[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Current research on dance in classical antiquity is an extremely dynamic field of investigation, at the intersection of aesthetics, art history and literature, cultural history and anthropology, as well as psychology, among others. The two editors of the volume under review, Zoa Alonso Fernández and Sarah Olsen, have already distinguished themselves in this area of research, as have all the chapter authors, in individual and collective publications.[1] Several points of originality characterize this collection of well-connected essays, which can be either browsed according to one’s main interests or read in the proposed order. Each chapter is not only descriptive, but also reflexive, about significant epistemological and critical issues, inspired for example by postcolonial or sensory studies. Right from the introduction, the role of the high-quality 54 color illustrations is never only illustrative, but most argumentative. Furthermore, published by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, this work is available in English and in Spanish, in two separate volumes.
The introduction (“Ancient Greek and Roman Dance: An Overview”) is much more substantial than a summary of the volume. Its main aim is to “explore, rather than erase, the distance between ancient and modern bodies,” by focusing on the “imprints” left by “ancient dancing bodies,” “in our literary, visual and material sources.” In this perspective, temptations of reconstructionism are to be avoided, by focusing first on Greek definitions of dance and the dancing body as “embodied knowledge and experience.” After some visual examples of general interest, this introduction turns to dance on Delos, as a multidisciplinary case study with strong methodological value, combining poetic, epigraphic, and artistic figurations. Three types of dance practices, all linked to specific contexts and modalities, both in Greece and in Rome, relate the eight chapters of the collection: “communal,” that is choral dances and processions, with important implications of “body politic”; “theatrical dance,” that is tragedy, comedy, fabulae, mimes, pantomimes, and other kinds of spectacular genres; and “symposium, convivium and dance in the private sphere.” These definitions are followed by a detailed presentation of chapters and their reciprocal echoes, constantly linking ancient thinkers with contemporary approaches from other research fields: as the general structure of the book proceeds by progressive association and “zooming in and out” effects, it would not be possible nor very useful to organize these chapters into distinct thematic groups, although some possible groupings can be identified.
The first two chapters form a suggestive duo. Chapter 1 (Rosa Andújar, Geography) approaches dance in a broad sense “as a site of racialization”: cultural identities and differences can be observed as “processes of assignations of otherness and superiority,” which dance performances “signal and even rework.” Geographic and choreographic imaginations develop from various places in the Mediterranean world, where dance produces culture, identities, and values. This inspiring chapter focuses on the notions of “city” (e.g. kômos in Athens and place-based female dancing in Rome), “conquest” (e.g. in Xenophon’s Anabasis, in narratives about Alexander the Great, and in Roman triumphs), and “borders” (e.g. on the circulation of imported dances in Greece and on pantomime’s “ability to transcend linguistic or cultural boundaries”). Chapter 2 (Lauren Curtis, “Space”) focuses on physical locations shaping dances which reciprocally shape them, especially “outdoors in city streets, public plazas, and natural settings.” The chapter also observes in detail the “development of theater space,” in Greece and Rome, as well as processional movements related to public architecture (especially in Greek lyric and hymnic poetry), group dances in natural settings (for instance Bacchic dances), indoor dances in private locations, and finally the Roman Forum as a site displaying “body politic.” Dance-spaces are all suggestively defined in relation to other spaces: civic, domestic, natural.
The following three chapters complement each other equally well. Drawing from contemporary dance scholars Ann Cooper Albright and André Lepecki, and from philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (on “arborescent” and “rhizomatic” structures and on experiences of “becoming”), chapter 3 (Sarah Olsen, “Body”) examines the “construction and subversion of embodied identity,” in ancient thought on dance, in intersectional and constructivist manifestations of the “body,” for example in the choral genre of partheneia and other maiden choruses and in various kinds of dance involving categories of gender, age, race and ethnicity, ability, etc., as well as in literary sources “engag(ing) dance as a site of play and transformation” (e.g. Homer, Alcman, Euripides, Ovid, and Libanius, about dancing young women becoming trees). Relying on notions of “kinesthetic empathy or contagion” and “interpretative strategies” implying a plurality of “embodied cultural knowledge” and responses (including wonder, identification, desire, and escapism), chapter 4 (Naomi Weiss, “Audience”) studies spectatorship and audience engagement towards dancing bodies, again in ancient thought and literature (Homeric Hymns, Bacchylides, Aristophanes, Plato, Ovid, Juvenal, Lucian) and in theatrical venues, outdoors, and symposia or convivia. The construction of audiences is well exemplified by the study of the “Pseudo-Virgilian Copa” and the “Lipari Acrobat Krater.” Chapter 5 (Zoa Alonso Fernández, “Movement”), drawing from Lepecki again, focuses on the distinctive and multiple temporalities of choreography and performer-spectator relationship, as observed, sometimes paradoxically, in textual, visual, and material sources. After an overview of kineticism in texts such as folk songs, ritual processional chants, and lyric dramatic texts, especially from a metrical point of view, this essay focuses on Martial’s Latin epigram Liber spectaculorum 30 [26], which depicts the dancing chorus of Nereids, and on “furtive,” “interstitial moments between immobility and movement,” such as stillness in pantomime and motion in visual arts, for example the Caryatids of the Erechtheion, a famous vase in form of astragalus by Sotades (British Museum), and Maenadic figures on the Borghese vase (Louvre): dance here is not an “autonomous” art form.
By observing props, stage material, masks, musical instruments, and costumes, chapter 6 (Karin Schlapbach, “Objects”) reevaluates notions of materiality, imitation, competition, agency, and reciprocity, which ancient artists and thinkers often elaborate as “static and kinetic energy.” This very rich essay first concentrates on “flying objects” in kinetic processes (e.g. acrobatic dancing with a ball, Odyssey 6 and 8; with swords and hoops, Xenophon’s Symposium; Salians’ shields in Ovid’s Fasti); then on “falling bodies” (Kebriones, Iliad 16; Petronius’ Satyrica; Xenophon’s Symposium again) and on the “artful nature” of relations between dance as moving image and image as frozen dance; finally, on “costume, sonorous objects, garlands,” for instance cloak semiotics in ancient pantomime, in Tanagra statuettes, and for modern dancer Loïe Fuller, and on “uncertain boundaries between object and body,” e.g. weapons and musical instruments, in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Chapter 7 (Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, “Politics”) associates dance and political action, in terms “of identity, agency, and culture”, by observing “official deployments of dance” and “spontaneous choreographies of the social body.” After literary and theatrical evocations of the Byzantine empress Theodora, from Procopius to Sarah Bernhardt, the essay, drawing from works by the baroque dance scholar Mark Franko, interprets political history as the study of a “rapport de forces” in “the dialectics between bodily practices and the regulations imposed upon them.” This chapter first focuses on “dance and political agency” and “concrete ways of doing politics through dance,” such as acts of civil resistance (Cassius Dio and Sextus Empiricus) and institutionalized choruses in classical Athens; then “Dance and soft power” (Aeschylus’ Eumenides and the Roman equestrian game Lusus Troiae); finally “Dance and Political Discourse” (Plato’s Republic and Laws and Livy on the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus). The conclusion of this chapter could be applied to others: the scholars’ “political agency” implies “political micro-acts,” “in the process of (re)writing histories of ancient dance.” Finally, through “depictions of divine performance,” chapter 8 (Carolyn M. Laferrière, “Gods”) studies “the ancient conceptualization of dance on a cosmic scale.” After a Roman Neo-Attic marble relief representing a chorus of Olympian divinities, as “a somatic re-enactment of divine performance,” in relation with Homer and Hesiod, the essay focuses on the “divine origins of dance,” for Dionysus of Halicarnassus, in Hesiod’s Theogony, and on a black figure lekythos by the Sappho Painter (Louvre); on the “vocabulary for divine dance” compared to human dances, concerning schemata and rhythmos, in Greek vases depicting dancing gods and a Pompeian shrine to the Lares; finally, on “becoming gods through dance,” in Lucian’s On Dance (India, 18), in dithyrambs, in vascular depictions of Dionysus and Dionysiac group dances, and in Euripides’ Bacchae and Ion. “Dance itself could become the medium through which divine presence is experienced,” by becoming “something else, something divine, even if just for the duration of the dance.”
Each chapter of this beautifully edited volume is supplemented by a rich bibliography (e.g. more than 10 pages for the Introduction alone): this leads to some unnecessary repetitions, but proves practical in use. The volume contains no epilogue nor conclusion and ends with Index Locorum and General Index. It would be pointless to single out favorite chapters: indeed, each author has her own style, but, since they all use similar methods, they combine texts, images, and contemporary critical concepts, to produce not so short essays, rich with displayed documents and reflections. The whole of the volume makes sense.
From the general introduction onwards, the reader gets the impression that scholarship on dance here have been carried out by a (female) choir, with deep methodological and thematic common interests. The book is not made up of successive independent solos: obviously, it stems from a long-term collective work, for instance in collaborative seminars and other meetings, where main issues were discussed and defined jointly and individual nuances were harmonized, though preserved. Besides, there is still room for other areas of investigation to come, the premises of which appear here: time, gender, transcultural relations between Greece and Rome, modern and contemporary receptions and reactivations. This volume surely is a thought-provoking collection of precise and well problematized studies, and it will be a work of reference, for specialists of dance, literature, and cultural history of classical antiquity.
Authors and Titles
Zoa Alonso Fernández and Sarah Olsen. Ancient Greek and Roman Dance: An Overview (pp. 1-44)
Rosa Andújar. Geography (pp. 45-79)
Lauren Curtis. Space (pp. 81-108)
Sarah Olsen. Body (pp. 109-136)
Naomi Weiss. Audience (pp. 137-162)
Zoa Alonso Fernández. Movement (pp. 163-198)
Karin Schlapbach. Objects (pp. 199-228)
Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar. Politics (pp. 229-255)
Carolyn M. Laferrière. Gods (pp. 257-294)
Notes
[1] For instance, Z. Alonso Fernández, “Roman Dance” in T. Lynch y E. Rocconi (eds.), A Companion to Ancient Greek and Roman Music, Malden (MA), Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, 2020, 173-185 and S. Olsen, Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature: Representing the Unruly Body, Cambridge University Press, 2020.