Associate Lecturer Malcolm Atkins has written an article for the Department of Classical Studies’ journal Practitioners’ Voices in Classical Reception Studies.
This article is about Malcolm’s practice of writing music for danced narrative with the group Avid for Ovid and includes rehearsal clips and recordings of music that exemplify his approach. Malcolm uses this as a basis for research into the possibilities for how music for narrative dance was created in the most popular art form in Ancient Rome – tragoedia saltata or danced tragedy. This is not about recreating the ancient practice – which is effectively lost to us – but about looking at possibilities and at the same time considering our attitudes to the way narrative can be conveyed through dance and music in our time to a contemporary audience and using that as a basis for comparison with the Roman world and its reception of danced tragedy.