Dance Translations. Re-enacting Ancient Dance under the Fascist Regime
In 1930s’ Sicily, the ruins of an ancient theater became the point of intersection for different European dance cultures. This project investigates how this curious phenomenon materialised and what consequences it had on the history of dance. The Istituto Nazionale Dramma Antico (INDA) had been staging ancient Greek tragedies for years when the fascist regime interfered with their agenda. The spectacularizing of the classical past was key to the nationalist propaganda, but ancient dances turned out to be more awkward to translate than ancient texts. Despite the all-Italian image projected on the spectacles, INDA looked abroad for dance vocabularies that satisfied not only high dramaturgical requirements but, putatively, also the fascist ideologies regarding group movement and female bodies. They appointed the Hellerau Laxenburg Schule, a eurhythmic institution based near Vienna―and in this way, a striking hybridization of Hellenic-like aesthetics, modernist dance and fascist ideology began.
Laura Gianvittorio-Ungar is a classical scholar with a special expertise in the theatrical, dance and musical cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity. Before obtaining the ifk Senior Fellowship, she was a researcher and lecturer at a number of universities in Europe and the United Kingdom (Palermo, Berlin HU, Salzburg, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Nottingham and Heidelberg) and led research projects at the University of Vienna as well as at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (FWF/Hertha Firnberg and FWF/Elise Richter). These projects examined multimodal practices of storytelling in ancient Greek theatre and, on these premises, re-conceptualised the narrativity and genre hybridity of theatre. Her current work tackles two broad research issues, namely, the material aspects of ancient movement arts and the reception of ancient dance in the 20th century.
Narratives at Play. Perspectives on Aeschylus’ Genre and Poetics, Leiden, Boston: Brill 2024.
»Dance and Politics«, in: Z. Alonso-Fernández und S. Olsen (Hg.): Imprints of Ancient Dance: Texts, Images, Bodies, Movement, Madrid: Autonoma University Press 2024.
mit Karin Schlapbach (Hg.), Choreonarratives. Dancing Stories in Greek and Roman Antiquity and beyond, Leiden, Boston: Brill 2021.
Choreutika. Performing and Theorising Dance in Ancient Greece, (= Biblioteca dei Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 13), Roma, Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore 2017.
Il discorso di Eraclito. Un modello semantico e cosmologico nel passaggio dall’oralità alla scrittura (= Spudasmata 134), Hildesheim, New York, Zürich: G. Olms Verlag 2010.
The lecture enquires into the dynamics through which, in 1930s Sicily, an ancient Greek theater came to catalyze fairly mismatched dance cultures into a productive exchange.