Brittany Hardy, University of Michigan
In this paper, I utilize Donna Haraway’s concept of Terrapolis to expand our understanding of choreia. As theorized by Haraway, Terrapolis is an imagined space that is multiworldly and multispecies, that embraces the interconnectedness between humans and other species, and that recognizes the agency of nonhuman entities (Haraway 2016). It is a vision of a world characterized by interdependency and productive collaborations across orders of being. This concept of Terrapolis opens up new, productive avenues for exploring the phenomenology of ancient Greek choreia. For this talk, I focus on how Pindar’s Pythian 12 instantiates a kind of choral Terrapolis, a space, created through song, that fuses the real and the imagined, the human and the nonhuman. Engaging with Haraway’s method of speculative fabulation and her vision of Terrapolis, this paper will reconstruct the transfigurative experience of choreia produced by Pythian 12.
This paper proposes three ways in which the narrative of Pythian 12 interacts, and even merges, with the live performance space to immerse the audience in a choral Terrapolis, a hybrid space both real and imagined. First, I consider the content of the myth to argue that Pindar uses the lamenting Gorgon as a metapoetic image of choreia. The poet theoriezes choreia as a hybrid musical collective whose imagined ontology, like that of the Gorgon, is both human and nonhuman. The poet thus fuses the live human chorus with the Gorgonic chorus of the narrative. Second, I explore how these choralized Gorgons extend beyond the myth and interact with the built environment of Akragas, home of the poem’s laudandus. In particular, I focus on gorgoneia, ubiquitous throughout Sicily, and explore how these petrified Gorgons would have affected this poem’s performance. Finally, I turn to the musical accompaniment, the aulist, who is implicitly at the center of this myth. Previous scholarship has identified connections between the aulist and the Gorgon (Akhunova 2020), and I consider the significance of these correspondences in the context of this choral performance. I posit that the transfiguration of an aulist into a Gorgon is a third way in which the myth’s Gorgons are reincarnated in synergistic and mutually intensifying ways during the live performance of Pythian 12. With its abundance of Gorgons, a choral performance of Pythian 12 would have produced an immersive experience for the audience, surrounding them with Gorgons in a hybrid space that refuses borders, a Terrapolis.
My paper bridges practices in close-reading with speculative fabulation to re-imagine the experience of choreia captured by Pythian 12. My reading builds upon previous studies on the uncanny, sublime nature of choreia (Peponi 2004, 2012; Power 2011; Kurke 2013). Moreover, I engage with classical scholarship on immersion and the immersive potentials of choral performances (Weiss 2018; Allan 2019; Grethlein, Huitink, and Tagliabue 2019), as well as studies of the ways in which Pindaric poetry closely interacts with sculpture, architecture, and the environment (Athanassaki 2011a, 2011b, 2012; Eckerman 2011, 2013; Kurke 2016; Neer and Kurke 2019).