From Text to Performance: Reimagining Ancient Drama
Drawing on the deep strengths of the department’s faculty in ancient drama and theatral performance, the Department of Classical Studies will host an international interdisciplinary conference featuring recent research on Greco-Roman drama. The conference will take place on the campus of William & Mary on April 25-26, 2025. If you are interested in submitting a paper, please see Call for Papers below for details. As the date of the conference approaches, this page will be updated with program details and other activities.
Call for Papers: From Text to Performance: Reimagining Ancient Drama
April 25-26, 2025
Drama was the ubiquitous speech-act spectacle of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean, and as such, offers an unrivaled interdisciplinary lens into a wide variety of textual, visual, and kinesthetic experiences of the ancient lived past. Understanding theater as performative language opens pathways to exploring how the utterance of words in a theatrical space generates the experience of drama. Recent decades have advanced our understanding of numerous aspects of ancient Greek and Roman drama: the physical space of the theater; the kinesthetics of performance; the socio-political circumstances of production; the dramatic technique of plays; the roles of music and dance; the bodies, objects, and agents of and within dramatic production. These approaches illuminate the multifaceted nature of ancient dramas as performances, civic events, spectacles, and occasions for reception. This conference will place in dialogue the varied dimensions of and approaches to Greco-Roman drama, seeking to bring out the richness and multiplicity of meanings within performance.
We invite scholars to explore these dimensions of text and performance in dramatic production in the ancient Greco-Roman Mediterranean. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Stagecraft and the grammar of dramatic technique
- The construction and orchestration of theatral spaces
- Music, dance, and the chorus
- Kinesthetics and performance
- Visual representations of performance
- From text to production
The conference will be held April 25-26, 2025, on the campus of William & Mary in historic Williamsburg, VA. The keynote speaker will be Professor Naomi Weiss (Harvard).
Abstracts (300-500 words) should be sent to Prof. Jess Paga (jpaga@wm.edu) by September 30, 2024. The committee will send notifications of acceptances by Dec. 1, 2024.
