Giving Helen of Troy a Voice through Dance

An Artist's Statement from Paideia's 2024 Brightheart Fellowship Recipient.

The Brightheart Fellowship is an artist residency that takes place alongside Paideia's two-week Living Greek in Greece summer language program, where fellowship recipients pursue an independent project that engages with the course's theme and texts. In 2024, the Fellowship was awarded to Emily Gunter, a professional dancer with a background in Classics. Here is her account of how she drew inspiration from the figure of Helen in Ancient Greek literature and the lush environment of the program's Peloponnesian setting to create an original choreography.

I arrived in Selianitika as a choreographer with a blank slate and left the Greek Peloponnese with overflowing inspiration and a new solo work. 

This past summer, the Paideia Institute’s Living Greek in Greece (LGiG) program studied Helen of Sparta. The course readings, discussions, recitation sessions, and site visits to Sparta and Mycenae expanded and deepened my choreographic source material. I utilized the Greek texts of Gorgias, Sappho, Euripides, and Homer to develop a solo work driven by the physical and emotional threads of Helen’s story as a woman in love, forced out of her home, displaced in a foreign city, and fueled with confusion, loss, innocence, and hope.

We do not get Helen’s story from Helen herself. Her story is told by Gorgias, Sappho, Euripides, and Homer, among others. Rhetoricians, playwrights, poets, orators, and authors design her words, her actions—or lack thereof.

The variety and crossover of details between ancient sources drew me to observe, discover, and build a story of Helen that aimed to listen to her and let her speak for herself. As a choreographer, I explored what it might be like to be Helen by considering the emotions and themes at play in the sources we have for her narrative.

The dance I created investigates the opposition and balance of several parallelisms in Helen’s story: strength/weakness, truth/lies, love/loss, innocence/guilt, and choice/fate. The concept of parallelisms was initially inspired by the rhetorical use of parallel phrasing in Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen.

My solo is structured in three sections, each set to its own piece of music: (1) Helen leaving Sparta, (2) Helen arriving in Troy, and (3) Helen settling into Troy. It was not clear to me right away that this solo would have three sections. As I dove into the reading materials and shared conversations with the LGiG participants and instructors, this structure unfolded in my plans. I imagined and hoped that Helen would feel anger, sadness, fear, courage, and peace. Not all at once, but certainly each one at some point. She would feel a yearning for the past and what was familiar, a yearning for the future and what would be new—a complex dichotomy examined through my movement expression.

I felt compelled to make specific choices with the use of my hands in this dance. Helen is uprooted from her life in Sparta by the gods, specifically Aphrodite who assigns her as a gift to Paris. I felt like, as Helen, I needed to show my hands, to show my innocence and prove that I was clean. I explored a lot of twisting and spiraling in my torso and with my limbs to exemplify how contorted it must feel to be uprooted and not have control over your situation, to literally be displaced to a foreign land and for the only thing that is familiar to you be you and yourself alone.

I used two chairs as props in this dance. I was inspired to do so during the LGiG site visit to Sparta. We climbed the Menelaion which was built in honor of Sparta’s king and queen, Menelaus and Helen. The Menelaion sits high on a hill overlooking the modern city of Sparta. The top of the hill felt dignified, the vantage point was vast, and I could imagine how regal such a shrine would be in the height of its splendor in the 8th through 6th centuries BCE. Across history and time, the thrones of kings and queens stand side by side. The two chairs in my solo are askew and not facing the same direction. At times in my solo, I imagined Menelaus or Paris was sitting in a chair and that I was drawn to them, abhorred by them, or playful with them. I also imagined that sometimes I was watching a phantom of myself, of Helen, sitting in a chair and I was trying to evaluate how it looked for me to leave one palace for another, whether by will or not.

Anna Conser, the head teacher at LGiG, led recitation sessions where we would read ancient texts aloud in rhythmical meters. Anna and I had a conversation about my process for selecting music for my solo. She expressed how limiting it must feel to have to select a piece of music that already has a set rhythm, meter, and emotional tone. While I was not in the position to compose a new score for this solo, I leaned into my ability as a choreographer to manipulate the tempo and quality of my movement. I used Sapphic meter and hexameter in Homer to influence my rhythmical movement patterning. This enabled me to take on the role of a sort of musical composer within my choreography despite the rhythms, or perhaps as a way to enhance the rhythms, in the music I selected.

In the second section of my solo, I took inspiration from Sapphic meter to create variety in the rhythm of my movement. Sappho is a female poet and in the excerpt we read she talked about how love is powerful, beautiful, and irrational. I wanted to capture some element of this in my solo for Helen.

Each of the first three lines in a Sapphic stanza follow this pattern (— = long and u = short):

— u — — | — u u — | u — —

I choreographed a series of movements where each long beat from the stanza was a different slow, fluid, and sustained movement. These long beats felt powerful and weighted in my body. Each short beat was a different fast, sharp, and short movement. These short beats felt surprising, energetic, and spastic in my body. I repeated this movement phrase three times in the second section of my solo to mirror the way this rhythm repeats three times in a Sapphic stanza. The first time I do the phrase, each long beat takes 7 counts of music and each short beat takes just 1 count. When I repeat the phrase a second and third time in different spaces on stage and with different facings, each long beat takes just 3 counts and each short beat takes a half count.

I followed a similar structure in part three of my solo. For this, I selected a telling line from Homer:

— u u — u u — u u —| u u — u u — —

ψεύσομαι ἦ ἔτυμον ἐρέω; κέλεται δέ με θυμός.

Shall I disguise my thought or speak the truth? My heart bids me speak. (Helen in Homer’s Odyssey)

Each long beat was a slow and smooth sort of movement and each short beat was fast and rigid. Adhering to this structure, I created my movement by taking more direct inspiration from the text within this line from Homer. My arms swirl around my head, my hands press up from my belly and heart and out past my mouth, reaching to the sky and beyond. I hide behind the chair and boldly stretch out past it to reveal myself, to reveal Helen.

I would be remiss not to mention the inspirational landscape of the gardens at the Hellenikon Idyllion in Selianitika and of the Peloponnese at large. Creating a new work in a wild, lush environment filled with ripe fruit, moving music, and diverse languages was a life-changing experience.

When I returned home after the Brightheart Fellowship, I prepared to present this solo at Choreography on the Edge (COTE) at the Hudson Valley Academy of Performing Arts in New York. COTE is a professional dance showcase for local choreographers to share new and inventive works. My solo was created outdoors and designed for the space of the gardens at the Idyllion, so I made some adjustments to perform this solo indoors. In Greece, I wore sneakers, brushed up against the foliage, stepped up onto the stage from the audience, and wore lightweight athletic wear in 100℉. For the performance at COTE, there was no foliage, no step to get up onto the stage (the audience was at the same level as the stage), there was a Marley floor so I was barefoot, and there was the technical ability for lighting design. For COTE, I was also able to select a more meaningful costume for myself: a white top, symbolic of innocence, and brown flowy pants, representative of the Earth, the land, and being simultaneously uprooted and grounded.

This choreographic journey uncovered so much for me about Helen and about myself. It is a project I could not have completed in the same way if I had not been in the Greek Peloponnese. Site-specific dancing is abundantly fruitful and rewarding. I am grateful to the people, the land, and the literature for inspiring me and guiding me to dig deep in the conjoined process of research and art-making.

The application deadline for the 2025 edition of the Brightheart Fellowship is May 1st.