ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to redirect our attention from the external cultic setting of the theater of Dionysos in Athens and the Dionysiac festival within which the tragedies were performed to the internal representation of specific gods and rituals manifest in the choral dance-songs of actual plays. The Athenian audience would have recognized dancing on Delos as a ritual scenario unrestricted to a single occasion or to a single chorus. In the Troades as in the Elektra, choral projection functions as a prelude to choral self-referentiality, both in the mythical past and in the theatrical present. The most conspicuous formal feature of this concluding strophe and antistrophe is its intricate performative movement, in which choreutic, cultic-choral, and encomiastic elements are intertwined. Choral projection is at its most complex in the plays of Euripides, who fashions intricate correlations among the choral performance, the dramatic action, and the emotional atmospheres of particular plays or scenes.
