Demons and Dancers: Performance in Late Antiquity

by Ruth Webb

Harvard University Press, 2008
Cloth: 978-0-674-03192-0
Library of Congress Classification PA3024.W43 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 792.0937

ABOUT THIS BOOK | REVIEWS | TOC

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Charges of obscenity and polemical anti-theater discourse have, at times, erased these popular performance traditions from the modern imagination. Demons and Dancers returns us to the times and places where those great ancient theaters were more than picturesque ruins dotting the Mediterranean landscape.

Ruth Webb fills this gap in our knowledge of the ancient world and provides us with a richly detailed look at social life in the late antique period through an investigation of its performance culture. The book focuses on the eastern empire, from Greece proper to modern-day Turkey and Egypt, between the second and sixth centuries CE. Using some of the tools provided by modern performance theory, this book explains how audiences interpreted the actions on stage, how the status of male and female performers shifted across time and place, how skilled the actors actually were (it was commonplace to dismiss these performers for their lack of skill), and what role spectacles involving spoken and sung words, as well as stylized gestures, had in Greco-Roman civic life.

REVIEWS

Pantomime -- dances which told stories -- fired the imagination of the ancient world. In the Roman Empire, dancers were superstar entertainers who wildly excited the audience with their brilliantly expressive and worryingly sexy performances. And as the Roman Empire moved into the Christian Empire, the full force of moral disapproval was brought to bear on the physical display of the dancing body. Demons and Dancers is a superb introduction to this extraordinary story.
-- Simon Goldhill, author of Jerusalem: City of Longing

Outstanding.
-- Denis Feeney Times Literary Supplement

One of the most visible remains a tourist finds in the ruined cities of the Roman Empire is a stone-built theater with a huge seating capacity, and he may wonder what productions were staged there that attracted such great audiences; gladiatorial combats, sometimes, and even wild beast fights in the eastern empire, where cities generally lacked amphitheaters, But the specialty of the theater was mime and pantomime, with music and dancing, Much of the evidence belongs to late antiquity, the general neglect of which makes this book all the more important. Mimes were skits with both male and female entertainers, and pantomimes were generally men, whose dancing interpreted a story that might be recited or sung by a performer accompanied by musicians, Webb describes the production companies, the place of theater in society, and the art of the pantomime, a dancer who could impersonate a man or a woman as the story required. Dancers could be enormously popular, but society ranked them low on the social scale, and the church considered the theater a haunt of the devil. Webb fills a gap in theater history with this fine book.
-- J. A. S. Evans Choice

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Theater and Society                                   24
Performers                                           44
Pantomime: The Dancing Body                          58
The Pantomime as Drama:
Dancers, Audiences, and the Communicative Body       72
Mime: The Drama of Everyday Life                      95
Mime, Humor, and Society                             116
Images of Actors: Identification and Estrangement   139
Ideas of the Audience: Possession and the Eye        168
Christians and the Theater                          197

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