3rd Annual Oxford Dance Symposium

Monday 2nd

10.30 Registration and Coffee

12.00 Lunch

Session I – Hell, Satyrs, and non-dancing Gods
Chair: Richard Parrish, St Catherine’s College, Oxford

1.30 Desmond Hosford (Music Department, City University of New York Graduate School, USA)
‘Visions of Hell: the Scène infernale in the tragédies-lyriques of Lully’

2.00 Amy Wygant (Department of French, The University of Glasgow, UK)
‘The Monsters of the Abbé d’Aubignac’

2.30 Rose Pruiksma (Department of Music, Bates College, USA)
‘From Ballet de cour to Divertissement: changing conventions in representing Gods on the French stage’

3.00 Georgia Cowart (School of Music, University of South Carolina, USA)
‘Operatic Satires of Louis XIV as Pluto’

3.30 Tea

Session II - Sources for Stage Monsters
Chair: Rebecca Harris-Warrick, Cornell University

4.00 Carol G. Marsh (School of Music, University of North Carolina, USA)
‘Dance and Music in Lambranzi’s Theatralische Tanz-Schul’

4.30 Frans Muller (Freelance designer, Holland) and Julie Muller (Free University of Amsterdam, Holland)
‘Monsters and Grotesque Figures on the London Stage’

Session III - ‘Monstrous’ Italian Opera in London
Chair: Michael Burden, New College, Oxford

5.00 Suzanne Aspden (Robinson College, Cambridge, UK)
‘Monsters on the Mind: Opera Stars in 18th-century London’

5.30 Xavier Cervantes (Department of English, University of Toulouse, France)
‘‘A Monster, nay the Monster of Monsters’: Italian Singing and Italian Singers on the 18th-century London Stage’

6.00 Band of Instruments and New Chamber Opera drinks party

7.00 Dinner

8.30 Concert

9.30 College Bar open

Tuesday 3rd

8.00 Breakfast

Session IV - Andromeda, Perseus, and Pantomime
Chair: Lionel Sawkins, London

9.00 John S. Powell (Department of Music, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA)
‘Music and the Scenic Portrayal of Gods, Men, and Monsters in Pierre Corneille’s Andromède’

9.30 Wes Williams (Fellow in French, New College, Oxford, UK)
‘‘Cette pièce n’est que pour les yeux’: Corneille’s view of Andromède’

10.00 Moira Goff (Independent dance historian, London, UK)
‘The Flying Lovers Outwitted? London’s Rival Productions of Perseus and Andromeda Compared’

10.30 Bruce Alan Brown (Department of Music History, Flora L. Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, USA)
‘…Pietra per il vostro scarpello’: Metastasio and 18th-century Pantomime Ballet’

11.00 Coffee

Session V - Classical Monsters in the 18th Century
Chair: Barry Russell, Oxford Brookes

11.30 Rowena Harrison (Independent scholar, UK)
‘Repressing the Mythic and letting it go again: Reinterpreting Aristotle in 18th-century France’

12.00 Charles T. Wolfe (Philosophy Department, Boston University, USA)
‘The Materialist Denial of Monsters’

12.30 Lawrence Woof (Leverhulme Research Fellow, Department of English, Lancaster University, UK)
‘‘Behold the Monster Polypheme’: Handel’s Incorporation of the Monstrous’

1.00 Lunch

Session VI - Sex, Sexuality and Cross-Dressing
Chair: Valerie Worth, Oxford Brookes

2.00 Stephanie Hodgson-Wright (School of English, Cheltenham & Gloucester CHE, UK)
‘Mad-made Monsters, Men made Monstrous: Conformity and Deformity in Aphra Behn’s The Second Part of the Rover’

2.30 Joe Harris (Department of French, Trinity Hall, Cambridge, UK)
‘Déesse ex machina: Sex Changes in Benserade’s Iphis et Iante (1634)’

3.00 Thomas McGeary (Champagne-Urbana, Illinois, USA)
‘Sexually Subversive Singers: Policing Sex at the London Opera, 1724-36’

3.30 Julia Prest (Jesus College, Oxford, UK)
‘Cross-casting in French Court Ballet, 1650-1750: Monstrous Aberration or Theatrical Convention?’

4.00 Tea

Session VII- Dancing Gods and Monstrous Creatures
Chair: Linda J. Tomko, UC Riverside, and President of the Society of Dance History Scholars

4.30 Jennifer Thorp (Regent’s Park College, Oxford) and Ken Pierce (Longy School of Music, Cambridge, USA)
‘Dances for Deities in Lully’s Persée 1682-1710’

5.15 Airs and Graces, UK
Dancers: Moira Goff, Ken Pierce, Jennifer Thorp
Musicians: David Gordon, Evelyn Nallen

6.45 Drinks

7.30 Dinner

9.30 College Bar open

Wednesday 4th

8.00 Breakfast

Session VIII - Amphitryon
Chair: Roger Savage, Edinburgh

9.00 Burkhard Niederhoff (Englisches Seminar, Universität Bonn, Germany)
‘Paradoxes of Sexuality in Dryden’s Amphitryon’

9.30 Elizabeth Woodrough (Department of French, University of Exeter, UK)
‘Gods Behaving Badly and Men Behaving Monstrously in Molière’s Classical Comedies’

Session IX - Dazzling Displays: Enchantment and Spectacle on Stage
Chair: Lionel Sawkins, London

10.00 Catherine Cessac (Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles, France)
‘Les Nuits enchantées de Sceaux’

10.30 Rebecca Harris-Warrick (Department of Music, Cornell University, USA)
‘Flying Phantoms and Tumbling Faunes: Acrobats on the French Baroque Musical Stage’

Session X - Putting Monsters in the tragédies lyriques
Chair: Carol G. Marsh, University of North Carolina

11.30 Antonia Banducci (LamontSchoolof Music, University of Denver, USA)
‘Directorial License and the Staging of French Baroque Opera’

12.00 Laura Naudeix (Centre de recherché sur l’Histoire du Théâtre, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, France)
‘Between the Earth and the Heavens: the Monsters of French tragédies lyriques’

12.30 Benoît Bolduc (Department of French, University of Toronto, Canada)
‘Among Gods and Monsters: Poetry, Music and the Marvellous in French tragédie lyrique’

1.00 Lunch