Community, Chorality, and the Global Experience. Conceptualizing the Collective ‘We’ on Stage

This paper reflects on representations of the twenty-firstcentury experience of crisis in contemporary interpretations of Greek tragedy. Applying a practice-as-research methodology, I will discuss two international productions that I recently directed, which revisit the classical canon from a cross-cultural point-of-view, to comment on the universality of the post-tragic condition. The article will first concentrate on American playwright Karen Malpede’s Troy Too, a reimagining of Euripides’ Trojan Women (staged in New York in 2023) tackling the modern-day predicament of climate change, racial justice, and the pandemic. In that staging, the original musical score amalgamating ancient Greek odes with choral parts inspired by American hip-hop, gospel, and blues reinforced the performance’s cultural plurality and global outlook. Lived and imaginary experiences of exile, trauma, and division coexisted as a performative manifestation and a persistent communal lament embracing a timeless, global audience. Following that, I will analyse the postdramatic staging of Euripides’ Medea at the Copenhagen Stage (2025), in which Medea’s story of abandonment and emotional violence becomes a polyphonic account of shared pain and a protracted scene of ecumenical suffering, using as a vehicle a multilingual Chorus appearing both live and in film. In both shows, the desire to interpret the past through a contemporary lens is framed by a raw chorality, where the commonality of human suffering interweaves with the dissonances and paradoxes of a globalized world.