Gianvittorio-Ungar Laura, Schlapbach Karin (eds.) Choreonarratives: Dancing Stories in Greek and Roman Antiquity and Beyond

Brill, 2021. — 384 p. — (Mnemosyne, Supplements 439).Choreonarratives, a collection of essays by classicists, dance scholars, and dance practitioners, explores the uses of dance as a narrative medium. Case studies from Greek and Roman antiquity illustrate how dance contributed to narrative repertoires in their multimodal manifestations, while discussions of modern and contemporary dance shed light on practices, discourses, and ancient legacies regarding the art of dancing stories.Benefitting from the crossover of different disciplinary, historical, and artistic perspectives, the volume looks beyond current narratological trends and investigates the manifold ways in which dance can acquire meaning, disclose storyworlds ranging from myths to individual life-stories, elicit the narratees’ responses, and generate powerful narratives of its own. Together, the eclectic approaches of Choreonarratives rethink dance’s capacity to tell, enrich, and inspire stories.Contributors are Sophie M. Bocksberger, Iris J. Bührle, Marie-Louise Crawley, Samuel N. Dorf, Karin Fenböck, Susan L. Foster, Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar, Sarah Olsen, Lucia Ruprecht, Karin Schlapbach, Danuta Shanzer, Christina Thurner, Yana Zarifi-Sistovari, Bernhard Zimmermann.Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar (PhD 2008, Palermo) is postdoctoral researcher in Classics at the University of Vienna/Austrian Academy of Sciences. She works on ancient Greek and Roman performance cultures and runs the project “Aeschylus’ narrative drama”, sponsored by the FWF-Austrian Science Fund.Karin Schlapbach (PhD 2001, Zurich) is professor of Classics at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She is the author of The Anatomy of Dance Discourse (OUP 2018). Her current research focuses on physical aspects of literary production in Graeco-Roman antiquity.