Gender Subversion and the Early Christian East

Reconstructing the Byzantine Comic Mime

Bibliographic Data

ID20076546
AuthorsAnna Foka (0000-0002-9949-616X, corresponding author)
Year2015
Pages65-83
Publication date2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueLaughter, Humor, and the making of Gender (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9781137463654_5
OpenAlexW2287259801
ISBN9781137463654
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited19

Scholars of theater have mostly treated Byzantine performance arts schematically, as if they were a literary bridge between antiquity and renaissance for the Roman East.1 Indeed, within the realm of performance arts, the same artistic forms found in Roman entertainment and spectacle also appear in later Greek antiquity: the landscape of popular culture in Byzantium is largely composed of chariot racing in the Hippodrome with comic mimes and serious pantomimes providing theatrical intermissions.2 In spite of this front-stage presence, however, these performances are treated by scholars of theater only fragmentarily, mostly focusing on criticism by the Church: with very few exceptions, scholars are mostly interested in their decline rather than their existence. 3 This narrow conceptualization of the role of Byzantine theater undermines the social and cultural importance of performance in that specific historical milieu. In spite of the overall rich hypotheses, and while there is substantial evidence for the rapid decline of performances, more concrete facts about them remain enigmatic and obscure.4KeywordsChristian MoralityDisciplinary EffectRoman ActorGreek AntiquityFemale PerformerThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Byzantine architecture · Comics · Entertainment · Literature · Political science · Realm · Subversion · The arts · Visual arts · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · History · Theatre and Performance Studies