"Closing Up" on Animal Metamorphosis: Ovid's Micro-Choreographies in the Metamorphoses and the Corporeal Idioms of Pantomime Dancing

Abstract

This article reads Ovid's Metamorphoses through the lens of its contemporary art of pantomime dancing. With a focus restricted to narratives of animalization, it argues that the dancer's exquisite bodily expressiveness has been co-opted and re-calibrated for the demands of the poetic medium, as Ovid's sequences of animal metamorphosis have amalgamated aesthetic strategies borrowed from the pantomime stage. Far from having been shaped exclusively within the literary mainstream, Ovid's idiosyncratic look, astonishingly perceptive and concentrated on the movements, gestures as well as the minutest parts of his characters' bodies, was the product of a bold, intermedial cross-over between poetry and dance.

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