For my senior thesis in Greek and Roman Studies, I designed and directed a performance of Euripides' Medea, a classic Athenian play about a woman who punishes her unfaithful husband. My goal with this production was to explore the ways the "ancient" is received and interpreted by the "modern" - what is chosen to be carried forward when a piece is reimagined, what can never be recovered, and what new things emerge to take their place.
Greek tragedies follow a distinct setup: periods of talking and acting are intersparsed with periods of singing and dancing from the Chorus, a group of performers who function simultaneously as background characters, singers, dancers, musicians and surrogate audience members. The principals in the play do most of what we would today consider acting.
For the purposes of exploring the interaction between these two modes, the play was performed in two separate languages at the same time: Medea and the principals took their lines from an English translation, while the Chorus sang in ancient Greek. The singing accompanied original musical compositions which were set to original dance numbers.
Here is a one of our odes (apologies if you don't speak Greek):