CONFERENCE
UNIVERSITÀ DI TRENTO
30 SEPTEMBER – 2 OCTOBER 2026
Audience in Archaic lyric performance and Classical theatre:
a synaesthetic continuity?
Organised by Anna Novokhatko and Bernhard Zimmermann
WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER
9.30-9.45 Opening words (Bernhard Zimmermann, Anna Novokhatko)
9.45-10.30 Laura Swift (Magdalen College, Oxford), Mental Imagery and Visual Perception in Partheneia
10.30-11.15 Daniel Anderson (Merton College, Oxford), Flower Music, and Other Song Metaphors
11.15 COFFEE BREAK
11.45-12.30 Samantha Newington (University of Aberdeen), Poetic catharsis and the beauty of performance: Sappho, Hesiod and Euripides
12.30-13.15 Anna Novokhatko (Università di Trento), Comparing Synaesthetic Immersion Techniques in Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic Performance
15.00-15.45 Lawrence Kowerski (Hunter College, New York), Sympotic Senses: The Sympotic Context and Sensory Imagery in Early Greek Elegy
15.45-16.30 Cecilia Nobili (Università di Bergamo), The Dramatic Experience of the Symposium: Mimesis and Synaesthetic Perception
16.30 COFFEE BREAK
17.10-17.45 Ronald Blankenborg (Radboud University, Nijmegen), Is Rhythm ‘a dancer’? Embodied Prosody as the Parser of Anapestic and Trochaic Speech
17.45-18.30 Chenxi Zhang (University of Chicago), The counter-palinodic gesture of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
THURSDAY 1 OKTOBER
8.30-9.15 David Wilson (King’s College London), Pathways to Epiphany at the Dionysia
9.15-10.00 Peter Agócs (UCL London), Poetics of the Voice in Pindar and Bacchylides
10.00-10.45 Simone Corvasce (Sapienza Università di Roma) A Kinaesthetic Approach to the Performance-Reperformance Duality of the Epinician Genre
10.45 COFFEE BREAK
11.15-12.00 Ettore Cingano (Università Ca‘ Foscari Venezia), Setting up Choruses All Over Greece: the Context and Gist of Choral Performance and its Relevance to Stesichorus
12.00-12.45 Edith Hall (University of Durham), ‘I Stand on Light Feet and Draw Breath’: Breathing and the Experience of Greek Choral Performance
15.00-15.45 Jonathan L. Ready (University of Michigan), Kinaesthetic Empathy, Inhabitable Scenarios, and the Enjoyment of Ancient Greek Tragedy and Choral Lyric
15.45-16.30 Theodora Hadjimichael (University of Birmingham), On coming after: Cultural knowledge, Memory, and Reperformance
16.30 COFFEE BREAK
17.10-17.45 Andrea Giannotti (University of Durham), Synaesthetic Lamentation: Multisensory Experience and Affective Imagery in the First Stasimon of Euripides’ Suppliant Women
17.45-18.30 Margaret Foster (University of Michigan), Off the Ground: Spatial Syntax in Ancient Greek Lyric and Tragedy
18.45-19.15 PERFORMANCE
Carina de Klerk (Binghamton University) and Lynn Kozak (Université McGill),
Ephemer-illz: an Improvised Greek Poetry Performance
20.00 CONFERENCE DINNER
FRIDAY 2 OCTOBER
9.15-10.00 Chiara Di Maio (Radboud University, Nijmegen), Διθυραμβοποιός or τραγῳδοποιός? Tracing the Cross-Generic Expressions of the So-Called New Music
10.00-10.45 Massimo Giuseppetti (Università Roma Tre), Modelling Cultic Effects: Synaesthetic Ecologies of Audience Response in Late Archaic Choral Song and Fifth-Century Drama
10.45 COFFEE BREAK
11.15-12.00 Giambattista D’Alessio (Sapienza Università di Roma), A Meta-Performative Text: New Readings and a New Interpretation of Pindar. fr. 140b
12.00-12.45 Richard Hunter (Trinity College, Cambridge), Plato on the Audiences of Epic, Lyric and Drama
12.45-13.00 Concluding remarks (Bernhard Zimmermann, Anna Novokhatko)