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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
Overview
Compared to the wealth of information available to us about classical tragedy and comedy, not much is known about the culture of pantomime, mime, and dance in late antiquity. Charges of obscenity and polemical anti-theater discourse have, at times, erased these popular performance traditions from the modern imagination. Demons and Dancers returns us to the times and places where those great ancient theaters were more than picturesque ruins dotting the Mediterranean landscape.
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