χορός, (α) σύνολο ρυθμικών κινήσεων του σώματος, των χεριών και των ποδιών. ’λλος όρος για την όρχηση·
(β) σύνολο τραγουδιστών και χορευτών ο χορός στο αρχαίο δράμα·
(γ) ο τόπος όπου γινόταν ή όρχηση, ιδιαίτερα στον Όμηρο· Ομ. Οδ. θ 260: "λείηναν δε χορόν, καλόν δ' εύρυναν αγώνα" (ισοπέδωσαν [έκαναν λείο] το μέρος για το χορό [το χοροστάσι] και πλάτυναν καλά το χώρο).
Στη Σπάρτη η αγορά λεγόταν χορός, γιατί οι νέοι συνήθιζαν να χορεύουν εκεί τις γυμνοπαιδίες . Παυσ. (Γ', 11, 9): "Σπαρτιάταις δέ επί της αγοράς Πυθαέως τέ εστιν Απόλλωνος και Αρτέμιδος και Λητούς αγάλματα· χορός δέ ούτος ο τόπος καλείται πας, ότι εν ταις γυμνοπαιδίαις... οι έφηβοι χορούς ιστάσι τώ Απόλλωνι" (στην αγορά τους οι Σπαρτιάτες έχουν αγάλματα του Πυθέα Απόλλωνα, της Αρτέμιδας και της Λητώς. Όλος αυτός ο τόπος ονομάζεται χορός, γιατί κατά τις γυμνοπαιδίες... οι έφηβοι εκτελούν χορούς προς τιμήν του Απόλλωνα).
http://www.musipedia.gr/
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Dance
In ancient Greece dancing played a prominent role both in private life and in public ceremonial and ritual. Group dancing, more often than not by members of the same sex, was commonest, but solo dancing, usually of an expressive or blatantly imitative character, developed particularly in connection with the stage, though also at private entertainments. The most striking difference from modern Western society is the absence of evidence for dancing in pairs of opposite sexes. The Greeks regarded the whole body as being involved in the movements of the dance, especially arms and hands (for which the term cheironomia is frequently found), but even head and eyes. Literary evidence for the dance is supplemented by that of art, especially vase painting, but the latter must be used with caution because of artistic conventions in the portrayal of action.
The earliest references in Homer are to dancing of youths and maidens at country festivals and weddings, or as entertainment in royal palaces. When Odysseus (Odyssey, viii, 206ff) is entertained by the Phaeacians, who boast their pre-eminence in dancing, he witnesses a dance in which athletic movements and ball-throwing are part of the performance. The mention (Iliad, xvi, 183) of maidens dancing in the choir of Artemis shows that the cults of Olympian divinities then, as in later classical Greece, featured song and dance rituals which became stereotyped in various poetic genres (e.g. the partheneia, maiden songs, composed by Alcman, Pindar and others for performance in the appropriate shrine, hymeneals, epithalamia, paeans, dithyrambs etc.). The pannuchis (‘all-night’ festival) was a common setting, and deities such as Dionysus, Apollo, Artemis and (in Sparta) the semi-divine Helen were invoked as patrons of the choirs. The word thiasos was used of the company of votaries of a particular god, and such groups were widespread in mainland Greece and islands like Delos, Lesbos and Crete.
It was commonly held by the Greeks themselves that Crete had once made an important contribution to the development, even ‘invention’, of dancing, and archaeological evidence confirms that dancing in groups or circles played some part in Minoan religious ceremonies and entertainments, the executants sometimes ornately dressed, or engaged in athletic tumbling and somersaulting for which Cretans were famed and which the Greeks regarded as part of the dance. The agility in battle of the Cretan Meriones, one of the minor Achaean heroes of the Iliad, is attributed to his dancing skill, and the description of battle as ‘the dance of Ares’ becomes a traditional poetic motif. Among prominent Cretan myths is the legend that the infant Zeus was protected at birth by the beating of feet and clashing of weapons by the Curetes, which drowned his cries. (Some scholars would associate this with a well-established primitive belief in the magical ‘apotropaic’ powers of dancing.) Armed dances continued to be popular both in Dorian Sparta, where disciplined dance forms recalling tactical manoeuvres were prominent in the education of young men and were thought to contribute to the martial excellence of classical Sparta, and in Athens, where at the panathenaic festival the so-called Pyrrhic dance, sometimes said to have been invented by Neoptolemus (Pyrrhus), son of Achilles, was performed in honour of Athena by youths naked except for helmet, shield and spear, and consisted of a traditional series of movements and gestures mimicking offensive and defensive postures of combat. References in Aristophanes, Demosthenes and others show that the dancing class, attended by youths according to their local tribe, was an important feature of education and social life.
Another dance said to be of Cretan origin was the hyporchēma, a lively dance of a pantomimic nature with instrumental accompaniment. This was occasionally danced at emotional moments in the lyrical passages of Attic tragedy, in which artistic choreography was greatly developed. The chorus punctuated the spoken dialogue of the play with songs and dances, accompanied by music of the double aulos, which varied in mood and metre according to the unfolding of the plot. The origins of tragedy are controversial, but one tradition, held perhaps erroneously by Aristotle, saw it as an extension or development of the dithyramb, originally sung and danced spontaneously in honour of Dionysus, god of fertility and wine. Certainly the association of Dionysus with both these poetic genres remained traditional, but in Athens the dithyramb itself continued to develop, and in the 5th century was a circular dance of 50 participants, and a prominent element in competitions between the tribes at Dionysiac and other city festivals. The tragic chorus numbered first 12, then 15, and seems to have danced formally in rectangular patterns in the so-called stasima, or choral odes, performed in the orchēstra (‘dancing-place’), where it remained throughout the play, from its first entrance (parodos) until its exit (exodos) to a marching anapaestic rhythm. The dances of Phrynichus and Aeschylus, the earliest notable tragedians (who traditionally wrote their own music and arranged their own choreography), were much admired. Sophocles, said to have been an elegant dancer, is known to have written a handbook ‘On the chorus’, which unfortunately has not survived. In his plays and those of Euripides the actors occasionally join with the chorus in lyrical exchanges, but seem not to have been called on to engage in the dancing.
Performed along with the tragedies were ‘satyr plays’, with the chorus masquerading as attendants of Pan or Silenus in grotesque caricatures of the tragic dances, and there is evidence of indecent dances such as the sikinnis and kordax. (Much terminology of specific dances is found in compendious works of later antiquity, particularly the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, e.g. books i and xiv, and the lexicon of Pollux, iv, 99ff.) The kordax was associated also with Attic comedy, and many plays of Aristophanes end with scenes of violent revelry where the chorus and actors indulge in the energetic, whirling dances appropriate to the kōmos (revel). Another striking feature of his plays is the dressing of the chorus as animals, birds or insects, which may hark back to popular charades in which participants dressed in animal costume and imitated animal behaviour. That such dressing up could also be used more seriously in ritual contexts is shown by another tradition of classical Athens, that of young girls at puberty dressing as bears and dancing in honour of Artemis at the neighbouring township of Brauron.
While dancing at festivals and religious rituals tended to produce stereotyped patterns, there was also the uninhibited ecstatic dancing, particularly in honour of Dionysus, but also of divinities from the East such as the Asiatic mother goddess (sometimes called Cybele) and various fertility demons (Attis, Sabazius etc.), whose cults infiltrated Greece. The dancing associated with these rites resembled the outbursts of dancing mania that have periodically occurred in Europe and given concern to civic authority by the social disorder they aroused. Women were especially prone to such effects, and there is much literature (notably Euripides’ Bacchae) about maenadism (called after the female votaries of Dionysus), while in art these dances are characterized by poses showing the tossing head, bulging throat and startled eyes of the devotee in a ‘possessed’ state. Much too is said of corybantism, called after the male devotees of Asiatic cults, whose excited dancing apparently induced hallucinatory states.
The contrast between such emotional and orgiastic dancing and the traditional use of the dance in education, and to some degree as a form of gymnastics, impelled Plato (in the Republic, and in more detail in the Laws) to recommend strict state control over forms of dancing permitted to free Hellenic citizens, who should concentrate on stately dances such as the emmeleia which imparted grace to body and soul alike, or on warlike dances in the Dorian tradition, allowing the more licentious dances to be performed, if at all, for entertainment by slaves and foreigners. (There are descriptions in Xenophon’s Symposium of the sort of dances that might be provided by professional entertainers and enjoyed at Athenian dinner parties, where hetaerae might also be engaged to dance for the company) Elsewhere Socrates himself is quoted as saying that ‘those who are best at dancing are also best at war’, alluding of course to such dances as the Pyrrhic described above. Plato’s views on music and dancing were much influenced (via Socrates) by Pericles’ friend and adviser Damon, the musician and educationist, who held firm beliefs in the effect of melody and rhythm on ‘soul’ and character; and, also, much subsequent literature on dancing, by for example Plutarch, Lucian and Libanius (the latter two being authors of extant treatises ‘On the dance’), and by musical writers such as Aristides Quintilianus, concentrates on the ethical influences of dance rhythms.
In the Greco-Roman world also, literary sources include much censorious condemnation of dancing (Cicero, Seneca) or devastating satire (Juvenal) against what was now mostly a professional art; but needless to say the dances of prostitutes in the taverns were popular with the masses, to say nothing of the more artistic theatrical displays of Greek dancers like the famous Bathyllus and Pylades. The real virtuosos were the pantomimi, who interpreted a series of different roles during the spectacular choreography of mythical scenes, and attracted public lionization, large incomes and the favour of the imperial courts. The theatrical excesses of the reign of Nero, and his patronage of dancing among the other arts, were notorious; and indeed later a dancer, the celebrated Theodora, by her marriage to Justinian, actually became Empress of Rome. Inevitably the unremitting censure of moralists, pagan and Christian, directed against salacious women and effeminate men dancers, became a literary commonplace, and a far cry from the art idealized by the classical Greeks as the god-given gift of Apollo, Terpsichore and her sister Muses, and even, Lucian (De saltatione) declared, as the mortal imitation of the concord and rhythm manifested in the dance of the stars.
E. Kerr Borthwick
Grove
