The impact of ancient Greek and Roman dance on modern dance has been perceptible since at least the 15th century. While classical reception in dance is now recognized as a sub-category within dance studies and a serious dimension to classical performance reception, previously this interrelationship, if acknowledged at all, was generally discussed in terms of modern dance’s regular dependence on Greco-Roman myth for its subject matter rather than with reference to any systematic formal links. However, with the recent interest in ancient pantomime scholarly attention has been given to the ancient origins of modern ballet, ballet d’action, which in the first decades of the 18th century took its cues from Roman pantomime. In the first decade of the 18th century, the synthesis of the arts began to unravel and dance was no longer allied to opera or spoken theatrical entertainment. It now had to find its own genealogy and Aristotle’s idea of dance as mimetic action, combined with treatises on Roman pantomime (itself a direct descendent of Greek tragedy), provided the theoretical underpinning for the 18th-century ballets d’action. Dance was to follow the ancients in having something important to say; and Greek tragic drama was realized in 18th-century danced drama without the aid of either speech or (unlike ancient pantomime) song. By the last quarter of the 18th century, ballet had acquired sufficient status to become a high cultural art form sui generis; and it had done so with the ancient example as both guide and legitimizing authority. Ballet, like other performance arts, depends very much on its genealogy: not least because its major stars very often belong to dancing dynasties. Ballet continued to look back to antiquity, but with the decline in the status of the dancer in the 19th century the links with antiquity were often deliberately suppressed. However, by the end of the century, and especially following Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (1872), where the singing/dancing chorus was restored to discussions on tragedy, Greek dance finally began to attract attention among scholars and artists alike. The aim of this bibliography is to trace this perceived, occasionally actual and tactical, but very often suppressed, debt to ancient dance in the modern world from the 15th century down to the present day, focusing on the individual dancer, dancing collectivities, and their relationship to scholarship.
CREATIVE IMAGINATION, TRAGIC-POETIC ART AND EDUCATION OF SENSIBILITIES
