The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World Responses to Greek and Roman Dance

When the eighteenth-century choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre sought to develop what is now known as modern ballet, he turned to ancient pantomime as his source of inspiration; and when Isadora Duncan and her contemporaries looked for alternatives to the strictures of classical ballet, they looked to ancient Greek vases for models for what they termed 'natural' movement. This is the first book to examine systematically the long history of the impact of ideas about ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern theatrical and choreographic practices. With contributions from eminent classical scholars, dance historians, theatre specialists, modern literary critics, and art historians, as well as from contemporary practitioners, it offers a very wide conspectus on an under-explored but central aspect of classical reception, dance and theatre history, and the history of ideas.

1 - Dead but not Extinct: On Reinventing Pantomime Dancing in Eighteenth-Century England and France
2 - 'In Search of a Dead Rat': The Reception of Ancient Greek Dance in Late Nineteenth-Century Europe and America
3 - The Tanagra Effect: Wrapping the Modern Body in the Folds of Ancient Greece
4 - Reception or Deception? Approaching Dance through Vase-Painting
5 - A Pylades for the twentieth century: Fred Astaire and the Aesthetic of Bodily Eloquence
6 - 'Where there is Dance there is the Devil': Ancient and Modern Representations of Salome
7 - 'Heroes of the Dance Floor': The Missing Exemplary Male Dancer in the Ancient Sources
8 - Servile Bodies? The Status of the Professional Dancer in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries
9 - Dancing Maenads in Early Twentieth-Century Britain
10 - Ancient Greece, Dance and the English Masque
11 - Dancing with Prometheus: Performance and Spectacle in the 1920s
12 - From Duncan to Bausch with Iphigenia
13 - Ancient Myths and Modern Moves: The Greek-Inspired Dance Theatre of Martha Graham
14 - Iphigenia, Orpheus and Eurydice in the Human Narrative of Pina Bausch
15 - Knowing the Dancer, Knowing the Dance: The Dancer as Décor
16 - Modernism and Dance: Apollonian or Dionysian?
17 - Dance, Psychoanalysis and Modernist Aesthetics: Martha Graham's `Night Journey'
18 - Striking a Balance: The Apolline and Dionysiac in Post-Classical Choreography
19 - Caryl Churchill and Ian Spink 'allowing the past to speak directly to the present'
20 - Staniewski's Secret Alphabet of Gestures: Dance, Body and Metaphysics
21 - Gesamtkunstwerk: Modern Moves and the Ancient Chorus
22 - Red Ladies : Who are they and what do they want?

Fiona Macintosh became Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in January 2010, after ten years as Senior Research Fellow. In 2008 she was made Reader in Greek and Roman Drama. She is currently Supernumerary Fellow of St Hilda's College and University Lecturer in the Reception of Greek and Roman Literature. She is author of Dying Acts: Death in Ancient Greek and Modern Irish Tragic Drama (1994; 1995), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre 1660-1914 (Oxford University Press; 2005), and Sophocles' 'Oedipus Tyrannus' (2009). She has co-edited numerous APGRD publications: Dionysus Since 69 (with Edith Hall and Amanda Wrigley) (Oxford University Press; 2004), Agamemnon in Performance 458BC to AD2005 (with Pantelis Michelakis, Edith Hall, and Oliver Taplin) (Oxford University Press; 2005).