Corseted Choristry: Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen as Chor(e)ography∗

Abstract

Arthur Schnitzler's drama Reigen is primarily known for its explicit content and the scandals it produced. Yet Reigen also reads as an attempt to modernize, and localize, the classical form of the chorus which had not found a place in modern bourgeois theater. Curiously overlooked in studies on literary choruses, the play—its title being one of the possible translations of the Greek χoϱός (choros)—can in fact be resituated as χoϱός‐literature, as choreo‐graphy, as literal transposition of a dance into a series of dialogues. The stringency of its serial format, the attention it gives to movement and location, entering and exiting, up to its suspension of language for the sake of rhythmical notation (– – –) reveal Reigen as theatrical hybrid: as chorus bursting with its copulating individuals. Radically questioning the conventions of “domestic” theater, Schnitzler's Reigen brings to the stage a critique of theatrical genres and conventions that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had clearly outgrown their use.