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Chapter 4 - Dance and Dissonance

The Innovative Choreography of Aristophanes’ Wasps

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 November 2020

Sarah Olsen
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
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Summary

Chapter Four turns to Aristophanes’ Wasps, wherein the playwright’s depiction of Philocleon as a renegade komast and irrepressibly unruly dancer in Wasps provocatively questions the socializing force of the kōmos as well as the mimetic force of dance itself. This chapter begins by considering the kōmos more broadly as a space for solo dance, especially male solo dance. I argue that Greek literature persistently imagines the kōmos (and even the symposium) as a kind of chorus, drawing the potentially unruly expression associated with these spaces into the socializing orbit of choreia. In the second half of the chapter, I show that Aristophanes exploits the unruly potential of komastic dance to represent Philocleon as a character who repeatedly breaks free of both social and generic constraints, even to the point of sidelining the chorus itself. In the final scenes of the play, I suggest that Aristophanes probes the ability of dance to function as a stable form of representation and problematizes the place of dance within both drama and society.

Type
Chapter
Information
Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
Representing the Unruly Body
, pp. 100 - 128
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Dance and Dissonance
  • Sarah Olsen, Williams College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
  • Online publication: 30 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755221.005
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  • Dance and Dissonance
  • Sarah Olsen, Williams College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
  • Online publication: 30 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755221.005
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Dance and Dissonance
  • Sarah Olsen, Williams College, Massachusetts
  • Book: Solo Dance in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
  • Online publication: 30 November 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755221.005
Available formats
×