In the winter of the year 182 CE, Epaphroditus, an eight-year-old slave, leaned out of a rooftop in a village in Egypt and fell to his death. The boy had been on that roof because he had wanted to watch dancing on the street during a festival. If one is lax about causal inference, one could say that dancing killed Epaphroditus. The papyrus scrap that reports this tragic incident (P. Oxy. 475, mentioned by Weiss on p. 141 of the book under review) is proof of the remarkable insight that some such documents provide into daily life in Roman Egypt. It is also evidence of the fact that dance was ubiquitous in the Greek and Roman Mediterranean, and that it mattered to many, even to children and slaves. Dance was so vital in cities, towns, and sanctuaries throughout the region in antiquity that it is perplexing how little attention it deserves among many classicists today. Then again, perhaps such neglect should be expected: dance plays a minuscule part, if any, in most classicists’ education. Moreover, even to specialists, dances that were danced several millennia ago seem hopelessly elusive, if not altogether lost. Many would probably argue that one can only ascertain that ancient dance happened, but not probe the performances themselves, especially not in the absence of text. They would be wrong.
Imprints of Dance in Ancient Greece and Rome is organized thematically under expansive headings, each treated by a single author. Rather than defined domains, chapter titles (i.e., Geography, Space, Body, Audience, Movement, Objects, Politics, and Gods) serve as points of reference around which contributors roam widely. Each chapter stands on its own, but whoever reads the book from cover to cover will profit even when the same evidence or topic is treated more than once. Dance and performance scholars will find up-to-date overviews of major themes in Greek and Roman dance studies as well as a varied array of relevant evidence. Those with specialized interests in Greece and Rome will benefit from the fact that chapters frame challenging questions in the current study of (ancient) dance. In their introductions and conclusions, many contributors foreground points of contact with dance and performance studies focused on modern-day dance practices. Here I first call attention to aspects of the individual chapters that I find provocative and conclude with some reflections about possibilities for future collaboration.
Andújar’s “Geography” deals with categories of identity, and also race and gender, as expressed through dancing bodies and practices. She is interested in the encoding of cultural alterity by means of movement, gestures, dress, instruments, and other dance accessories. She is aware of the challenges of assigning cultural meaning(s) to dancing bodies that were explicitly characterized in antiquity by geographic markers (47). Among the varied evidence she treats is a well-known passage of the soldier and historian Xenophon (ca. 430-355/354 BCE), who relates that Greek mercenaries marching back home through what is now northern Turkey performed a series of narrative and non-narrative dances in front of local audiences (Anabasis 6.1.3, discussed on pp. 61-62). The passage is relevant because their performance was intended as a sort of choreographic map. Modern scholars have only the mercenaries’ version of events. Xenophon depicts the Anatolian observes as awe-struck hicks, dazzled by the spectacle. The precision with which he correlates successive dances with people and places back in Greece is fascinating. Whether the Paphlagonians cared much at all about any of those dances, let alone understood the complex choreographic map, is very difficult to ascertain. Even so, there should be no doubt that in antiquity specific dancing bodies, movements, and costumes were correlated by performers and/or audiences—not always simultaneously—with specific places and associated meanings and values.
In “Space” Curtis ranges through city and countryside, using theaters, streets, plazas, and “natural settings” to discuss “the intersection of choreography, space, and meaning making” (81-82). No readers of this journal will object to the claims that dancing transforms space or that the space in which dance happens impacts performance. Curtis adds complexity to those notions by exploring dancing spaces that also served many other purposes (e.g., the Roman forum) and spaces in which different dances were danced at different times. She also expounds ritual dances as mediating between divine and human spatial (and temporal) realms (90). One of the most intriguing issues she tackles, if only briefly, has to do with places that dance themselves (94-95). The stones of ancient Thebes, for instance, were said to have danced into becoming fortification walls attending to the tune of the magical lyre of Amphion (Pausanias 6.20.18). Curtis treats mythological texts, but one wonders: When Greek and Roman poets and philosophers wrote of islands (or stars) dancing, was their claim merely metaphorical? The fact that mountains and lakes were understood to be animate in ancient Anatolia suggests otherwise. A negative answer to that question disrupts widespread assumptions not just about landscape animacy, but about the ontological limits (and perhaps also origins) of dance.
Olson handles “bodies,” particularly “how the physical body and its markers of identity operate with a specific cultural context” (110). She deals not with actual human bodies (or their physical traces) but with textual descriptions and visual representations of those bodies, fully aware that many of her sources say more about cultural hierarchies than lived experience. She argues that ancient texts and images construct dancing bodies rather than merely documenting them (115). Much of her article is devoted to how some dances allow dancers to transcend or transform and “explode” the cultural meanings with which they are laden—at least partially (119-28). Many ancient dances invited audiences to envision dancers as if they were other-than-human beings: divinities, animals, stars, architectural supports. She considers the empowering as well as the limiting effects of arboreal transformation especially for girls and young women. Those interested in extending her investigation should probe also non-literary and not even metaphorical ancient cases in which trees and other-than-human entities danced alongside humans.
Weiss uses the first part of her chapter to remind her readers of the heterogeneity of possible responses to dance. These vary for all sorts of reasons including age, gender, and social status, but also for reasons that, though obvious to living spectators, are sometimes overlooked by scholars of antiquity (e.g., distance from the stage, a person’s height, their levels of intoxication, glaucoma). Responses to dance vary also by an audience member’s degree of attention: one could simply be looking away from the stage at a possible target of romantic interest, or distracted by competing stimuli (e.g., a juggler, a fistfight, a fart). Some readers of this review who have sat in the ruins of Greek and Roman theaters may have wondered why anyone would have looked at the stage at all, instead of at the sea or the mountains beyond it. In the second part of her article, Weiss asks how representations of dance “construct external audiences of their own” (150), in other words, how texts or images turn readers and viewers into spectators. Her extended analysis of a dancing scene on a South Italian vase (153-58) is a compelling elucidation of the fact that audiences ancient and modern, both drawn on that vase and outside it, can be kaleidoscopically diverse.
Alonso Fernández deals with “Movement” and its occasional absence. Inspired by scholarship on contemporary dance, she aims to probe the multiple temporalities and even multiple presents of ancient dances. To do so, she first examines intersections between dance and texts, including a first-century CE poem describing a troupe of choreographed swimmers. —If only Ridley Scott had given us those nereids instead of goofy CGI sharks in Gladiator II— Readers who are not classical philologists may have doubts about the kineticism of ancient texts. But Alonso Fernández also describes one artifact that is as apposite to the complexities of ancient movement as it is perplexing: a 5th century BCE ceramic vessel in the shape of a giant knucklebone (185-88). On one of the sides of that “knucklebone” is painted a choir of lovely maidens who hold hands as they dance, led by a choirmaster. On another side, the maidens alight, some become fully airborne and glide through the air with grace and confidence. Actual knucklebones in antiquity were cast, like dice, in games of chance. If one imagines the ceramic knucklebone aloft, those maidens would be tumbling through the air. However, that vessel was used by ancient users, I am fully convinced that it plays on the tension between dance, airborne movement, and what Alonso Fernández calls “interstitial moments of stillness” (188).
Schlapbach analyzes “objects” manipulated by Greek and Roman dancers to expand, limit, counter, and generally structure the movement of their own bodies. She deals with balls in the air and static swords, as well as with costumes, props, and percussive instruments. Greek and Roman dancers incorporated these and other objects into their performances to effect, for instance, apparent inversions of active and passive matter. She speaks of a dancer who falls—or pretends to fall—from on high as occupying a “grey area between dancing and dying” (210). It won’t surprise readers to learn that the daredevil dancer and choreographer Elizabeth Streb is quoted in relation to such movements. Schlapbach examines how dancers deployed objects to highlight paradoxes of performance, including the irretrievability of an absolute original during ritual performances. Anyone who has seen homages to Loïe Fuller’s serpentine dance knows that while the robe of the (re)performer may materially and kinetically be quoting that of the celebrated dancer, one is not actually seeing Loïe Fuller. The same may have been true, mutatis mutandis, of ritual props in ancient dance (e.g., the sky-fallen shield of Salian priests in Rome discussed by Schlapbach and several other contributors) would perhaps call attention to the fact that that an annual ritual dance both was and was not the same as its myth-historical original.
Gianvittorio-Ungar deals with “Politics”, specifically with how people in antiquity made political statements by dancing, as well as by refusing to dance or by restricting dances. The topic is of current relevance: everyone who saw Donald Trump jiggling to “YMCA” during his campaigns will know the formidable galvanizing power of dancing politicians (and perhaps also the desire to restrict them). Gianvittorio-Ungar is mostly interested in the dancing politics and political dances of people other than those in positions of power. Towards the end of her chapter, she claims that scholars also exercise political agency by “(re)writing histories of dance” (250), highlighting her own efforts in this chapter to value “popular rather than official sources” and “secular rather than religious aspects” of ancient dance (251). She may be exercising political agency, but her chapter is in fundamental ways conservative. She uses mostly literary passages that are as canonical as they can get (including Aeschylus’s Eumenides, Plato’s Laws, and Livy’s account of a resolution by the Roman senate restricting Bacchanalian rites in Italy) to reflect about dancers and their impact on their political environment.
For as long as Greek and Roman dance has been studied, the focus of investigation has tended to be, unsurprisingly, human. And yet, as Laferriere argues in “Gods”, questions about how and why divinities dance are just as important for those wanting to know why dance mattered in antiquity. Dancing was a common way of interacting with deities in ancient Greece and Rome, for example, during religious festivals or when a dancer impersonated a god(dess). Some human dances were said to have been invented by or for specific divinities and others were understood as mortal manifestations of divine performances. Questions about kinesthetic empathy (as defined and treated by Deidre Sklar (Reference Sklar1994 and Reference Sklar, Noland and Ness2008) and Susan L. Foster (Reference Foster2011)) become especially difficult when that empathy involves other-than-human dancers. An obvious challenge for those undertaking this sort of investigation concerns relevant sources. Laferriere does not claim to have direct evidence of divine dance in antiquity. Rather, she combines textual depictions and visual representations to show that dancing gods and goddesses, and divinities who loved dance, cut across social classes and creative domains.
Imprints of Dance is an important milestone. Its editors and contributing authors are part of a group of classicists who, for the past decade or so have animated the study of Greek and Roman dance with a steady output of articles, monographs, and edited volumes. This volume in particular provides an opportunity for them to survey the state of Greek and Roman dance studies, to highlight their contributions to relevant debates, and to celebrate the atmosphere of collaboration and friendship that has characterized their inquiry. Their book demonstrates that the study of Greek and Roman dance is vibrant and multi-faceted. It also shows that much remains to be done, not least by (or with?) scholars of antiquity who are not primarily philologists, which the contributors to Imprints of Dance all are. I suspect all of them would agree that dialogue among different specialists will continue to provide insights into (ancient) dance. Even among scholars of Greek and Roman dance, promising grounds for exchange are readily available. Direct collaboration between scholars of ancient literature and archaeologists, art historians, epigraphists, and papyrologists, is a desideratum.
The core evidence in this book is literary, and to a lesser degree visual, but inscriptions and papyri—which are considered only occasionally here—can provide as much insight into Greek and Roman dance as literary texts. The epigraphic legacy of the Greek and Roman east has only been skimmed by scholars of dance, and mostly as it concerns pantomime. Epigraphists (and papyrologists) probing matters having to do with affect, emotion, and embodiment would make stimulating interlocutors. Angelos Chaniotis (e.g., Reference Chaniotis2021) and his many collaborators in his Unveiling Emotions project come immediately to mind. Archaeologists can further expand debates about (ancient) dance because they have long thought about what the editors call “imprints” (28- 29), and more generally about the intersections between past and present time and matter. Archaeologists have been concerned for decades with the ephemerality of movement and the ontology of traces. Methodologically, some are arguably at the vanguard of new breakthroughs.
One example among many possible ones: William van Andringa’s meticulous—frankly obsessive—archaeological investigations in Pompeii have led his team to precise reconstructions of exact ancient gestures (Reference Van Andringa2021). Pompeii is exceptional and one may be skeptical about such forensic positivism, but van Andringa’s work troubles the purported irretrievability of ancient movement. His work also offers new points of contact—and perhaps also friction—with contemporary theorists of performance who have occasionally engaged with archaeological material (e.g., Rebecca Schneider (Reference Schneider Schneider2018)). At the very least, direct collaboration will expand the range of evidence that is available to scholars of dance, and animate explorations with new methodological possibilities and theoretical frameworks.
Imprints of Dance is carefully edited and beautifully illustrated with more than fifty high quality color photographs. It has a handy general index and an index of ancient textual sources. The editors seem aware of the fact that the book’s thematic organization will invite readers to dismember it (on suggestions for the relevant motion, see, again mutatis mutandis, figures 51 and 52). Each chapter concludes with its own bibliography, even though there is much overlap in the scholarship and evidence cited by different authors, and several of the images are duplicated in different chapters. Reviewers of edited volumes often grumble about the heterogeneity of such endeavors and the unevenness of individual contributions. No such complaint should be leveled at this book. It is substantive and thought-provoking throughout.
