A tragic play in Greek with song and dance? No prob

A University of Cincinnati expert in ancient Greek wants to produce the most authentic performance of the play “Antigone” that audiences have heard in nearly 2,500 years.

UC Classics Assistant Professor Anna Conser is collaborating with UC’s College-Conservatory of Music, or CCM, to stage a new production of the famous tragedy.

Conser, a specialist in ancient music and drama, is working on a book about Greek tragedies as musical theater.

To bring “Antigone” to life, she is looking at the musical patterns traced in the surviving lyrics — poetic meters for the rhythms and pitch accents that denote the melodic rises and falls. Together, these help reconstruct the lost music of choral odes.

She has lectured on this topic at Oxford, Cambridge, Columbia and UC Berkeley.

Conser said the chorus originally performed the odes with song and dance.

“It is highly rhythmic. The closest analog might be hip-hop. The emphasis is less on orchestration than on the combination of words, melody and rhythm,” she said.

The play tells the story of Antigone, a princess who defies the law to bury her slain brother after the civil war and pays for that decision with her life.

“A lot of my students are passionate about this play,” said Associate Professor Brant Russell, head of dramatic performance at CCM. “The idea that a young woman would defy an unjust law in order to pursue what she believes is right no matter the cost feels pretty relevant.”

Russell is co-directing the new production with Conser and UC Assistant Professor Samuel Stricklen, who also teaches drama.

“‘Antigone’ dramatizes the conflict between what is legal according to the government and what we feel is morally or religiously correct.,” Conser said.

The play is sometimes used as a metaphorical framework to discuss other social or political ideas, Conser said.

“The main character in ‘Antigone’ is not Antigone but her uncle Creon, the king who follows the letter of  the law without making exceptions for family,” she said. “He is trying to do what he thinks is right, but he refuses to compromise and loses everything as a result.”

And the chorus is at the center of everything. Conser said it would be wrong to think of the chorus as mere background performers reciting lines in the shadows. Their odes, originally performed with song and dance, were showstopper performances, she said.

“Modern performances often make the chorus feel ‘ancient’ or conventional,“ Conser said. “But it was actually more like a Broadway show.”

Conser will work with a CCM composer to create new musical settings for the chorus’ odes, based on her digital analysis of the meter and pitch accents.

“The fun part is the interpretation: there is a lot of technical data, but the melodic patterns it reveals can be very exciting, adding new meaning to the words.,” she said.

The show debuts next April with a few extra performances timed to the annual Feminism and Classics Conference UC Classics is hosting next spring. This will give CCM students experience in building sets designed to be broken down and restaged, he said.

“This is a thrill for us. It’s a huge cast and a play that students are excited about,” Russell said.