The word “choir” comes from the Greek χορός, khoros in Latin – a group of performers dancing, acting, singing and commenting in unison the actions of plays in theatre. Its function was to give background information and insights to the audience, often suggesting them how to react to the plot on stage and impersonating an anonymous mass (which was in sharp contrast with the heroic protagonists of the Greek tragedy). Accordingly, the voice of this form of choir was non-individualized and homogeneous, uniform and assentive – a highly structured aesthetic display of collectivity.
This unanimous and consensual nature of the “choir” is still present in many idiomatic expressions (such as the Italian “una voce fuori dal coro”, which can be translated
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Toward a philosophy of vocal expression, Cavarero understands voice as an “anti-metaphysical” force that communicates – before of any semantic content – the uniqueness of every speaker and, at the same time, immediately establishes relationships with the others. In other words, Cavarero not only underlines the singular, embodied and resonant materiality of voice, she also emphasizes the fact that the voice is primarily relational and always creates a mutual resonance among different human beings. For these reasons, Cavarero interprets vocal exchange as the paradigm of a politics that is based on a contextual “reciprocal communication of voices” and that find an “ideal dimension,” a genuine expression, in singing together.
Conceived in these terms, the choir might be considered as a figure of Jean-Luc Nancy's “being singular-plural” through mutual voicing and listening, as an allegory of the co-existence and reciprocal exposure to each other that, according to the French philosopher, define Being as a “we” before every “I.”4 “Chorality”, in this context, doesn't imply the flattening of the different voices in one, but rather a melting point of singularity and plurality, the process of going beyond individuality to recognize the heterogeneous multiplicity of “being-with,” producing a plural