Brief Note on Greek gesture and Dance , The totalities of Opsis & Hamartia or Tragic Failing

Greek gesture and Dance

We know that the use of gestures for orators was prescribed by the Greek rhetoricians for arousing emotions and effective communications. Quintilian has given an account of how the head, face, arms, and many other emotions. But the orator, he suggests, should not use mimetic hody and feet can be made to express joy, sorrow, humility, abhorrence, wonder gestures and be as unlike a dancer as possible. He adds that an actor should not even attempt to imitate the voice of the character (Standard 85). One can infer that gestures of many kinds must have been employed as revealed by a close reading of some plays. From Libation Bearers ( lines 24-31 ) , Suppliant Women ( lines 110-11 ) , Electra ( lines 146-50 ) actions like veiling the head , beating the hand and the body vigorously , tearing and hair pulling , gnawing the face with finger - nails and tearing garments can be inferred easily . 

 

 The totalities of Opsis

Opsis has not only the last but the least place in the Aristotelian scheme. Although opsis should be taken to mean everything visual in theatre such as formation of dancers in the chorus, the costumes, movements, gestures and hand signs (cheironomia) of the actors, still it is commonly believed that Aristotle had limited the sense of the word to stage scenery only. The totality of opsis was immense in Greek theatre. Any study in this area should not underestimate its richness and function on account of Aristotle's negligence in describing these aspects of performance. Even though, Aristotle has not written at length on the subject of gestures, references were however made to it by other classical authors like Athenaeus and Lucian in the context of dance in ancient Greece.

 Hamartia or Tragic Failing

 Misfortune befalls the hero of a tragedy not by his voice or depravity, but by some error of judgment. This sense of the error of judgments conveyed by the Greek word ' Hamartia ' which is translated into English as ' error of judgement ‘. The cause of tragedy must lie not in the hero's depravity, but in some great error (Hamartia) on his part. Hamartia is not a moral state, but a specific error which a man makes or commits. Hamartia, may arise from “ignorance of some material fact or circumstances " , or it may be an error arising from hasty or careless view of the special case , or it may be an error voluntary but not deliberate , as in the case of acts committed in anger or passion . Aristotle assumes that Hamartia is accompanied by moral imperfections, but it is not in itself, and in the purest tragic situation the suffering herb is not morally to blame. 

The term ' Hamartia ' admits of various shades of meaning and so it has been differently interpreted by different critics. But all of them agree that Hamartia is not moral imperfection and that it is an error of judgment, whether arising from ignorance of some material circumstance or from rashness andimpulsiveness of tempter or from some passion. It may be a character - trait, for the hero may have a tendency to commit errors of judgment, and may commit not one but a series of errors. This last conclusion is borne out by the play Oedipus Tyrannous to which Aristotle refers again and again, and so it may be taken to be his ideal. In this play, the life of hero is a series of errors, the most fatal being his marriage with his mother. The tragic irony lies in the fact that hero may err innocently, unknowingly, without any evil intention at all, yet he is doomed no less than those who are depraved and sin consciously.