The Oresteia part 2

In order to perform extracts of Greek chorus, we are looking at a version of The Oresteia part 2 of 'the libation Bearers' and adapting the original Greek theatre to a modern interpretation. The Oresteia tells the story of Orestes quest to kill his mother out of revenge for his father's murder. In my groups section of the script, Orestes is being persuaded by the chorus to kill his mother because she murdered his father. When I originally looked at the section I thought that Orestes was the villain of the story as he plans to kill his mother however the chorus piece shows how they sort of pressuring Orestes to do it as they say things like "do it for the house of Atreus". This therefore made me feel that the chorus had the dominance in this scene over the hero and that they have a lot of influence in the play itself.

We as a group started to think about how we could modernise the performance in order to suit our target audience, a group of upper aged school kids. One idea we explored was a mother's meeting. Because the chorus had control over Orestes, we thought that the audience might relate to how they have been controlled by their mothers as well as Orestes. However when we started to develop this idea, found out that we weren't able to create an equal chorus role for all of our group and we were focusing more on our theme then the physical and vocal performance of the piece. Instead we started to pull out key words from our text that could link to physical actions for example our first line is "let all who have prayed for justice". The key word we found was prayed and so we decided to create a tableu of praying using levels and individual images that linked together. I personally felt that this was a better way to create our performance as it meant that we could connect more with the text and it later made it easier to add our context to the movements.

Our contextual style that we have decided to perform our piece in is school kids peer pressure. We felt that this was a good theme as it is relevant to our young teen audience and it would enable us to use chavy ascents to portray our characters. It was easy to add this voice to our piece for example James says "when she wails 'Orestes my child' ". He is able to add manipulative tones and slag to his voice to make this line comical for when he pretends to faint. I feel that this style also makes it more modern as the chavy ascents weren't even created in Ancient Greece and it has only really being used in the late 20th century.

Also adding physical theatre to these ancient texts makes it modern as we are using modern practioners styles of physical theatre. For example we use a lot of berkovian techniques in our piece as we over exsagerted mouth movements when we say the text and we use robotic like clockwork movements when we turn to get into our first tableu. I feel that berkoff was a good practioner to use as this style of theatre questions against complex theme just like in the Oresteia.

Greek Chorus - Origins

Greek Theatre Origins

There is three types of Greek Theatre:

• tragedy
• comedy 
• satyr

Originally these types of plays would have been performed in the festival of Dionysus in front of all of Greece. The festival of Dionysus is a religious festival which celebrates the god Dionysus so it was very common for these Greek plays to have masks worn by all of the players. They were used to teach Greece life lessons by showing them the worst consequences to peoples actions. These plays were performed in open air theatres that were built into the side of a hill.

Tragedy
In Greek Tragedies, they mainly focus on looking suffering and human misery in the face. It confronts themes like living in a fraud world which has been caused by our own actions and these themes often relate to our modern world today. In tragedies, someone usually dies from some cause and before they die they usually talk about the sun as it links to the religious beliefs of the Greek gods. At the end of Greek tragedies there is also a catharsis. Catharsis is when there is a cleansing or purifying which can inflict to the audience an emotional draining at the end of the play. When relating these Greek tragedies to today's world, they are most similar to modern day soap operas as they have confront many extreme themes through acting.

Chorus
There are two key uses of a Greek Chorus. One of them being that they added fun and energy to the plays by using 12 or so strong singing/dancing men who were very athletic and engaging in the plays. The second being that they provide the prospective of the community in the plays. They often will show the hero and the villains story but the chorus will comment on the actions and decisions of the main characters. The chorus don't necessarily have to all think the same things but they must show different responses and opinions to the main characters. In the National Theatre videos on Greek Theatre, they described the chorus as "not a body that thinks together but a body that speaks together". The chorus's identity are usually based on stereotypes of common people in order to show that they are the community compared to the main characters. However in modern interpretations some play writes have adapted the chorus members to have there own individual character trait and statues in order to show that there are different people with the same opinions. 

Greek Chorus - Basic Techniques

In the lesson we looked into Greek chorus in order to explore the different ways to use our voices as an ensemble. in Greek theatre the chorus would usually provide commentary on the actions and events that were taking place on stage. They are very judgemental and can provoke the lead actors to do things because of their beliefs. they often would wear masks and there could be a leader of the chorus in which the rest of them follow.



We firstly thought about how the chorus could say large chunks of speech. one way they  could talk is by all of the chorus saying every word at the same time and tone. We found that this became quite lazy, depressing and church like which could be useful for a gloomy effect but it didn't really engage us as the audience. We then said that each person could say one line each. This flowed better as everyone got a bit to say and we were all individuals in the chorus however it did drag and there wasn't much emotion in the piece. We then made every person read up to the punctuation marks and then the next person would start. I felt that this was the most effective as it wasn't so regimented and everyone was able to have their own individual voice in the chorus. another way to perform this piece could be by splitting into small groups and read the piece, having the leader read the speech but the chorus read the last two words on the line or have the leader read the speech and the other chorus members repeating words that stood out for them.

Chorus reaction:
We also looked into to reactions that the Greek chorus might have to what the lead actors might say or do. For example they could react to the death of a lead character. One way in which we explored reaction was by showing opposite emotions. We were asked to show our reaction to good news and then bad news. I noticed that when we heard good news people's faces brightened up and they were more likely to lean forward to hear the news. However when people hear bad news they shrunk into themselves more. We also looked at fear and empowerment. Most people used the chair as a protector when they were portraying fear but when they showed empowerment, people stood up on the chair and opened up more. We finally looked at forgiveness and punishment. When people portrayed forgiveness they were reaching towards someone on the same level as them but when they showed punishment most people looked down to the person. I think that using opposite emotions it allows the actors to find the extreme differences in the body images and gives them a basis to show emotion as a chorus.