SCS Newsletter - October 2019 (CBA) | Society for Classical Studies

Reading Ancient Sources with Dancing Bodies

by Thomas Sapsford

My research practice has involved working across fields from the outset. My career has been spent in two distinct disciplines: the first 15 years of my working life were as a professional dancer, first with the Royal Ballet and subsequently for contemporary balletic choreographers, Wayne McGregor and Michael Clark. I then entered the academy, trained as a classicist, and have subsequently taught and published on ancient Mediterranean culture and its receptions. Last Spring, as a Resident Fellow at The Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) at New York University I was able to explore the two areas of classics and dance simultaneously.

Founded by Jennifer Homans (author of the critically acclaimed and best-selling history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels), CBA gathers a new cohort of scholars and artists each semester to spend their time on various research projects that explore either the future of the art-form or its relation to other fields of academic endeavor. In my cohort, scholars worked on such varied topics as social dances in twentieth-century Kenya, the Russian critic André Levinson, and the exodus of avant-garde dance artists from Nazi Germany. Some artists explored the gendered language of ballet, lost dances by Nijinsky, and the use of interactive media as a choreographic tool.

My time was spent looking at Johannes Meursius’ Orchestra, sive de saltationibus veterum (1618), a lexicon of ancient Greek and Roman dance forms. I used this text to think through how we might better understand the preservation and transmission of ephemeral and non-verbal phenomena in classical antiquity.

Every week of the residency one fellow presented a seminar on their research project to fellow CBA members and alumni; our goal was to learn how best to speak across our disciplines while productively discussing specialized research interests. For my seminar, I wanted to concentrate on the related issues of information-loss and the all too common impulse to reconstruct ancient Greco-Roman dance.

Loss and restoration were certainly concerns for Meursius, who in an opening address bemoans our fragmentary knowledge of ancient dance. Several scholars both in the early modern and modern period have attempted to reconstruct and re-embody these ancient dances from their scant remains. Notably, as Frits Naerebout has documented, Scaliger was said to have performed his ‘pyrrhic dance’ several times at the court of the holy Roman emperor Maximilian I. In the late nineteenth-century Maurice Emmanuel used ancient visual culture to amplify and corroborate what textual sources tell us in his La danse grecque antique d'après les monuments figurés.

For me, the opportunity to explore re-embodiment of one of the Orchestra’s dances was too good to pass up. Happily, one of the CBA artists, Ashley Bouder (founder and choreographer of her own dance project and principal dancer with New York City Ballet) volunteered to take on the following dance-description:

Tongs (Thermaustris)

Athenaeus [14 629e] calls it a furious dance...Pollux (4.14) says: “Alternate hands (hekateris) and tongs (thermaustris), violent dancing: the former, the making movement of the hands; and the tongs, leaps.” Hesychius says: “Thermaustris: an implement similar to a pincer, which goldsmiths use. And a violent dance [because] of its red-hot speed.”

They were also dancing so that, when they leapt, they would move their feet back and forth between themselves before coming back to the ground.

The resulting three-minute dance was significant to me not so much for any claim to authenticity, but rather due to the translation strategies that Bouder had employed in turning text into dance.

Bouder avoided any attempt to reproduce the dance’s form or stylistics. Rather than choreographing in a quasi-Greek idiom, she drew on her own balletic vocabulary, grounded in the works of George Balanchine. Instead she focused on the dynamics and motions of the tongs dance, interpreting the mention of the dance’s furious, tight energy as a sequence of scissoring jumps and fleet, skittering footwork.

On the one hand the words collected by Meursius became a choreographic tool, providing a blueprint for the creation of a new dance piece; on the other hand, Bouder’s experiment showed the possibilities of dance reconstruction as a process useful for us as scholars. The dancing body proved a means of reading by emphasizing — for the tongs dance at least — its range of affective possibilities on the viewer. Such an imaginative exercise also helps us consider the role of the professional in ancient dance, and the experienced, dedicated skill needed for its execution.

My 16 weeks at The Center for Ballet and the Arts were a richly productive time to write, watch, and listen as I moved across and between several disciplines. In addition to providing me with dedicated space and time to work on the critical commentary of the Orchestra, CBA arranged several events in conjunction with the Dance Division at the New York Public Library, and MoMA. We had the opportunity to watch dancers at American Ballet Theater do their daily training and even took our own ballet class (scholars and artists alike) under the expert guidance of Heather Watts, leading NYCB ballerina of the 1970s-90s and exemplary performer of Balanchine’s works.

This chance to explore antiquity with both brain and body was rare indeed. And although my days onstage may be done, I was reminded once more that applying a performative approach to academic questions can be richly generative. My work on Meursius and the Orchestra is still ongoing: New York in Spring is, after all, a wonderfully distracting place.

(Tom Sapsford is a Lecturer in Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College and an Early Career Fellow at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, the University of Oxford. You can learn more about The Center for Ballet and the Arts and it's fellowship program here.)

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