songs,
these choruses, throughout their lives.
Tragedians like Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles
made sure to capitalize on their audience's lived experience
outside of the theatre, to make their plays
resonate on a personal,
as well as universal or political level.
Tragedians being what they are, of course,
they use their choruses to create
deliberately ironic complicated feelings in their audiences.
In Euripides' Hippolytus,
whose central figure is a young man
who has no interest in getting married,
but whose stepmother has been cruelly struck
by Cupid's arrow and has the hots for her stepson,
the poet deploys traditional wedding songs
in the choral odes, just to turn the knife
and highlight just how screwed up
the figures in this play are when it comes to marriage.
Or if we look at the chorus in Sophocles' masterpiece,
Oedipus the King,
the chorus frequently call on the god Apollo for help,
using refrains from a specific genre of choral song,
the paean, a healing song,
that was dedicated to Apollo.
When the play opens,
with Thebes in the midst of a deadly plague,
a chorus appealing to Apollo with such a song
is absolutely appropriate.
Perhaps we, plague-ridden as we still are,
should try singing a paean or two.
But the choruses refrain of 'o paean'
is also deeply ironic when we, the audience, recognize
that the god Apollo is responsible
for all the mess that Oedipus is in,
and the mess that will be revealed to him
over the course of the play.
These are some of the aspects
of the ancient Greek chorus
that made it an invaluable element
in the creation of powerful dramatic works of art
in ancient Greece.
They brought spectacle, song, and dance to the production,
they acted as characters in their own right,
and they provided a poetic counterpoint to the action,
summoning up for the audience
the world that existed beyond the world of the play
in the form of familiar songs and ritual utterances.
But what can the chorus say and do for us now
in the modern world?
Kae Tempest's rewriting of Sophocles' Philoctetes
gives us a brilliant exploration of this question.
In the play, the chorus has been transformed
from the male soldiers of the original
into a community of women who are deeply rooted
in the place where the play is set,
only referred to as the island.
In the snapshots that we see of individual characters,
their individual backstories,
plot arcs, hopes for the future,
the injuries and disappointments of the past,
Kae Tempest has found a different way
for modern audiences
to connect with this 'other' character
of Greek tragedy, its chorus.