Table of Contents

* Preface * Introduction * Theater and Society * Performers * Pantomime: The Dancing Body * The Pantomime as Drama: Dancers, Audiences, and the Communicative Body * Mime: The Drama of Everyday Life * Mime, Humor, and Society * Images of Actors: Identification and Estrangement * Ideas of the Audience: Possession and the Eye * Christians and the Theater * Conclusion * Epilogue * Abbreviations * Biographical and Bibliographical Notes on the Principal Ancient Sources * Notes * Index

Promotional Information

Pantomime -- dances which told stories -- fired the imagination of the ancient world. In the Roman Empire, dancers were superstar entertainers who wildly excited the audience with their brilliantly expressive and worryingly sexy performances. And as the Roman Empire moved into the Christian Empire, the full force of moral disapproval was brought to bear on the physical display of the dancing body. Demons and Dancers is a superb introduction to this extraordinary story. -- Simon Goldhill, author of Jerusalem: City of Longing

About the Author

Ruth Webb is Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck College London, and Professeur Associee, Universite Paris 10.

Reviews

Outstanding. -- Denis Feeney * Times Literary Supplement *
One of the most visible remains a tourist finds in the ruined cities of the Roman Empire is a stone-built theater with a huge seating capacity, and he may wonder what productions were staged there that attracted such great audiences; gladiatorial combats, sometimes, and even wild beast fights in the eastern empire, where cities generally lacked amphitheaters, But the specialty of the theater was mime and pantomime, with music and dancing, Much of the evidence belongs to late antiquity, the general neglect of which makes this book all the more important. Mimes were skits with both male and female entertainers, and pantomimes were generally men, whose dancing interpreted a story that might be recited or sung by a performer accompanied by musicians, Webb describes the production companies, the place of theater in society, and the art of the pantomime, a dancer who could impersonate a man or a woman as the story required. Dancers could be enormously popular, but society ranked them low on the social scale, and the church considered the theater a haunt of the devil. Webb fills a gap in theater history with this fine book. -- J. A. S. Evans * Choice *
Pantomime-dances which told stories-fired the imagination of the ancient world. In the Roman Empire, dancers were superstar entertainers who wildly excited the audience with their brilliantly expressive and worryingly sexy performances. And as the Roman Empire moved into the Christian Empire, the full force of moral disapproval was brought to bear on the physical display of the dancing body. Demons and Dancers is a superb introduction to this extraordinary story. -- Simon Goldhill, author of Jerusalem: City of Longing