For whom do the Chorus weep? A response to the Greek-Barbarian polarity in Aeschylus’ Persians by Thiasos Theatre Company.

Aeschylus’ Persians, set in the court at Sousa, represents the reaction of the Persians to the destruction of their fleet by the Greeks at the battle of Salamis. It was first produced at Athens in 472 BCE, eight years after the battle and while Xerxes still ruled the Persian Empire.

The play is charged with political significance and has a performance history which reflects the multitude of perspectives from which it can be viewed: as an expression of the David and Goliath theme—a small nation defeating a large aggressor, as an illustration of independence, or as a victory of civilization over barbarism.
Thiasos Theatre Company produced the play during 2006 and 2007 in St. Stephen’s Church in London, at the ancient theatres of Cyprus and in the gardens of New College in Oxford. Extracts were also performed at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2007.

As famously elaborated by Edith Hall in her ‘Inventing the Barbarian’ (1989), Aeschylus constructs a picture of the Persians which, though partly based on the Athenians’ direct knowledge of their enemy, is also designed to express the radical difference between the Persians (as the inferior ‘other’) and the Athenians. Central to this otherness is the unrestrained emotion of the Persians’ collective lament and the portrayal of the Persians as effeminate, excessively luxury-loving and despotic—an antithesis to the characteristics of manliness, moderateness and equality valued by a so called ‘democratic’ Athens where, to quote from the messenger’s speech in Persians ...”each man is king of his own oar”. (379)

Then again the lament, so close to the Greek way of lamenting and so poignant, points to the possibility that patriotic feelings did not preclude sympathy for the enemy. To quote Casey Dué, “the Athenians had a particular appreciation...of the universality of wartime suffering to the extent that they could explore their own sorrows by experiencing that of their enemies.”

Thus, on the stage, the effete and despotic enemy was represented by a citizen chorus clad in Persian costume performing familiarly Greek heartbreaking songs of sorrow.

This apparent inconsistency has occasioned much discussion in the literature on the relationships of Greeks to the ‘other’. Helena Foley, for example, writes that while women, slaves and barbarians portrayed in Greek documents serve to “define less fully human alternatives” to the rational self-controlled males..., “at the same time, tragedy offers a dialogue in which women, slaves and barbarians ... are represented in a complex and powerful public performance”.

Froma Zeitlin, in Playing the Other (1996), famously argues that Greek tragedy explores masculine and civic structures through the feminine ‘interior’ worlds, and, more generally, through ‘otherness’, and that this exploration constitutes the essence of impersonation and therefore of theatricality.

Moreover, theatre productions have often resolved the inconsistency between patriotism and sympathy by inventing analogies to the Graeco-Persian conflict which invite the spectator to take sides. This has been achieved by emphasizing whichever characteristics accorded with the director’s sympathies and with the political climate of their times. For example, the Berliner Ensemble’s 1983 production portrayed Xerxes as a fascist Junta commander ruling over a court of western decadence, while Peter Sellars emphasized the lament of ancient Persia to express the suffering of modern Iraq when it was bombed by the west in 1993.

While one would not wish to limit the interpretative wealth of Greek tragedy, one feels that discussion of the Greek-Barbarian polarity has paid insufficient attention to the following:

1. The unique ability of the Greek chorus to represent its audience - the citizen body - while at the same time eschewing rigid characterization.

It should be remembered that the chorus of effeminate Persian elders in exotic dress is played by youths representative of the citizen body performing laments, songs and dances that, despite their oriental elements, are also characteristically Greek.

2. The inheritance from epic of sympathy for the enemy
For example, the same internal contradiction between celebrating and lamenting the destruction of the enemy in Aeschylus’ Persians, may also be found in Homer’s Iliad. The Iliad, a poem extolling the Greek hero, Achilles, ends with the lamenting of his Trojan enemy, Hector.

3. The evocation in tragedy of extra-theatrical death ritual both in (i) themes and imagery and also (ii) through the performance of gestures and music.

(i) Themes and Imagery.
Although no funeral as such takes place in Persians, the play strikingly embodies many thematic and structural features of extra-theatrical mourning in both the play’s imagery and its performance.

The imagery in Persians of the lamenting maternal earth, Asia , the cutting down of the flower of youth, the flower of the Persian land echoes images of fertility frequently also found in myths surrounding the death and resurrection of youths such as Hyakinthos and Adonis.

The conflated themes of the land of Persia emptied of its men, women longing for their absent husbands, and parents grieving for their children, find expression in erotically charged song combining themes of love, loss and longing (pothos). Communication between the living and the dead, a central feature of death ritual, occurs frequently in Persians in many guises: in the tomb offerings by the Queen to Darius, in the summoning (anakaleisthai) and raising of his ghost, and in the direct addresses by the chorus to the dead commanders of the Persian army.

(ii) Performance of gestures and music.
There are many literary and iconographic references to characteristic gestures of lamentation. Persians is a rich source of clues regarding the various gestures that might have been part of a choreography of grief.

Below, for example, are the following sung instructions shouted by Xerxes acting as the exarchos (leader) of the threnos (lament) at the end of the play:

1052-3: CHORUS: Ototototoi.
My groans will mix (oi) with blows that blacken flesh.
1054 And beat your breast and shout the Mysian lament
1056 And tear for me the white hair of your beards
1060 Now tear your clothing with your fingernails
1062 And pluck your hair and show your pity for the army.

Solid evidence for the existence of these practices outside the theatre is provided by Plutarch’s account of Solon’s sixth-century legislation which forbade laceration of the cheeks, singing of set dirges and lamentation at other people’s tombs. The ban was in force during Plutarch’s time and heated disapproval of the very gestures in Persians described above - the blows, the breast-beating and the rending of hair and garments - continued to be expressed five centuries later by the Church Fathers. Basil of Caesarea for instance, in the fourth century after the Christian Era, writes:

...neither men nor women should be permitted too much lamentation and mourning. They should show moderate distress... without moaning, wailing, tearing of clothes and grovelling in the dust...

Although little is known about the ancient Greek music of lamentation, sources are consistent in associating it with the East - with the shrill, high-pitched tone of the aulos and with the a minore metre known as the Ionic. Unsurprisingly in Persians there is an abundance of such ‘eastern’ characteristics, as also several explicit references to eastern laments such as the Mysian and the Mariandynian lament, and to harsh cries and shrill songs.
On the other hand, the antiphonal lament often has an eastern character independently of who performs it. In Homer, for example, it is performed by the Greek Ocean Nymphs and by the Muses and in several tragedies it is performed by choruses composed of Greeks.

Though somewhat far-fetched, one can see how ‘eastern’ attributes of ‘real life’ lamentation in Greece might have mutated through the ages into a dramatic chorus of Persians ready to weep for their historical defeat at Salamis.

4. Tragedy’s re-appropriation of forms from which it has emerged—for example, the antiphonal singing and refrain performed by two distinct groups of family and outsiders.

Margaret Alexiou, in her seminal work The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974 and 2002), suggests that in Homeric and pre-Homeric times there is a distinction in the performance of the lament between performance by kin and performance by outsiders. The relatively ordered threnos is sung by outsiders while the wilder goos is sung by closer kin. Alexiou then suggests that the professional threnos was the kind developed by lyric poets while the goos was reestablished as the kommos of tragedy (described by Aristotle as a tragic lament between chorus and actors).

The metrical symmetry between strophe and antistrophe that is typical of the choral odes, not just of Persians but of all classical tragedy, also shows a marked correspondence with the antiphonal singing of the lament.

Death ritual is tenaciously traditional and changes little over time. We can therefore assume that the lamenting choral songs, reinforced by familiar gestures, would have had strong emotional associations for the spectators even in the classical age. However, in our sources it is the insiders—the female kith and kin—and not the outsiders who are given to unrestrained lamentation. We might therefore ask how a (male) Athenian audience would respond to such relatively unrestrained lamentation: would the fifth-century Athenians have associated the Persians’ lament with the grief of their own wives and mothers, or would they have constructed it as alienatingly ‘barbarian’ and ‘effeminate’?

The unattainable answer, one suspects, is concealed in the fluidity of choral identity and in the versatility of the performance.

The following passage from Persians illustrates how the cohesion of the chorus as representatives of the polis often over-rides the Greek-Barbarian polarity:

Not for long now will the inhabitants of Asia
abide under Persian rule,
nor pay further tribute
under compulsion to the King,
nor shall they be his subjects,
prostrating themselves on the ground;
for the kingly power is destroyed.

Men will no longer curb their tongues;
for people are released to talk freely
when a strong yoke has been removed
And the soil of Ajax’s sea-washed island,
stained with gore, holds the remains of the Persians. (584-595).

This pair of verses (strophe and antistrophe) is sung almost immediately after the chorus have heard of the catastrophic defeat of their army and the deaths of their comrades. Actors today might be perplexed (as were the Thiasos actors) as to how the emotions expressed should be interpreted: are the Persian chorus bewailing this fate of impending freedom (as many commentators suggest) or are they as jubilant as an Athenian chorus of citizens might be at the removal of a ‘strong yoke’?

Attributing a consistent political outlook to the chorus of a fifth-century classical play as if they were real-life characters of the modern world would have been anachronistic. Our production therefore sought to preserve rather than to resolve ambiguities in Persians through a number of directorial choices:

a. the creation of a flexible choral identity which cuts across various polarities such as those between luxury and moderation and between democracy and despotism.

b. the setting of certain choral passages at the peak of the Persians’ despair to the falak singing of Tajikistan—a penetratingly powerful genre of singing which expresses separation and loss. The grief of separation from beloved comrades, husbands, sons and country and fighting and dying away from home was, I felt, the core emotion of the play and at the centre of our performance.

c. the performance by the chorus of Shi’a mourning gestures –violent expressions of grief.
Recurrent mourning gestures, themes and imagery may be identified not just in ancient literary and iconograpic sources but also in living traditions such as those of the Muslim Shi’a. As noted above, Greek funerary iconography depicts self-laceration, pulling hair, beating the breast and tearing garments. These gestures of grief are also widely performed throughout Shi’a Muslim cultures at Ashura ceremonies that commemorate Ali’s martyrdom at Karbala. Breast-beating, for example, is known as matam.

Furthermore, Solon’s and other condemnations of uncontrollable behaviour at funerals recalls frequent bans and condemnations by members of the Islamic clergy of extreme gestures of grief that involve cutting the scalp with razor blades or rhythmical self-beating with chains (zanjir zani).

During the preparation of our production we studied and observed these gestures during Ashura celebrations in Tehran and in several documentary films and photographs of Karbala ceremonies in Iraq, at Hezbollah parades in the Lebanon, and at funerals of young men killed during the violence in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

These gestures of violent grief were deliberately used by the actors when required by the text. It was thought they might evoke something of the ‘pity and terror’ of images familiar to modern television viewers.

The Thiasos chorus was played by both males and females, dressed in luxurious costumes from various parts of what was once the Persian Empire - such as present-day Uzbekistan.

At the moment of the most intense grief—when they hear of the catastrophic defeat of the Persian army—the chorus shed their ornate outer layers of costume to reveal simple white garments. They remain in this unadorned attire for the rest of the play which consists mainly of a series of heartbreaking laments.

d. Tragedy’s re-appropriation of forms from which it has emerged—for example, the antiphonal singing and refrain performed by two distinct groups of family and outsiders.

Margaret Alexiou, in The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (1974 and 2002), suggests that in Homeric and pre-Homeric times there is a distinction in the performance of the lament between performance by kin and performance by outsiders. The relatively ordered threnos is sung by outsiders while the wilder goos is sung by closer kin. Alexiou then suggests that the professional threnos was the kind developed by lyric poets while the goos was reestablished as the kommos of tragedy (described by Aristotle as a tragic lament between chorus and actors).

The metrical symmetry between strophe and antistrophe that is typical of the choral odes, not just of Persians but of all classical tragedy, also shows a marked correspondence with the antiphonal singing of the lament.

Death ritual is tenaciously traditional and changes little over time.  We can therefore assume that the lamenting choral songs, reinforced by familiar gestures, would have had strong emotional associations for the spectators even in the classical age.  However, in our sources it is the insiders—the female kith and kin—and not the outsiders who are given to unrestrained lamentation. We might therefore ask how a (male) Athenian audience would respond to such relatively unrestrained lamentation: would the fifth-century Athenians have associated the Persians’ lament with the grief of their own wives and mothers, or would they have constructed it as alienatingly ‘barbarian’ and ‘effeminate’?

The unattainable answer, one suspects, is concealed in the fluidity of choral identity and in the versatility of the performance.

The wealth of the vocal effects of the lament was rendered in Tajik falak song which is redolent of cries and sounds of intense emotion and suffering. These vocal effects are singularly well suited to give voice to a series of extra-syntactical cries uttered by the defeated Persians. Choral passages were sung in Persian (the native language of Tajikistan), ancient Greek and English by both male and female voices. This allowed us to explore male and female contrasts in the interplay of the so-called Greek and barbarian antithesis in Aeschylus’ tragedy - especially in relation to the effeminisation of the Persians. Thus, while the use of costume, voice, and language maintains the distinctions between ornate and simple, male and female, native and foreign, it also cuts across them.

There is no way to re-create the identification that a Greek citizen might have felt with a tragic chorus in the religious civic space of the theatre regardless of their ethnicity or allegiance. Our production however, though far removed from the ‘original’, serves as an example of the power of a choral presence to generate feelings in an audience that are mutually exclusive and compatible at one and the same time. Once the chorus is understood to be representative of the polis and the central driving force of the performance, to classify them as either Greek or Persian becomes redundant.

Taking the structure of extra-theatrical death ritual and the chorus as points of departure, Thiasos’ Persians eschews simple analogies and shows that what appears as a polarity is in fact a unity. I tried to create a picture in which the choice between good Greeks and bad Barbarians on the one hand, and bad Greeks and good Barbarians on the other, would simply not present itself. Thus, the unity I refer to is not created simply by what Simone Weil so eloquently terms the ‘equalizing power of grief’. It is created by the antecedents of tragedy in the collective human response to the pain of death and by the blending of features of epic and lamentation outside the theatre which gave tragedy its characteristic shape.

Let us then ask not how the lament serves the Greek or the Persian cause in the battle of Salamis, but how Aeschylus set the battle of Salamis to a lament.

RE-ANIMATING ANTIQUITY: STANIEWSKI’S DANCE ALPHABET.

Introduction
This essay begins with a brief introduction to Gardzienice, the Polish theatre company led by Wlodzimierz Staniewski and founded in 1977. The essay ends with the suggestion that Staniewski has created a corporeal language that resonates across a multitude of cultures and political climates and situations.

This would be for the following four reasons:
1. The emphasis laid in the training on mutuality—that is on a dialogic language between actors’ bodies which links text music, audience and surroundings.
2. The centrality and remarkable fluidity of the chorus.
3. The engagement, throughout Gardzienice’s history, with the customs, and performance traditions of communities from all over the world—remotely rural communities as well as urban ones.
4. The fact that Gardzienice is rooted in a Polish theatrical tradition where theatre is inextricable from other artistic expressions, such as music and painting, and where artistic expression is in turn inextricable from the political and philosophical striving for freedom (regardless of how this freedom is conceived at different times).

Focusing on what Staniewski calls cheironomy—an alphabet of gestures derived from ancient Greek iconography and from reconstructed fragments of surviving Greek musical notation—I hope to provide some clues as to how these—‘units of language’ multiply and mutate into the rich theatre performances and films such as the Iphigenia at Aulis at Delphi (2008).

Reanimating Antiquity
Gardzienice, the name of the theatre company is also the name of the village in south eastern Poland near the Ukranian border where the theatre is located.

Central to Gardzienice’s work are explorations and close mutual exchanges of performances known as 'expeditions' and 'gatherings',. These have involved communities from Gardzienice's neighbouring Euro-Asian cultures –Jewish, ethnic Roma, Ukrainian, Lemo, Bielorussian ethnicities –and from places as remote as Lappland, Brazil, South Korea and Sierra Madre. The company also receive visiting performers from a variety of cultures and traditions on home territory.

This process of sowing and gathering is structured around the themes of Gardzienice’s performances which have very long gestation periods—sometimes as long as 7 years. Movement, music and scenarios are permeated by indigenous rituals, community songs and dances and involve painstaking research.

In Gardzienice’s creations, philosophical and literary ideas are often actualised in physical movement. When life and history present Staniewski with a new theme and a new aesthetic, the basic physical language changes accordingly and each new project generates its characteristic ‘gestus’ : so for instance in The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum (1983), (excerpts from the priest’s biography combine with Orthodox religious imagery, antiphonal singing from Mount Athos and alternating wild and calm pagan rituals) a low bowing ‘gestus’, expressing both submission and defiance, was retrieved from the religious icons and based on viewing the body as an allegorical cross.

For the last 13 years, Staniewski has been exploring classical Antiquity and has so far produced Metamorphoses (1997) based on Apuleius’ Golden Ass , an adaptation of Euripides’ Elektra 2002, Iphigeneia at Aulis 2007 and is currently preparing Iphigeneia in Tauris. The basic ‘gestus’ is cheironomy.

Though there are significant differences between the three pieces in its use (the use of cheironomy), Greek vase iconography is the defining source for the creation of the movement language in all three.

Here are some examples of these sources from Gardzienice’s CD Rom – A Theatrical Essay

The Elektra opens with an upstage screen projection of a second-century BC papyrus from Euripides’ music for the Orestes. An actor points to the screen reading out the words and, as the reconstructed music is played, the company sing and relate arm movements to the sound heights depicted graphically on the inscribed music.

Subsequently the chorus leader cries out words  relating to poses that constitute the alphabet:  ’beautiful!’, and the chorus members cup their breasts; ‘muscles!’, and they flex their muscles —each move mirroring gestures from a Greek vase- painting projected onto the screen. And the still movements pick up speed and develop into a vigorous dance.

The Elektra’s semiotic lecture and Gardzienice’s training exercises based on Greek iconography (of which I will show you an example] suggest a deceptively simple correspondence between image, sound and gesture. The correspondence is infinitely more complicated.

To quote Staniewski:
‘ the postures on the vases came from a forgotten line of life within ourselves - the desire to dance. They are not frozen, static postures: these figures are running, spinning dancing flying”

the process of setting ‘antiquity dancing’ involves of course also music. An alchemy is created between the iconography the ancient musical fragments through multifaceted engagement with living performers and performance traditions from several cultures.
'Music’, says Staniewski, is 'at the core of everything I generate…a vital energy and life-force…[it is] my co-director'. Before entering the world of antiquity with Metamorphoses, Elektra and Iphigeneia, Gardzienice had generated their performances in close association with indigenous musics, rituals and dances of communities from all over the world.   In every instance the music had been live—it could be heard and felt—and the organic link between gesture and sound could be directly experienced.

.

Iphigeneia in Delphi

In the summer of 2008 Gardzienice took Iph at A… and Metamorphoses to Delphi in Greece.
Iphigeneia’s journey to Delphi forged the Company’s intimate correspondence with Greek tragedy For the Iphigeneia penetrates even deeper into ancient Greek territory than the previous two productions. For the first time, Staniewski uses the entire Euripidean text and a unifying score by the composer Zygmunt Konieczny. The music is pervaded by a Slavic lyricism with a rich emotional texture.  

 (from the end of the play as Agamemnon -played by Mariusz Golaj- prepares to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigeneia played by Karolina Cicha)

In the next clip, the chorus use cheironomy to perform a war between the sexes to the accompaniment of a choral song sung partly in ancient Greek.
The song's theme is the destruction of Troy following Helen's forsaking of her husband and comes after a marital argument between Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra.

AGAMEMNON: “a wise man should keep his wife at home”.  
CHORUS: "Pergamus with walls of stone, Phrygia's town,
He [Ares, the god of war] will encircle in bloody battle,
Cutting the defenders' throats."

The chorus splits to perform a war of the sexes as the female half side with Clytaemnestra and the male half with Agamemnon over the issue of Iphigeneia’s sacrifice.  Parts of the choral ode are also distributed to Iphigeneia and to a messenger figure played by a well known Polish actor Krzystof Globisz.
You might recognize the  cheironomia designating ‘towers’ and ‘temple’:“Then from the citadel’s top peak to earth/He will sack all the dwellings in Troy city…”

Conclusion

I would like to end by reintroducing the question of an ‘original’ source or performance text:
Staniewski’s productions are informed by a huge amount of scholarly research and by a ceaseless striving to excavate, to come close to the very real, but ever-elusive spirit of antiquity. How do we assess the value of any insights gained by the audience and actors in the course of this researching and performing? If they are of value, how necessary is this illusion of antiquity being within what Staniewski calls a ‘touching distance’? And why is it that so often, the engagement with ancient material is at the same time an engagement with our present and our future political questions and ideals?

Messenger: ..the whole barbarian force has perished.
Chorus: Agonising, agonising, without precedent
and dire! Aim, Persians
weep...   (256-8)                                                             translation Edith Hall

From Thiasos’ production of Aeschylus’ Persae at New College Gardens (Oxford 2007). Directed by Yana Zarifi

From Thiasos’ production of Aeschylus’ Persae at New College Gardens (Oxford 2007). Directed by Yana Zarifi

New College Gardens (Oxford 2007). Directed by Yana Zarifi