Deborah Steiner’s provocative investigation starts with the question τί δϵá μϵ χορϵύϵιν; (‘why should I take part in the chorus?’), from Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus 896. The main issue here is not so much ‘what was the chorus in ancient Greek culture?’, but rather ‘in what measure can Greek art, culture, and society be regarded as choral?’ This is less about dancing and singing choruses, an important matter in current scholarship (21–24), and more about ‘chorality’, as a network of aesthetical and cultural paradigms, archetypes and models. Political aspects have been tackled recently by historians: Vincent Azoulay and Paulin Ismard (Athènes 403: une histoire chorale (Paris 2020)) use ‘chorality’ on two levels, as an analytical tool to study Classical Athens, where choral practices exemplify the dialectics of dissension and harmony, and as a discursive device shaping a ‘procession’ of ten exemplary classical figures. Steiner’s inquiry expands wider, from Geometric to Classical art, and from Homer to Euripides (and even Callimachus), with important references to Plato and post-classical history and rhetoric (Pausanias, Philostratus, Lucian). However, a fuller inclusion of pre-Platonist philosophers and classical sophists and orators could have benefited the argument as a whole.
From the title on, Steiner uses the expressions ‘choral constructions’ and ‘the idea of the chorus’. This is an elegant way, somewhat choreographic, to ‘cross-pollinate’ various fields, such as performing arts (choreia, rather than choral dance), poetry, music, visual arts, rituals, mythology, writing and architecture. In the dynamic structure of a chorus, consonance depends on tensions and intensity on variety. As dance is a question of structure and fluidity, the architectural, biological and aesthetic concept of ‘tensegrity’ could be helpful here. Steiner often draws from analogies recalling cognitive psychology and prototypical semantics. Chorality, then, is a pervasive conceptual metaphor. Not for this reviewer, but for some readers, these analogies may be too speculative.
In nearly 800 pages, including a rich bibliography, indexes of passages cited and subjects, and 120 evocatively analysed illustrations, Steiner proposes a sequence of ten chapters, organized chronologically and thematically, from 1, ‘Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18: choreia at the forge’ (25–75), also about tripods, automats and Hephaestus as a kōmast dancer, to 10, ‘Choral envisioning’ (629–701), about archaic enargeia (‘vividness’), from a post-classical perspective. Steiner insists here on the analogy between light and movement, ‘vicarious transport’ (cf. N. Felson-Rubin, ‘Vicarious Transport: Fictive Deixis in Pindar’s Pythian Four’, HSCPh 99 (1999), 1–31), the energetic and spatial value of metaphora (and schemata, ‘figures’), empathetic participation and divine epiphanies. Under the auspices of Philostratus, these analyses could relate enargeia even more to poikilia (‘variety’) and saphēneia (‘clearness’), to synaesthesia, kinaesthetic empathy and embodied cognitive and emotional aspects of spectatorship and readership, as in contemporary literature and dance studies. Chorality concerns all senses: on Hephaestus’ craftmanship and epic creation, Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux claims ‘dance is a model of total art, at once visual, figurative, kinetic and musical’ (quoted by Steiner, 64; my translation). This assimilation of poetry and metalwork is thoroughly expanded by Steiner, in Chapter 1 and beyond, completed by other comparisons demonstrating that chorality is not a peripheral issue.
The first part of the volume consists of five chapters describing ‘paradigms to think and depict choreia’. I give only the beginnings of their titles: 2, ‘From the demonic to the divine’ (76–114) about ‘dancing pots’ and ‘bronze voices’; 3, ‘Flying with the birds’ (115–81), on halcyons, cranes, doves, etc.; 4, ‘The carnival of the animals’ (182–258), on dancing animal herds, like horses, cows and deer; 5, ‘Water music’ (258–339), on nymphs, ships and choral aquatics. The second part contains five chapters, including Chapter 10, on ‘chorality as a both real and symbolic construction of communal experience’: 6, ‘A chorus of columns’ (340–404), on Pindar’s poems as agalmata, ‘incipient chorality’ (see T. Power, ‘Cyberchorus: Pindar’s κηληδννϵς and the Aura of the Artificial’, in L. Athanassaki and E.L. Bowie (eds), Archaic and Classical Choral Song: Performance, Politics and Dissemination (Berlin 2011), 67–113) and ‘architectural chorus’; 7, ‘Choral fabrications’ (405–89), on interplays of dance, weaving and cloth-making; 8, ‘Choreography’ (490–580), on alphabetic writing, dance, rhuthmos and harmonia; and 9, ‘Girls in lines’ (581–628), on catalogues.
In the limited space of a review, it is impossible to present important passages which at once provide excellent food for thought, issues to discuss and inspiration for further research. Extremely rich, evocative and bright, this volume is to be integrated into a general trend of scholarship which could be labelled as choral (‘plural singularity’, 18) and from which Steiner takes her full share. This publication will surely become a stimulating resource and an inspirational source for sensitive problematizations not only of dance, but also of the interactions of literature, culture, the arts and society, in Archaic and Classical Greece and beyond.
