[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Workshop: February 19, 2016

[Dimitri H. Gondicas]

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies



Workshop


'Grecian Dances' and the Transformations of
Corporeality in the Age of Moving Images

Pantelis Michelakis
p.michelakis at princeton.edu<mailto:p.michelakis at princeton.edu>
University of Bristol
Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Hellenic Studies



Respondent: Rebekah Rutkoff, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton


The emergence of cinema at the end of the nineteenth century marks a profound shift in the way in which Greece and Rome are conceptualized in the modern world. Cultures previously perceived as remote and inaccessible, the object of contemplation from a distance or the product of imagination, are suddenly transformed into a vivid but fleeting reality to be experienced through the senses. Cinema makes possible the generation of new modes of perception and thought in modernity within which Greece and Rome become not only more vivid, but also more complex, dynamic, and enigmatic. One of the most distinctive features of this reconceptualization of Greece and Rome in cinematic modernity is dance. The focus of this talk is on a popular type of dance of the era of silent cinema commonly identified in the critical and commercial discourse of the time as 'Grecian.' This type of dance must be set apart from other 'ancient' dances that appeal to early film because it strikes a precarious but important balance between cinema's drive for entertainment and its drive for moral uplift. It must also be set apart from other cinematic investments in the human body because of the dynamism and energy with which it responds to cinema's preoccupation with the corporeal catastrophes of modernity. The talk sketches out the larger context of the craze for Grecian dances in numerous, now forgotten, films of the silent era with the help of specific case studies that include Charlie Chaplin's Sunnyside (1919), William Desmond Taylor's Johanna Enlists (1918), Rae Berger's Purity (1916), and Ted Shawn's Dances of the Ages (1913).
Pantelis Michelakis is Reader in Classics at the University of Bristol. He works in the fields of archaic and classical Greek literature, Greek culture, and the classical tradition. He is the author of Greek Tragedy on Screen (OUP, 2013), Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (Duckworth, 2006), and Achilles in Greek Tragedy (CUP, 2002). He has also coedited The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (CUP 2013), Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004 (OUP, 2005), and Homer, Tragedy and Beyond (SPHS, 2001). He is currently working on books on the reception of ancient Greece in early cinema and on the transmissibility of classical narrative, and on articles on classics and cinema in the digital age and on the performance history of Greco-Roman drama.


Friday, February 19, 2016

1:30 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103



Supported by The Christos G. and Rhoda Papaioannou Modern Greek Studies Fund


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