When the eighteenth-century choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre sought to develop what is now known as modern ballet, he turned to ancient pantomime as his source of inspiration; and when Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries looked for alternatives to the strictures of classical ballet, they looked to ancient Greek vases for models for what they termed 'natural' movement. This is the first book to examine systematically the long history of the impact of ideas about ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern theatrical and choreographic practices. With contributions from eminent classical scholars, dance historians, theatre specialists, modern literary critics, and art historians, as well as from contemporary practitioners, it offers a very wide conspectus on an under-explored but central aspect of classical reception, dance and theatre history, and the history of ideas.
Introduction ; I. DANCE AND THE ANCIENT SOURCES ; 1. Dead but not Extinct: On Reinventing Pantomime Dancing in Eighteenth-Century England and France ; 2. 'In Search of a Dead Rat': The Reception of Ancient Greek Dance in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe and America ; 3. The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient Greece ; 4. Reception or Deception? Approaching Dance through Vase-Painting ; 5. A Pylades for the twentieth century: Fred Astaire and the Aesthetic of Bodily Eloquence ; II. DANCE AND DECADENCE ; 6. 'Where there is Dance there is the Devil': Ancient and Modern Representations of Salome ; 7. 'Heroes of the Dance Floor': The Missing Exemplary Male Dancer in the Ancient Sources ; 8. Servile Bodies? The Status of the Professional Dancer in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries ; 9. Dancing Maenads in Early Twentieth-Century Britain ; III. DANCE AND MYTH ; 10. Ancient Greece, Dance and the English Masque ; 11. Dancing with Prometheus: Performance and Spectacle in the 1920s ; 12. From Duncan to Bausch with Iphigenia ; 13. Ancient Myths and Modern Moves: The Greek-Inspired Dance Theatre of Martha Graham ; 14. Iphigenia, Orpheus and Eurydice in the Human Narrative of Pina Bausch ; IV. ANCIENT DANCE AND THE MODERN MIND ; 15. Knowing the Dancer, Knowing the Dance: The Dancer as Decor ; 16. Modernism and Dance: Apollonian or Dionysian? ; 17. Dance, Psychoanalysis and Modernist Aesthetics: Martha Graham's 'Night Journey' ; 18. Striking a Balance: The Apolline and Dionysiac in Post-Classical Choreography ; 19. Caryl Churchill and Ian Spink 'allowing the past to speak directly to the present' ; V. THE ANCIENT CHORUS IN CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE ; 20. Staniewski's Secret Alphabet of Gestures: Dance, Body and Metaphysics ; 21. Gesamtkunstwerk: Modern Moves and the Ancient Chorus ; 22. Red Ladies : Who are they and what do they want?
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