The Chorus was commissioned by Magdalen College, Oxford and Potential Difference as part of Stories From The Sands.
In 2022 during an excavation in Egypt, papyrus featuring fragments of two Euripides lost plays were found in a grave of a woman and child from the 3rd century BCE. Both plays are about grief and loss. Because of their context and content, I talked to Archaeologists and Undertakers about their work, conventions of care and historical/ contemporary grave goods. I asked them about the invisible and visible labour that happens around the dead, both at burial and at excavation. Archaeologists and those working in the funeral sector are deeply connected despite being separated by hundreds or thousands of years. Together they are the last and first hands to touch a burial. I’m interested in how their work echoes and mirrors - how it agrees or disagrees.
I talked with them about the lost plays - particular Polyidus. It’s a story about loss, grief and resurrection through magic, superstition mixed with a bit of royal entitlement.
Interestingly, the Papyrus fragments are mostly inscribed with excerpts from principal characters, not the Chorus - these are still lost to time. In Greek theatre, the Chorus are a group of like people. They would have said their lines together as one voice. The Chorus are the essential, moral, often practical voice - they are the conduit between the actors and the audience. They were even the curtain before theatrical curtains existed - signalling the end of the play.
I was talking to the Undertakers and Archaeologists at the same time as learning about the role of the Chorus. Weren’t they all doing the same thing? The Chorus being conduits of story, the archaeologists conduits of time and the undertakers conduits of endings (perhaps this is both time and story).
Curtains keep coming up. They signify beginnings and endings - especially endings. You see them in the crematorium, you see them at the theatre and cinema where we go to be told stories. For this project I have made a very large velvet theatrical curtain hand embroidered with words; one side features a phrase from an undertaker, the other from an archaeologist. I think they are speaking to each other.
I displayed the curtain in Oxford and spoke about the extraordinary insights and tender details that had been shared with me through all the hours of conversations.
Photographs to come.
A very exciting Part 2 is in development.
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Thank-you for helping me understand your worlds and for the generosity of conversation; Lucy Coulbert; Fran Hall; Isabel Russo; Jenny Uzell; Jess Thompson; Malin Holst; Penny Bickle; James Taylor; Steve.
