Get in Formation, This is an Emergency: The Politics of Choral Song and Dance in Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Spike Lee's Chi-raq

Abstract

Get in Formation, This is an Emergency: The Politics of Choral Song and Dance in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Spike Lee’s Chi-raq CASEY DUÉ On March 3, 2003, as the United States prepared to once again invade Iraq, a series of readings and performances of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata were staged around the world in protest. The humor of this particular play, in which the women of Greece come together to stage a sex strike in order to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the Peloponnesian War, has a seemingly timeless quality that allows its anti-war message to transcend time, place, and culture and speak across the centuries. Of the forty-four tragedies and comedies that survive from fifth-century bce Athens, it is one of the most frequently staged.1 But when Lysistrata was first performed in Athens at the Lenaia festival of 411 bce, the play was not timeless; it was rooted in the moment of its creation and the experiences of its first audience, Athenians who had experienced twenty years of on-again, off-again war with the Spartans, plague, and the utterly disastrous Sicilian Expedition, in which the Athenians had lost the vast majority of their fleet and thousands of citizen lives. An emergency board of ten magistrates had been put in charge of the city. It was just months before the oligarchic revolution of 411 (for which the groundwork was already being laid, unbeknownst to most Athenians).2 The play’s characters, who are so easily transferred into modern contexts (Americans and Russians, English and Scottish, city and country) were inspired by real people: the name of the title character, Lysistrata, seems to be a play on arion 24.1 spring/summer 2016 the then current priestess of Athena Polias, Lysimache.3 Contemporary politicians and other prominent Athenians are the butts of many jokes. More fundamentally, the choral singing and dancing that are the backbone of the play are deeply Athenian, building on at least a century or more of dramatic and ritual tradition within the song culture that was Classical Athens.4 Spike Lee’s film Chi-raq (co-written with Kevin Willmott) adapts Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in order to explore the very timely topic of gang violence in a very particular place and time, the South Side of Chicago in 2015. And he does it in verse. Such was the sense of urgency Lee felt about Chi-raq’s message that he released it in the same year in which it was filmed, a year which included the killing of nine people at an historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist, and the high profile deaths of Walter Scott and Freddie Gray at the hands of white police officers. The film is a mash-up of both Athenian tragedy and comedy combined with a variety of forms of African-American styles of song and dance functioning as choral interludes between episodes, each with great emotional or comic effect. Chi-raq works as an adaption to the extent that it does precisely because of its timeliness, and because it engages most directly a particular subculture within our broader American culture, much as ancient Athenian tragedy would have connected to its particular audience within the larger Greek speaking world. And it does so not only on a sociopolitical level, but also on a deeply emotional level by way of the music and dance traditions of that particular culture, those of Chicago’s African-American population on the South Side, a part of Chicago termed Chi-raq in recent years by local rappers. Spike Lee was of course well-versed in didactic musical comedy spectacle long before taking on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. In fact, many elements of Chi-raq—including its powerful and highly sexualized female lead Lysistrata, its dueling hemi-choruses, its narration by Samuel L. Jackson, and its call for us to “wake up”—find counterparts in Lee’s get in formation, this is an emergency 22 earliest films, including She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), and Do the Right Thing (1989). Like Chi-raq, these films use music, dance, and outright instruction to address controversial political themes...