When Dionysus took to the stage

Published: 2007 - July, Dossier

In the beginning was catharsis (from the Greek katharsin): the gradual detachment from passion through a collective ceremony of purification. The mystical process was accompanied by songs and music in a repetitive and compulsive vortex inducing a trance and bringing people into contact with the gods. The cult of drama, the presenting of an event to an audience, came into being in ancient Greece with Aristotle’s poetics and the extraordinary golden age of the great architects of the classical world: from Polycletus to Skopas in Pericles’ Greece up to Vitruvius’ rigorous sculptural approach in the Latin world. The etymology of the word theater goes back to ancient Greece and the term indicating the area used by instrumentalists and dancers between the audience and the stage.
To understand the development of music in the spaces now used for complex performances, we must remember the origins of a viaticum, that of the chorea, an ancient circle dance with singing, arising from the human need for contact with the divine.
In the ancient world, music was considered the primary art, the media through which the persons celebrating cults came into contact with their divine half. The circular and curvilinear form of the amphitheater  in addition to being the perfect perimeter for creating excellent acoustics  was the exact proportion established by philosophers in Pythagoras’ School. First the priests and then the actors took their place on the stage. The chorus, a fundamental part of Greek tragedy, stood in the wings, while in the space beneath the stage, the so-called pit, were the musicians, whose numbers would later grow to form full-blown orchestras.
At this point we should remember the importance of the Orphean and Dionysian rites in the development of the space for music and the catharsis which still accompanies every drama, whether musical or theatrical.
These rites were events in which the audience lost their self-control and identified in a gradual sensual climax with the gods being invoked. For the Greeks, theater was a mass spectacle, deeply felt and experienced by the citizens of every social class and economic rank. Plays were ritual with creative, religious and social significance. They were also considered a way of educating for the good of the community. In fact from Pericles’s day on, the state treasury reimbursed the price of the ticket (around two obols a day).
Plays in Athens were held during the great Dionysia, festivals in honor of Dionysus celebrated at the end of March. The Dionysia were organized by the state and as soon as the eponymous Archon took up his position, he appointed three of the wealthiest citizens to deal with the choregia, i.e. running the tragic chorus. In democratic Athens the more well-off citizens had to fund public services as a “liturgy,” i.e. as special taxes.
The roots of the modern rock concert come from this ancient tradition established on the shores of the Mediterranean. Identifying with pop or rock idols, and the consequent catharsis through music, echoes the Dionysian or the Orphean rites (without the aspects of sacrifice) and the empathy generated by collective interrelations. That is why today the empathetic element between the actor, musician and audience catalyses the energy of the performance, which is heightened by the setting, be it an ancient amphitheater, 18th-century theater or modern auditorium.