Oedipus: Greek Chorus

The Greeks never cease to amaze me at their level of advancement. They always seem to be a step ahead of everyone else, even many cultures that came a few hundred years after theirs. Even in theatre, they were great. Being in a Greek chorus is a lot harder than it seems like it would be. With the movements, the speeches, and the togetherness, these actors had one of the toughest jobs in the whole play. Although the individual actors had more lines and movements, they didn't need to work around acting as one with a whole mob of other people. I don't think that the Greek chorus was given as much credit as it should receive. Although the tradition began to die out, it was the beginning of Greek theatre. It may not be the most interesting subject in the world (which it's not), but the componenents in it are cool. First, there's music which needed to match with the movements the chorus did. During our performance, it was hard to come up with anything except a simple beat when people were speaking. Either the music (or basically drumming) didn't go along with what was being said or was too distracting. Attempting to find a balance between that was quite difficult. Also, the movements tended to be distracting as well and we would sometimes accidentally run into each other. Eventually, our group just settled for a bit of random posing that couldn't contradict what was being said or required much movement. The people in the original Greek chorus must have had to practice forever on that seeing as how they had almost fifty people sometimes and we only had four but we failed at it. Lastly, the lines were a bit hard to say as well. It was not just because of the langauge either. Talking at the same time as one being was CRAZY. Some words came out all jumbled because separate people said them all at different times or ended up mumbling because we couldn't tell where the other person was. Greek people were way too advanced for that time period and I'm sure that they would fit in great even now.