‘Closing Up’ on Animal Metamorphosis:: Ovid's Micro-choreographies in the Metamorphoses and the Corporeal Idioms of Pantomime Dancing

Ismene Lada-Richards

doi:10.1353/clw.2018.0023

‘Closing Up’ on Animal Metamorphosis: Ovid's Micro-choreographies in the Metamorphoses and the Corporeal Idioms of Pantomime Dancing

Ismene Lada-Richards

Classics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

388 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This article reads Ovid's Metamorphoses through the lens of its contemporary art of pantomime dancing. With a focus restricted to narratives of animalization, it argues that the dancer's exquisite bodily expressiveness has been co-opted and re-calibrated for the demands of the poetic medium, as Ovid's sequences of animal metamorphosis have amalgamated aesthetic strategies borrowed from the pantomime stage. Far from having been shaped exclusively within the literary mainstream, Ovid's idiosyncratic look, astonishingly perceptive and concentrated on the movements, gestures as well as the minutest parts of his characters' bodies, was the product of a bold, intermedial cross-over between poetry and dance.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	371-404
Number of pages	34
Journal	CLASSICAL WORLD
Volume	111
Issue number	03
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2018.0023
Publication status	Published - 1 Apr 2018

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10.1353/clw.2018.0023

Closing up on animal metamorphosis_LADA-RICHARDS_Accepted5June2017_GREEN AAM
This is the peer-reviewed manuscript of a paper accepted for publication in Classical World, ©Johns Hopkins University Press. It will be published online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journal/317
Accepted author manuscript, 343 KB

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‘Closing Up’ on Animal Metamorphosis: Ovid's Micro-choreographies in the Metamorphoses and the Corporeal Idioms of Pantomime Dancing

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