Choreia

The Trojan Women is the tragedy of change. Troy has fallen, and women wait to be taken to Greece as slaves. The Trojan women have to adapt to this new situation and exhibit their resilience to their sudden change of status. In her words, Hecuba has to peacefully endure her change of fortune (line 101). The Trojan queen is the only character who literally remains in her place throughout the play, while others come and go. She remains still on stage, although she is being struck by blow after blow.
Hecuba, in the face of distress, chooses to adapt and accept her faith. The heroine often emphasizes her difficulty to move which coincides with her inability to dance (lines 98-99, 112-119, 138-139, 149-152, 191-192, 466-468, 506-509). She has only a brief change of heart at the end of the play when she makes a series of sudden movements and attempts to enter the pyre that burns Troy (lines 1271-1283). Hecuba’s resistance to change is considered a sign of temporary madness (line 1284). Her restraint -that goes hand in hand with her limited movements- is further emphasized when contrasted with Cassandra’s frantic choreia that expresses her emotional state (lines 308-340).
It is not a coincidence that in the descriptions of the choral activity of the resilient Hecuba, the kinetic element of her choreia is almost absent. As other scholars have noticed, the kinetic element of choreia that has great potential to express excessive emotions, to excite, and emotionally involve the audience.  In this paper, I suggest that Hecuba is represented in the Trojan Women as a person who tries to successfully adapt to change.  I examine how and to what extent her ‘immobility’ is an expression of her inner world and a manifestation of her successful struggle to face a series of unwanted changes.

in: VERONIQUE DASEN, MARCO VESPA (dir.), Jouer dans l’Antiquité classique. Définition, transmission, réception.
Play and Games in Classical Antiquity.
Definition, Transmission, Reception, Presses Universitaires de Liège (Jeu /
Play / Spiel, 2) Liège 2021, 29-47

Paizein (‘to play’) is one of the termini technici for dancing in Greek culture. This paper explores the anthropological implications of this intriguing fact. After a glance on Plato’s explanations and its use in archaic poetry, the author investigates how this notion stands in accordance and in contrast to the poetics of Greek tragedy and in what way it is more appropriate for comedy and satyr play. The exuberance of playing children (paides) expresses the gay happiness of the comic atmosphere and the activities of the satyrs who, to some extent, seem to be re-projected to their status as children. Tragedy, on the contrary, besides its alleged origins in Dionysian ritual, seems to have little to do with pure paizein as joyous self-expression in dance. Therefore it possesses a much greater tendency to subordinate the quintessentially playful dance to the dramatic role full of suffering. However, the purely ritual and choral nucleus of tragedy as paizein tends to become manifest in choral songs about Dionysus, especially when the god is mentioned together with Nymphs and Maenads as notional parthenoi. Paizein like khoreia as a whole has to do with education, internalization and habituation of sexual and gender roles by young persons. Through performative foils, models, distortions, myths, narratives and body scripts young members of the society received a tool to apprehend and internalize the gender-role that is expected from them as well as to experiment with counter-worlds. Especially girls are envisioned in playful dance to display their sexual attractiveness. Beauty is the central value that maidens are about to assume in processes of habituation. The cultural re-workings of rites of passage in single or choral dance and play possess a huge role in the acculturation and appropriation of the expected behavior, not just by words but in a multimodality where the body as medium of dance is decisive.

Framing and change of frames make ritual become self-reflexive. Already the fact that a ritual is incorporated into a Dionysian performance creating ,ritual in ritual‘ makes mimesis meta-ritual. At the same time such re-enactments of ritual or connected mythic narratives are reassembled with other components to new and impressive scenes that tragedians deploy for the dramatic effect. Since ritual and theater are deeply connected each re-enactment of ritual on stage possesses a genuinely theatrical dimension. Aeschylus tends to dramatically display ritual as a mise en abyme, reflecting the macrostructure of the play in the microstructure. Thus in the central and striking necromantic scene of Dareius in Persians Aeschylus can reflect key motifs and religious themes of the whole tragedy. The conjured up king from the dead even becomes a voice to interpret the intricacies of the recent historical past in hermeneutical tones fusing the Persian with the Greek perspective. Ritual practice is usually represented by the choral group acting out a multimodal performance on the level of song, dance, rhythm, and music. Therefore staging religion becomes self-reflexive in a double sense. First, choral self-reference highlights the ritual action in the form of a speech-act, and second, choreia represents ritual action in the purest sense, embedding other ritual re-enactments that aim at highly spectacular performances.

Dionysian choreia is inextricably tied to extreme emotions. Descriptions of the choreia of female and male choruses that are akin to Dionysian choreia abound in ancient Greek drama. These descriptions aim at the emotional involvement of the audience. Nonetheless, sensory methodology has been never applied into the emotional experiences of this mystery cult as it appears in ancient Greek theater. This paper focuses on the descriptions, and especially the self-descriptions, of the acoustic and kinetic part of the choreia of several choruses of Greek drama-such as Aeschylus' Edonians, Euripides' Bacchae and Aristophanes' Women at the Thesmophoria-and reflects on the multiple senses through which the members of these choruses and the audience could experience Dionysian cult. It is also possible that the dramatic poets engage in the literary discourse of 5 th century B.C. and inscribe in the choreia of these Dionysian choruses the poetics of ecstasy, an emotional and cognitive state seen as the recognition of truth and not as a state of madness. Ecstasy in these contexts is a blessed experience provided by Dionysus, the god of theater.

The aim of this paper is to offer an analysis of the Christian intellectual perspective of choreutic gesture, putting forward the hypothesis that by regulating dancing, late antique bishops became spokesmen for an anthropology of gesture which on the one hand demonised all forms of performative dancing and on the other hand encouraged men to become perfect imitators of an angelic choreia in the Platonic framework. This choreia was supposed to guide the behavioural movement and schemata of men’s bodies. However, it was more than just a characteristic of a presumed Ideal City; it also had to be realised in life on earth, the anticipatory mirror image of the heavenly city.

Analysis of various sources from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, with a focus on texts by Church Fathers and conciliar norms intended to regulate the dancing practices, enables examination of the formation of Christian prejudice against dancing. A connection can be established between the choreia (choral dance) of the Ideal City described by Plato and the ideal of harmony that the early medieval Church attempted to impose as a form of social control. Such reflections, on dancing as well as on harmony – or the lack thereof – thus facilitate an in-depth reflection on the choreutic aspects of demonic possession.

In the parodos of the Prometheus Bound, the chorus of the Oceanids enters in their winged cars and addresses Prometheus in lyric meters without, however, performing dancing. In order to interpret the absence of choral activity up to a certain point of the drama, which has a significant impact on the identity of the tragic chorus per se, it is important to understand the role and the importance of the Oceanids in the whole play by bringing to the fore their own comments on their presence and activity. Within this framework, we need to place particular emphasis on the dramatic space that hosts their performance, as well as on their singing and dancing and on the emotions conveyed throughout the drama. The unusual choreia of the Oceanids corresponds to the spoken grief of the chained protagonist and thus acquires a strong performative effect.

6.10.2021, 16:15,
Metatheatrale Spielformen im attischen Drama als theatrum mundi und Platons Blick auf die Welt als Marionettentheater
Zoom under https://dslw.philhist.unibas.ch/de/

in: Theatrum mundi
Das Theater als Weltmodell
Ringvorlesung an der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel
Konzeption und Organisation:
Harm den Boer und Alexander Honold
(Departement Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaften, Universität Basel)
Mittwochs 16.15–18.00 Uhr
Hörsaal 1 des Pharmazentrums an der
Klingelbergstrasse 50, 4056 Basel sowie über Zoom
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