Dithyrambs Reading – Kalamazoo, MI (EDIT)
Where and When:
Time: 7 pm, Thursday April 28
Place: Kalamazoo Public Library, Kalamazoo, MI
The dithyrambs event has been postponed until fall due to scheduling conflicts. Check back for more information as it becomes available!
Event Description:
In 1998, Carnegie Mellon University Press published my Dithyrambs. In my newest collection, Swastika into Lotus (Carnegie Mellon, Feb. 2016) there are two newer choral lyrics. I’ve long wished to organize a relatively large, public presentation of my dithyrambs, and am taking the publication of this new (and probably my final) collection of poems as the occasion for acting upon my seventeen-year wish.
I envision a performance exactly like any other choral performance. The “singers” will cluster, dressed alike or wearing choral robes, and holding choral “books.” For each dithyramb, two people will step out of the choir to speak the two leads. In most cases, the leads will be one male and one female, though there are two or three exceptions. Rather than being organized into voice types (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone), the choir will be organized into “male” and “female,” and transgendered folks are of course included in this binary.
Each dithyramb tells a story; that is, each has a narrative arc, a sense of setting, characterization.
All that’s required is a voice strong enough to be heard in a large room, and the ability to declaim pentameter lines. All English-department students, graduate and undergraduate, are invited to participate, as are folks from the community. Back in the late 90s, when Dithyrambs was published, I gave quite a few performances at colleges and universities. I’d find three volunteers, a male and two females. I would perform the male chorus leader part, the male volunteer would read the male chorus part, and the female volunteers would read the female chorus and female chorus leader parts. We’d practice for an hour or so, and then perform. I have to say that those impromptu performances were well received and a load of fun. After we’ve formed our troupe, we’ll practice two or three times.
Richard Katrovas
What’s a dithyramb?
From the introduction to Dithyrambs (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998):
Perhaps for all the wrong reasons, I am enchanted by the choral ejaculations of Attic tragedy, and am fascinated by the question of how tragic drama, the likes of which developed nowhere else on earth, issued from a particular moment in ancient history, the product of satyr plays, dithyrambs, and epics. As far as I can tell, what fragments of dithyrambs we have are not necessarily representative of those immediate precursors of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, and I imagine that one must look directly into Aeschylian drama to see the vestiges of dithyrambs in their latest development, a period when they were original compositions and not simply received, folkish forms. My dithyrambs are highly stylized blank verse monologues framed by choral outbursts. In all of these poems, several dialectics are at play, not the least of which is a simultaneous yearning for, and parody of, a “high” lyric style.
—RK