-
"Closing Up" on Animal Metamorphosis: Ovid's Micro-Choreographies in the Metamorphoses and the Corporeal Idioms of Pantomime Dancing
- Classical World
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 111, Number 3, Spring 2018
- pp. 371-404
- 10.1353/clw.2018.0023
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
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 coopted and recalibrated 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 and gestures, as well as the minutest parts of his characters' bodies, was the product of a bold, intermedial crossover between poetry and dance.