Euripides’ Aesthetics of Be[wild]erment: Choral Chronotopes in the Bacchae

This paper traces how attention to Euripides’ deployment of the chorus and explorations of chorality in the Bacchae yields a greater understanding of the tragedy’s wild immanent politics. These elements distort the play’s spatio-temporal coordinates, overlaying an imagined primitive past and a horrifying future; the orchestra and the city streets; the polis and the mountain; Athens and Thebes. Using the joint lenses of the 2017 performance of Teat(r)o Oficina’s Bacantes and Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire I draw to the surface the Bacchae’s intertwined fifth-century anxieties about eastern invasion and colonization.

Reception will follow.