(Un)Belonging in the body of the chorus

Abstract

In September 2019, Mark Fleishman in collaboration with the cast created a postdramatic performance of Sophocles’ tragedy ‘Antigone’, entitled Antigone (not quite/quiet). One of the key elements of the performance was the representation of Antigone as a chorus of 13 individual bodies, including that of my own body. During the performance, the chorus came to represent a re-imagined Antigone-figure as the youth of South Africa, the protesting body, and the female body saying ‘no’. Using auto-ethnographical writing, this article recounts the experience of (un)belonging in the postcolonial and postdramatic chorus that came to represent Antigone, specifically with regards to the discomfort and impossibility encountered in the attempt to position myself as a white, Afrikaans, female body in relation to that of a choral body representing the voice of the South African youth. It argues that the chorus functions as an ever-liminal state, one in which both the ‘I’ and ‘we’ exist, at once being within and without, and therefore holds the potential to function as a performance analytic to the tragic experience of the individual within a larger societal identity.