- 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.