Choric Theatre

Abstract

The ninth chapter, ‘Choric Theatre. Between Tragic Experience and Participatory Democracy’, discusses a new form of theatre that grew out of Greek tragedy’s chorus. While Einar Schleef used the chorus in The Mothers (1986) in order to create a new tragic theatre, in the 1990s—that is, after the protest choruses of the Monday demonstrations in the GDR had led to the fall of the Berlin Wall—choric theatre became an important form of political theatre. Mostly, these choruses were composed of local citizens, as in Volker Lösch’s Oresteia in Dresden (2003) or in theatercombinat’s The Persians (2006–8), and often even of members of a minority, as in all of Volker Lösch’s later productions. Here choric theatre gave a voice to those who had been silenced and even anticipated a utopia of a truly participatory democracy.