Towards a Theory of Performance Reception

Abstract

theoretical issues facing the classicist who wants to study the ways in which ancient Greece and Rome have been "re ceived" in performed media. It attempts to identify an intel lectual ancestry for this type of scholarship, above all in schools of aesthetics deriving from German idealism, and thereby to define what it is about performance arts that makes the study of the ways they use Greek and Roman an tiquity different from Reception in non-performed arts. Since this inquiry addresses cultural phenomena extending from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, it does not engage with the scholarly controversy surrounding the legit imacy of the concept of performance in relation to the an cient world, which knew neither the term nor the category it denotes.1 While acknowledging that performance is a concept with its own (relatively recent) historical specificity, the discussion nevertheless assumes a commonsense defini tion of the word performance as it is used in our own time: to say that something from ancient Greece or Rome has been performed implies an aesthetic phenomenon in which humans have realized an archetypal text, narrative or idea by acting, puppet manipulation, dance, recital, or song; the category Performance Reception therefore excludes individ uals reading a text to themselves, or the visual arts (except, hypothetically, when they are of a type requiring the label performance art).