Silent Eloquence: Lucian and Pantomime Dancing (review)

In 2005, in Oxford, the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama held a symposium on New Perspectives on Ancient Pantomime, now published as E. Hall and R. Wyles (eds.), New Directions in Ancient Pantomime (Oxford 2008), but the general content of the paper delivered there by Ismene Lada-Richards can now be read in this book.

While chapter 1 traces the chronological history of pantomime, chapter 2 is dedicated to the other performative genres with which pantomime competed. In dealing with tragedy, Lada-Richards stresses both similarities (the subject-matters) and differences (drama of the body vs. drama of words). The technical aspects of the performance—venues, music, lyrics—are the subject of chapter 3, where special attention is given to the professional preparation of the dancer, his ability at imitating and creating êthê ("characters") and pathê ("passions"), his memory, his performative language.

Pantomime dancing always provoked different reactions: praise and blame, love and hate, acceptance and refusal, etc. While chapter 4 explains why so many politicians struggled to include the most popular performers in the festivals they organized, chapter 5 tells why dancers were kept apart from the urbane citizenry. In Greece dance played a major role in education and cultural life; in Rome, on the other hand, the dancers' social status was very low; their job gave them high popularity but carried the negative connotation of mollitia ("debauchery"). This hybrid heart of pantomime is reflected by the arguments put forth by the protagonists of Lucian's treatise, the criticism of Crato and the praise of Lycinus. The main point of Lycinus' harangue is that pantomime dancing was a learned and educational spectacle (paideusis is a key word), with ample moral essence, addressed to a sophisticated audience. Its learned features were justified by the genre's affiliation to the powers of memorization, rhetoric, and philosophy; its morality was guaranteed by the paradigmatic force of the exempla narrated by the dancer. The pantomime performer fashioned by Lycinus was molded in accordance with the cultural preoccupations of the Second Sophistic. But was this self-presentation really consistent?

The answer is given in the last chapters, where Lada-Richards deals with the way political and cultural elites considered pantomime. Since they wanted to show themselves as upholders of the acquisition of literacy through the art of logos, they could not be for a nonliterary teaching such as pantomime, because such a performative genre was a very unlikely candidate for the dissemination of an educational legitimacy based on a "textual" culture. At the same time, in his attempt at intellectualizing the dancer, Lycinus overlooked the most interesting aspect of pantomime, its peculiar value as a communicative channel that depended on its ability to affect those inner regions unattainable by verbal language. Public declaimers understood well this truth, since their career paths often crossed with pantomime dancers: their life might be equally glamorous, but was also precarious, because it depended on the public; their fame had to be "visible" (that is, enacted in public performances); they had to defy dancers in their territories by improving their art of impersonation, using a physical dramaturgy, and exploiting the gestural vocabulary of bodily communication.

Since he too was a public declaimer, however, what were Lucian's real feelings (his own, not just Lycinus') toward this genre? The last chapter deals with this question. Since Lucian was not a real member of the club of the Second Sophistic, his attitude might have been different from his colleagues. This explains why in the dialogue the overall picture of pantomime is positive; the extoling of pantomime was both a compliment to Lucius Verus for his choice of entertainment and an attempt at showing himself "as a bold path-maker and reliable taste-maker, a wielder of true power, actively shaping and guiding, rather that being shaped and guided by, current perceptions of the boundaries between cultural legitimacy and illegitimacy."

As this summary shows, Lada-Richards...