[Music] the course often doesn't seem to be the most relatable thing for audiences I think theater makers and theater goers are really really aware of that it's kind of often talked about as a problem and I think the chorus is really challenging to contemporary audiences but not challenging in a oh it's really difficult we can't we can't handle it way challenging in a way that kind of prompts us to get involved in the action get invested start bringing what we we already have in our lives to tragedy one of the things that they do all the time is um they talk about different places and different times so the chorus in way acts as a kind of window into other worlds and if you think about the ancient theater when you didn't have elaborate scenery you couldn't do set changes you just had a stage people and an audience it's really really important to be able to say and now we're going to go back in time a little bit so if we think about women of Troy there we have a chorus quite early on in the play where they talk about what was happening just before uh the Trojan Horse got wheeled in and the whole city was sacked they're remembering the wonderful times they had how they thought the war was over they were celebrating they were [Music] dancing the ancient Greeks combined spoken text with sung text and dance so I wanted in conceiving our chorus to honor that and to have as many of those ingredients as possible so of course they have the spoken text which they deliver directly to the audience in the Littleton but also they do dancing in this production we're using dance without the men so by putting their arms up and the women dancing it reminds the audience of the absent men who've been killed in the conflict the challenge is is finding a new language for the chorus and um because of course at the time what happened is the chorus would have about you know this was this was an oral um culture so you so groups of women would all know these songs um obviously the chorus and the original Productions would have sung but we're working with um will and Allison from gold frap who are creating a new Coral score for the production and so they're going to be working with our female chorus of 13 performers to get this very kind of strong um ethereal sound through the production in the Antony we had a chorus that was really really really definitely made into a group of individuals where people had their own individual roles they had their own individual identities they spoke as individuals they also found that actually within a sort of coral ode a particular piece of coral text you had almost a conversation going on you had differing opinions coming out and so in a way the unity um of the corus was was exploded in that production and it had a really really powerful effect so we knew that we we were going to make the chorus um a gang of men individual personalities that um a modern audience could more readily understand easier to understand 10 individuals and 10 people operating as a pack all the time who were running one of these secret underground they called continuance of government facilities is the Posh phrase for them so it was quite fun working out what the status of those 10 men might be how they might interact with each other and then to use that as a way of starting to carve up the lines who has a low status line who has a high status line one of the things I think um allows audiences to interact with a chorus is that often their identity will be based on a kind of stereotype so uh in women of Troy we have sort of slightly um upper class women who up until now have had like a very very nice life um suddenly they're in this awful awful situation where they've lost everything and they're just not highly sure how to deal with it um all of the chorus members in that in that production of Ky Mitchells were sort of very very nervy and kind of unsure about how to handle things and they had their Handbags and sort of that was sort of their main stay so that's a stereotype immediately we kind of understand in the Meda we have a different kind of stereotype of the bridesma and it's a sort of role that they slowly slowly take on it's a really interesting kind of plot Arc that the chorus in media have in Carri Kel's production where they come on sort of individual ually costumed and all very interested they are a unit but they have they have some distinction and then slowly they get kind of absorbed into this um bridesmaid from Hell sort of costuming and at the end they're all there asort of one um unit