Song Seminar - Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting

Wednesday 21 November, 12.30-2 pm in Emmanuel College (Harrods Room)

Naomi Weiss (Harvard) – 'Performance, Memory, and Affect: Animal Choruses in Archaic and Classical Greek Vase Painting'

In this presentation I explore how ancient Greek images of choral song and dance—activities unified in the term choreia—engage a viewer's experience of musical performance. I focus in particular on a series of Attic pots, mostly from the mid- to late sixth century BCE, that show choruses of animals and animal-riders singing and dancing, usually to the accompaniment of a double pipe (the aulos). These pots are often assumed to be "proto-comic," appearing at the same time as dramatic festivals were developing at Athens. Rather than seeing them as records of particular theatrical scenes, I suggest that we should understand them as expansive and flexible in terms of the songs they convey: they can reproduce the phenomenology of an entire production as well as that of one moment within it; they can also suggest affinities to other performances of choreia, thus drawing on a broader choral repertoire. By evoking the multisensory, multilayered experience of theater, these vessels position their users as audience members once more. At the same time, by cueing a viewer's embodied memory of being a choral performer himself, they can draw him into participating in their own musical productions.