The Thread

A dance to the music of Vangelis

We are in Athens on a warm August night.

Carolyn and I are sitting in the Odeon of Herodes Atticus on the slopes of the Acropolis, bewitched as the perfect semicircles of the two-thousand-year-old theatre fill with smartly dressed Athenians. There is chat and laughter, the swish of finery, the smiles and touches of friendship and reunion. We are tinging with expectation; seduced by the beauty of the setting and what we are about to receive.

The theatres of the ancient Greeks have captivated tourists since that breed of inquisitive voyagers invented itself. How could one not be charmed and transported by the magnificent symmetry and the setting of Epidaurus or Delphi? Perfect semicircles carved into olive clad hills with views to die for; breath-taking constructions that can still summon awe and wonder after more than two millennia.

But it turns out that it is not just the aesthetics of these cultural monuments that has provoked interest and discourse, but also mathematics and science. Vitruvius wrote on how to design a theatre, but the expert seems to have been Heron of Alexandria who wrote extensively, specifying the amount of space a person required (two square feet) and providing formulae for how many rows one might need to seat a certain number of people.

And then there are the acoustics (from the Greek of course – ακουστικός pertaining to hearing). The wonderful acoustics of Epidaurus are mythical. My friend Harilaos tells me that he repeated the legendary experiment of proving that tearing a piece of paper on the orchestra could be heard at the back of the theatron. In fact, the acoustics of Epidaurus have been explored in modern times by acousticians from Georgia Tech.

They did indeed find something special and theorised that the arrangement of the rows of seats acted as an acoustic filter, cutting out background sounds allowing the actors voices to carry to all 14,000 occupants. Boringly, it has to be said, that a more recent exploration using hundreds of microphones within the theatre itself, cast doubt on this, but the experience of 2000 years of being able to hear actors can’t be disproven by a bunch of disbelieving techies.

And then there was Pythagoras ….. but more of him later.

Back to the warmth of a Greek summer evening. We are here to see The Thread, a ballet created by Russell Maliphant to music by Vangelis, his start point being Greek dance and how it might run like a thread through Greek culture and history.

When we talk of Greek dance, we think of a line of dancers loosely linked by arms on shoulders with various patterns of step, but this style is found across all the levant.

When we attended a wedding in Albania a few years back the glitzy, bling laden event was dominated by live music of ear-splitting intensity led by a wailing clarinet, which formed the soundtrack to a continuum of sedate steps shuffled by the bridal matriarchy and children of all ages. Into this open armed crocodile, we were enrolled with smiles of welcome and a comforting willingness to overlook our gross incompetence. The exception to this stately procession being a dervish of neck breaking accelerando, performed by the groom and his androgen pumped ushers, involving much leaping and foot stamping, which in a different context would have served as a convincing haka. A war dance perhaps.

But herein lies the two faces of Greek dancing; a similar format can provide both tea dances for arthritic septuagenarians and proof of testicular volume in combat ready males. Leigh Fermor recognised these polarities in the sixties. Firstly, when witnessing sailors dancing in the on the Black Sea coast in Bulgaria:

‘The next dance, on which Costa embarked solo was even odder…. He gazed at the ground with his eyes almost closed, rotating on the spot with his hands crossed behind his back; soon they rose above his head like a vulture’s wings opening, then soared in alternative sweeps before lowering his lowered face….

The sudden twirl of the body the sinking on alternate knees as the complex steps evolved. On a rock near where I sat was the heavy round table that I had eaten from. Revolving past it, Costa leant forward: suddenly the table levitated into the air, sailed past us and pivoted at right angles to his head in a series of wide loops, the edge clamped firmly in his mouth but held there by nothing but his teeth buried in the wood.

It rotated like a flying carpet, slicing crescents out of the haze of woodsmoke.’

And then in Roumeli when attending a wedding in Sikarayia in Thrace in the ‘60s

‘Plenty of the young Saraksans were well in on wine and been so for days; but their dash high spirits deserted them the moment they joined the long chain of the dancers. Their pace slowed to a ritual shuffle.’

Mostly when we see Greek dance, perhaps dare I say in on holiday in Mykonos, it will be a Kalamatianos, Hasapiko or Sirtaki, the latter being immortalised by Anthony Quinn on a beach in Zorba the Greek. All of these are performed either with arms joined, or with hands linked by a white handkerchief. The solo male dance is the Zeibekiko, a freer and less formal ‘anything goes’ affair, where the higher the leaps and the more daring the foot slapping, the better. This is about physical prowess and daring and one wonders whether it didn’t have its origin as a form of combat training, as in the Pyrric dances mentioned by Homer and Plato amongst others. These were loved by the Spartans who considered them battle training and Athenian youth learnt it in the Paleastra.

And now I recall a dramatic demonstration in Kerala of the war-like yoga routine of Kalaripayattu, with skinny young Indians performing a dazzling sequence of high-speed twirls, dives and rolls in tight formation, claimed as the forerunner of all martial arts, but balletic in its grace and fluidity.

All this is to suggest that there is plenty of scope for a piece based around the history of ancient dance. Not that I am thinking this as we sit expectant as the theatre fills to its near capacity. Gradually the sky darkens over the ancient skene behind the stage. The Athenians still pour in, sophistication personified, silk clad elegance and gold bands dangling from slender tanned arms. The atmosphere is so different from a London theatre. Not a hint of red velvet or gold ormolu, instead a simple stone seat with a thin cushion. But this is how you squeeze 5000 people into such a small area: no back or arm rests, the rows packed tight together, and Pythagorean geometry.

And then the lights dim and a Greek voice calls for a minutes silence in memoriam of Vangelis who died earlier in the year. A swirl of stillness falls onto the chattering crowd and an eery quiet moves through the theatre like a spirit. Is it my imagination that this silence is different from how it would have been in a London theatre? Strangely there is no traffic noise, the city is quiet, the audience still, the air warm and calm. Do our bodies form the perfect acoustic cushion, or does the lack of hard surfaces prevent any reverberation? Perhaps it is just the expectation and thrill of the location that sets my senses tingling. Darkness settles over the theatron save for a rectangle of light centre stage and Vangelis’ pulsing music starts.

For the next hour we sit mesmerised and spellbound as the beauty of Maliphant’s moving and dramatic homage unfolds.

Vangelis starts with a pulsing electroacoustic beat as the chain of dancers shuffle into the pool of light clearly demarcated in Michael Hulls complex lighting scheme. But already we can see the step is familiar of a Hasapiko, the feet work but the progression is slow, the twenty dancers clad in long loose trousers or skirts with bare arms. The line coils and snakes around and through itself, the sinews on the slender intertwined arms appears threadlike as it weaves and curls to the incessant beat. This is another thread – the thread of the line – which is animate in its jointed form; a centipede of mesmeric footwork. But then that tableaux moves off and more dancers appear with new and ever changing vignettes, sometimes a deux or in quartets, then reverting to the full compliment. The costumes change; the women appear in gorgeous flowing skirts echoing folkloric patterns and colours.

Now the music shifts, the rhythm less prominent and folk instruments dominate, a ready clarinet and a droning bagpipe run through with the principal melodic line, catchy but never trite. The lights change, sometimes glowing amber pools empty of dancers, slowly or only partly filled as the line reforms, loose arms windmilling in turn as the dancers seem to cartwheel across the stage.

Then a single line of male dancers, booted and in black. This is much more of the Zeibekiko with the stamp of testosterone and bravado, but they too disappear into the shadows and the female line takes over with a tenderness and femininity that speaks of another form of dance. Maliphant says: ‘there is a spirit of community and social sharing that is embedded in much of the Greek traditional dance forms,’ and this is what we return to time and time again in these shifting scenes; the pull of communion set against the dazzle of individual prowess.

Now something extraordinary happens, a mixed line appears, again with a change of costume, moving with complex footwork to stage centre. Instead of linking arms white handkerchiefs appear between their hands. Then the dancers smile. Modern dance isn’t much about smiling, but the effect is transformational. We move from intensity, formality and focus to the charm of the taverna. The footwork now seems automatic, not programmed or learnt. The audience senses it too, smiling with our dancers who have become our friends and family, dancing for fun at panagia just because they love it.

But the mood changes again and Vangelis gives us a much harsher rhythmic beat. It could be Wagner or the Anvil Chorus. A group of men appear in black circling in a threatening formation with simple goat bells attached to their belts, which clank out their steps. The girls arrive (and in this moment they are girls) innocent in a pastoral way, dancing a simple step of charm and innocence, but they are soon ensnared by the men in a crescendo of sound and power, to be vanquished one by one as the sinister circle closes in. Then the men gradually exit too, the clanking of their bells diminishing from ensemble to soloist, to leave just a single bell, truly 'brass or tinkling cymbal,' empty and threatening as the harmonics of the ensemble becoming the discordant individual. It is devastating in its impact, as shocking and vivid as the end of Poulenc’s Carmelites.

There is more, much more, and as the piece ends and the applause thunders through the Odeon, we are left wishing there was yet more still. A hour of captivating beauty to a memorable and evocative soundtrack in a thrilling and spectacular setting. I listen to the applause and the shouts and whistles and again get that sense that there is something special about the sound quality of this space, as well as its magisterial setting.

Pythagoras had ideas about sound. He developed theories of pitch, allegedly from realising that the note produced by a blacksmith depended on the size of the hammer. He thought the celestial bodies produced music generated by their movement through the firmament the tone being related to the distance from the earth. He called the perfect harmony that resulted ‘the music of the spheres’, producing his oft reproduced drawing:

But could this sketch not be the design of an ancient theatre? Pythagoras said ‘there is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.’ Could the perfect acoustic of the Herodes Atticus not be due to a Pythagorean celestial resonance in the perfect hemisphere of the Odeon?

I would like to think so. Certainly, there was something other-worldly and magical in the air that evening on the Acropolis.