Animating Antiquity: Classical (Dis)embodiments by Modern Women

Abstract

This dissertation maps out an original multimedia network of poetic texts, dances, visual art, and audio-visual installations by twentieth and twenty-first-century Greek and Anglo-American women artists and gender diverse collectives to argue for their performance of “classical (dis)embodiment.” The opposition and the undoing latent in the ambivalent dis- prefix (disembodiment, disarticulation, disintegration, disability, and even distrust for this ancient past and its iconic figures) animate these artists’ engagements with Greek and Roman antiquity. The (dis)embodied archetypes I consider in these modernist and postmodern networks of poetry and performance are fractured into pieces, always becoming otherwise, ghostly and ephemeral, and multiplied beyond the single self. To different degrees, these (dis)embodiments all challenge typical conceptions of the “classical” (iconic, male, white, singular) body and open up modes of queer, gendered, racialized, and/or disabled embodiment that are relational and non-normative, “liquid” (Holmes 2017) and liminal rather than monumental.

My introduction proposes a constellation of the concepts of animation, animacy (Chen 2012), and inter(in)animation (Schneider 2011), as an extension and alternative to a model of Critical Classical Reception Studies (see Hanink 2017). I understand animation as an enlivening and multimedia/multidisciplinary approach for interacting with the classical Greco-Roman past. In my chapters, I perform close readings, innovative comparative exploration, and original research in modern dance and performance archives in Greece and the US. I trace how the artists under consideration fragment the body and choreograph it in(to) pieces; mobilize the “trans-corporeal” (Alaimo 2018) and transformative body in metamorphosis; “decreate” (Carson 2005) the phantom body and all of Helen’s illusory classical doubles; and revive the choral body in vastly different political contexts. My modern archive includes the posing and photography of Mary Duffy; dance performances by Loie Fuller, Jody Sperling and Time Lapse Dance, Kinetic Light, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and Koula Pratsika’s National Dance School in Athens; and poetic texts and related audio-visual work by Robin Coste Lewis, Olga Broumas and T. Begley, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Phoebe Giannisi, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Anne Carson, and Carrie Mae Weems. My ancient archive incorporates the lyric and choral fragments of Sappho, the Venus de Milo sculpture, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Greek verses of Homer, Stesichorus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

I emphasize the importance of adding the often-left-out perspective of Modern Greek Studies to comparative work on classical reception. My work examines how modern Greek women perform Hellenism as both a local and globalized phenomenon and participate in discourses about the complicated heritage or inheritance of Greek history. My project also takes a step beyond the timely critique demanded by Critical Classical Reception Studies and asks us to consider what other narrative and imaginative possibilities exist in this body of ancient material. I modify our expected set of relations between who or what is animated by whom and enact a reciprocal and queer model of comparative study. In this framework, the material and iconographic remains, and even the abstract idea of the ancient Greco-Roman past, animate humans and material objects today as much as we ourselves animate them in our work. In my comparative approach, curating multiple texts from varying contexts and working across media, my work also calls for a reconsideration of the boundaries imposed between bodies and texts, between performance and poetics.