Chorus and Collectivity

For whom does the dramatic chorus speak? In this graduate seminar, we track the figure of the chorus in drama, theater, and performance from antiquity to modernity, investigating how the chorus represents collectivity and enacts new social forms onstage. The chorus, as we’ll find, can be an instrument of tyranny or of transformation, depending on the members who comprise it – whether they are an assembly of elders (Sophocles’s Antigone), a gathering of survivors (Euripides’s The Trojan Women), a cadre of revolutionaries (Bertolt Brecht’s The Mother), a crowd of athletes 2 (Elfriede Jelinek’s Sports Play), or a digital network of chattering AI machines (Annie Dorsen’s Prometheus Firebringer). Our seminar attends to how the chorus shifts across historical, geographic, and cultural contexts: from ancient Athens to postwar Germany, and from American mass culture to decolonizing movements in the Caribbean, the chorus has proven to be a remarkably flexible and resilient element of live art. The course offers graduate students a broad introduction to canonical works of dramatic literature both ancient and modern, while also featuring lesser-known plays and productions by emerging artists. For the first two-thirds of the term, our sessions will juxtapose a dramatic text with a work of social theory (by thinkers including Nietzsche, Simmel, and Goffman), as well as at least one scholarly essay. Our broader goal in the course is to develop fluency in critical methods at the intersection of drama, philosophy, and social theory. In this course, that is, we approach theater as not only responsive to traditions of social thought, but also generative of new social practices and collective habits of body and mind. In addition to regular weekly assignments, students will complete one short essay and one seminar-length paper at the end of the term.