Choreonarratives is a seminal incident in the recent proliferation of ancient dance studies. Seminal, because it illuminates some rarely addressed but fundamental pillars of Graeco-Roman choreo-dramatic performance: dance movements (rather than dance formations or routines); solo performance; the physiological and psychological channels of spectatorship; and the configurations and transfigurations of the (Hellenized) pantomime as a ‘world dance’ under the universality granted to the French ballet. Incident, because of its groundbreaking focus on the existing choreologic material in classics.
Part 1 (‘Dance as Medium of Narration’) starts with a literature review immediately adherent to the promised centrality of practical choreology. Holding no longer to the myopic cliché of limiting choros/kinēsis/orchēsis to the chorus’ activities, Bernhard Zimmermann identifies four types of choreologic hints (didaskaliai) in Aristophanes’ comedies, found in stage directions, dialogues, ‘outsiders’ comments’ and dance interludes. He gives us a vivid picture of the multi-semiotic functionality offered by different solo and choral dance formations, while taking us through the development of societal expression of civic individualism thriving in late fifth-century Athens.
The centrality of dance movement continues with a second spotlight on choreologic material in texts. Sophie M. Bocksberger incarnates her hands-on experience as a dancer in her performative-philological study of the core element of dance, the rhythmic and stylistic movement of the body(parts), termed ‘schema’. Drawing on classical writers’ presentations of the word, Bocksberger demonstrates how schema, as a key choreologic concept, ambitiously targets implications far beyond ‘dance step’, ‘movement’ and ‘gesture’, while opening up a systematic method for narrating a persona (ēthos) through the re-embodiment of affections and emotional responses (pathos).
Concentrating on representational mimesis, a yet another hyper-classical perspective emerges in Karin Schlapbach’s essay on non-representational, non-dramatized dances of Late Antiquity beyond the overarching picture of the Graeco-Roman pantomime (orchēsis). Watching a dance routine can trigger the audience’s decipherment of its individual and specific schemata, but then, by recalling the underflowing experience of myths, the decipherment may invoke unsettlement, excitement and even ecstasy.
Lucia Ruprecht’s decipherment of Noé Soulier’s choreographed rendition of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (2018) juxtaposes the writer’s compressed conceptualization of human movements with the dancer’s multi-sensory choreography of interpersonal and meta-personal/societal discourses.
The next three chapters, those comprising Part 2, centring on the dances of Io, Neoptolemus and Salome, underline the interactive triangle of actor-spectator-recounter respectively, which can also be translated as the transmission of the story from the performer to their immediate and then later audience.
Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar expands on Sarah Olsen’s thematic examination of Io’s choreologic monologue in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature (Cambridge 2021)). The paradox of Io’s assumed solemnity against her agitation-charged lamentation inspires a collective review of some of the most important and yet least-studied sources about ancient (Greek) dance: vase paintings; proto-choreologic hymns and songs (for example, monodies and kommoi); performative appropriateness (of the level of realism in re-enactment of grief, madness and the like) as made sense to theatrical populations in the past; and transculturally comparable dance traditions.
Along the same lines, Sara Olsen herself explores the power of ‘imaginative engagement’ (175) of the Hellenic spectators as crafted by the playwrights through paratextual references to their lived experience of choreologic rites (the narrator-to-listener effect defined by Deidre Sklar as ‘kinesthetic empathy’ in Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas (New Mexico 2001)) in Euripides’ Andromache.
Kinaesthetic empathy can arouse dangerous desires. Danuta Shanzer deconstructs the semi-historical legend of Salome, the primordial paradigm of a deadly dancing femme fatale. In a choreologic probation of intertextuality, Christina Thurner substitutes verbal accounts about dancers for self-contemplating dance pieces. Paralleling the condensing scantiness of those extant accounts with the minimalism inherent in modern auto-bio-narratives, she explains how the question of the impact of performance condition on the narrativity of dance, posed by the 18th-century ballet reformers, is revisited on the postmodern stage.
Part 3 crowns this ontological insight into the choreologic classics with the indispensable history of modernization of pantomime/orchēsis/saltatio through five chapters that highlight its phenomenological turning points: the philological problem of translating remote but renowned classical content into contemporary (although essentially European) tongues of dance performance (Iris Julia Buehrle); the revivalist question about gestural decipherment of legendary characters on the 18th-century stage of the French(-style) ballet (Karin Fenböck); the reconstructionist compilation of ancient dance poses derived from Greek visual records (Samuel N. Dorf); the ethnographic non-Western adaptations of classical drama and its bolstering capacities; and the reimagining of tragoedia saltata (‘tragic dance’) by 21st-century dancer-researchers (Yana Zarifi-Sistovari).
In her take on augmenting the above outlines, Marie-Louise Crawley stages a ‘living archive’ of the classical female bodies sidelined by history in their associated home at the museum in her piece Myrrha (Ashmolean Museum, 2015 and 2018), a postmodern ritualistic ‘remembering and dismembering’ of the myth via eccentric and excessive body movements that oscillate between dancing and action.
Chorreonarratives ends with Susan Leigh Foster’s epilogue, which, after a comprehensive survey of the book’s content, posits her dancer-scholar suggestions for what can come next. As much as I find progressive her queries about the power of dance to voice the opposition(s) in political discourses and about promoting verbal content to enrich narrative dance performances, the list of wants and needs is much longer. Here, I only (re)sound the ample capacity of insiders’ (here, Greeks) multiple views obtainable from the professional, elite or lay onlookers and postlookers of the inherent narrativity of Greco-Roman dance.
