The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance ed. by Fiona Macintosh, and: Modernism's Mythic Pose: Gender, Genre, Solo Performance by Carrie J. Preston (review)

Perhaps the best-known dancer from Greek antiquity is Hippocleides, who was a suitor for the hand of the daughter of Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon in the sixth century BCE. According to Herodotus, Hippocleides was "the most outstanding man in Athens for his wealth and good looks," and Cleisthenes preferred him for his son-in-law "because of his courage" (or "manly virtue," andragathiê) and because he was related to the Cypselidae of Corinth (Histories 6.127-8). On the day Cleisthenes was to make his decision, however, things took a wrong turn (Histories 6.129.2-4; trans. Waterfield 1998):

After the meal, the suitors competed with one another at singing and at public speaking. As the drinking progressed, Hippocleides had a clear lead over the others, but then he told the pipe-player to strike up a tune, and when the musician did so he began to dance (orchêsato). Now, although Hippocleides liked his own dancing a lot, Cleisthenes was beginning to look on the whole business askance. After a while, Hippocleides stopped momentarily and asked for a table to be brought in. When the table arrived there, he first danced a Laconian dance on it, then some Attic figures, and finally stood on his head on the table and waggled his feet around. Hippocleides' uninhibited dancing of the first and second sets of figures had already put Cleisthenes off having him as a son-in-law, but he kept silent because he did not want to scold him. When he saw him making hand gestures with his legs (echeironomêse), however, he could no longer restrain himself. "Son of Tisander," he said, "you have danced away (aporchêsao) your marriage." The young man replied, "Hippocleides doesn't care! And that is how the proverb arose.

Hippocleides is not one of the ancient dancers in Fiona Macintosh's comprehensive and thoroughly researched edited volume. Nor is his headstand a mythic pose, the subject of Carrie Preston's book. But the anecdote raises two questions pertinent to this review: What is a dancer, and, more specifically, who or what is an ancient dancer? The first question is conceptual, and the second is historical. Must a dancer be a professional, or are amateurs or spur-of-the-moment practitioners like Hippocleides entitled to the name? What is the evidence for the dancer in antiquity, and how do we interpret that evidence? The case of Hippocleides also raises the question of dance as a political medium. Cleisthenes selects Hippocleides' Athenian rival Megacles for his son-in-law, and, as Herodotus goes on to tell us, this marriage produces the Cleisthenes who will establish the democracy in Athens and, in a later generation, the great Athenian statesman, Pericles. Hippocleides may have danced away his marriage, but in doing so he set in motion the downfall of Athenian tyranny. As the readers of Dance Research Journal will have guessed at this point, I approach these studies not as a dance historian—a field in which I claim no expertise—but as a classicist with a background in dance.

The title of Macintosh's volume, The Ancient Dancer in the Modern World: Responses to Greek and Roman Dance, draws our attention to the conceptual and historical variables referred to above. Macintosh, director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama and reader in the Reception of Greek and Roman Literature at the University of Oxford, is an established authority on the modern reception...