Greek Chorus Activity

Today we learned about the Greek chorus and it was really interesting. I loved learning about the history of theater and how greatly the Greeks impacted theater. We watched a crash course video and it told us about the origins of the Greek chorus and how Greek culture has affected theater in general.

After we watched the video we had to work together to create a short script that the chorus would recite and that one person would act out in front of the chorus. It took us a long time to come up with an idea we thought was entertaining and funny, but we finally settled on our principal, Mr. Caruthers, waking up on a snowy morning. After we had our idea, we started to work together to develop a script. We made sure our script rhymed and told the story of Caruthers jumping out of bed to see the snow and eventually going outside in the snow. We then picked someone, Allison, to be the actor and the rest of us went into a chorus line and read the script. I found this exercise interesting for a few reasons. What I didn’t realize was that being a part of the chorus was more work than I thought it would be. We had to keep a certain rhythm to the script to keep it flowing and it took effort for us to all be on the same beat and tone while reciting the script. It was also interesting to see Allison come up with her movements. I loved how precise and sharp she was with her actions and she did a fantastic job of choosing realistic movements that made sense with the script. Overall I really enjoyed this activity and it helped me to better visualize what a greek chorus is.