Moving to the Music: Song and Dance in Antiquity

Ovid’s Metamorphoses, as scholars have compellingly demonstrated, can be fruitfully read in dialogue with Roman pantomime dance, with points of contact ranging from its mythological subject matter and its focus on bodies and gesture to the way it depicts movement and transformation (e.g. Galinsky 1975: 68-69; Richlin 1992; Garelli 2013; Ingleheart 2008; Lada-Richards 2013, 2016, 2018).

This paper will explore the relationship between music and dance in Roman theatre during the early imperial period. The paper will focus specifically on the evolution of the dramatic genre known as fabula togata and the relation of this genre to the origins of the pantomime. My contention is that modern scholarship on the pantomime (e.g. Lada-Richards 2007) has promoted an overly narrow conception of how musical styles developed under the patronage of the Julio-Claudian emperors.

The appearance of dancing scenes on ancient Greek vases enables a unique area of exploration in the combined areas of gesture and ritual. Vase-painters in the city of Athens, as well as in other regions (e.g. Laconia, Corinth, Boeotia) active during the 6^thand 5^thcenturies BC, frequently choose dance figures and contexts as subjects to decorate the surfaces of their vessels.

In order to underline the role of represented, perceived, and lived bodies in poetic performances, this study applies the critical tools of kinesthesia, empathy, and synesthesia to the so-called "Newest Sappho". In archaic choral song-and-dance (Naerebout 2017), instrumental music, dance, song, and text are inseparable (Ceccarelli, Catoni). Ancient theoreticians also notice that (Webb, Schlapbach, Bocksberger).