Chorus: We know what a chorus is: singers.  There is also a chorus line of dancers.  In ancient Greek drama the chorus chanted lines & also danced.  Remember that the audience looked down on the stage & choral pit from seats carved in a hill.  The chorus could therefore work something like a marching band at football game half-time.  They could illustrate themes by dancing or arranging their bodies to represent patterns.  In Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy, two themes are prominently illustrated by the chorus: dizziness & being caught in a net.  Orestes & the chorus are dizzied by the complex moral dilemmas they find themselves in.  The chorus would have whirled & spun in dance movements to illustrate their inability to find a straight moral line of balanced behavior.  Aeschylus also uses the idea of how our moral decisions (in what we hope is a straight line) tie knots & how these knots ultimately form an inescapable net of fate.  This would also have been illustrated by the chorus in dance as well as song.

Aristotle: In his work explaining how tragic drama works, Aristotle was especially interested in two principles: mimesis & catharsis.  Interestingly, Plato thought the exact opposite on these two principles that are argued to this day.  Plato's thought was modeled on the idea of "monkey see, monkey do."  He reasoned that if children watch violent cartoons, movies, video games, they imitate the models they studied becoming more violent.  Therefore they should be protected from such influences.  On the issue of catharsis, Plato thought that the more often one is emotionally moved, the harder it is to return to temperance & emotional neutrality necessary to dispassionately analyze what is best.  The more often you go to the movies or read novels, the stupider you become because you are not doing your math homework & because you are becoming addicted to emotional excess.

Plato's reasoning on aesthetics makes sense in regard to children.  Most adults find Aristotle more convincing.  In regard to mimesis (what the artist seeks to imitate or present as reality), an artist hopes to present complex human motives & emotions, not some simple, predictable response.  Orestes & Antigone & Medea are involved in far more complex moral problems than was AK, whose simple response to problems was violence.  Plato was dead wrong, Aristotle thought.  Instead of being a waste of time, drama teaches & informs an audience about moral truths that are intelligible or understandable in no other way.  We might hear a sermon or lecture about pride a hundred times & still be bored by the topic.  In contrast, a single attendance at a rivoting performance of Sophocles' Oedipus might demonstrate exactly how intellectual pride works & how disastrous it can be.  We may leave the theater much better educated about the moral problem than if we had heard yet another bland & over intellectual sermon.  Aristotle claims that art communicates a kind of reason that reason itself fails to recognize.

Secondly, art does not emotionally disturb people.  It does the very opposite in association with the process of catharsis, which works like this.  Our everyday life fills us with tension & hostility.  If we are mature, we do not vent our pent up resentments taking out our hostility on our spouse or dog.  Hopefully we go to the theater where we have an opportunity, when the lights of the movie theater go down, to vicariously identify with Dirty Harry or Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris.  The more violence the better, because in vicariously participating with the fantasy ego of Harry or Chuck, slaughtering hundreds, we cathartically vent our hostilities, leaving the theater "cured" or fairly placid & ready to resume a "real" identity & ego that knows violence is not an easy solution to life's problems.

Athens was more convinced by Aristotle, making attendance to the theater obligatory for citizens, as much, perhaps, for its cathartic emotional affect as for its instructional function in regard to the lessons of citizenship.
 

Click on the next section: Explication above.