Making gods real through choral dance

ABSTRACT This article investigates the poet Euripides’ work and its effect on theatregoers. It explores the ways contrasting metres and choral dance elements in his Cyclops and Alcestis contributed to a sense of divine presence at the Athenian Dionysia and perhaps in reperformance elsewhere. Gods are ‘supernatural’, inherently invisible and untouchable in normal circumstances, but as the American anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann puts it, worshippers need ‘to shift from knowing in the abstract that the invisible other is real to feeling that gods and spirits are present in the moment’. In ancient Greece there were many ways to achieve this, ranging from prayer and sacrifice to larger ritual activities like choral dancing or processions and indeed impersonation. Combining evidence from the ceramic record (from Magna Graecia and elsewhere) and modern research into neurology, including brain/body interconnections, with close concentration on the metres involved in the choruses themselves makes it possible to gauge the emotional and psychological tone of the productions and suggest how through choral dance Euripides made gods, and particularly Dionysos, ‘real’ to fifth-century Greeks.