The Seminar on Ancient Art and Archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts invites you to “Sign and Sense in Mid-Republican Rome.” This lecture will preview a manuscript in progress on the semiotics of the Roman Middle Republic. Inspired in conception and execution by Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij’s The Semiotics of Russian Culture, the manuscript scrutinizes those sign systems through which Romans and becoming-Romans of the Middle Republic communicated with each other and with the wider social and naturecultural world. For this lecture, I will focus on two sign systems: (1) divine figural representations (2) human names. Although each of these sign systems privileges particular media for their routing of communications, what I will emphasize through several case studies is the multi- and intermediality of mid-republican Roman culture.Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is associated with the Department of African American Studies and affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (PUP 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (CUP 2017). Current projects include a study of 338 BCE and the origins of Roman imperialism (co-authored with Denis Feeney and under contract with HUP), A People’s History of Rome (under contract with PUP), a volume on new approaches to the Middle Roman Republic (co-edited with Seth Bernard and Lisa Mignone), and a manifesto on race and racism in the disciplinary identity of Classics (co-authored with Sasha-Mae Eccleston). He has written for the public-facing Classics journal Eidolon and published pieces for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, the NYT, Fabulist, and diaphanes.
Please join us in welcoming Amanda Molina, our new Undergraduate Program Administrator, to the DAH.
Prior to joining the DAH, Amanda worked at New York University’s Office of the Provost from 2018-2021. She performed administrative tasks for multiple vice provosts and coordinated several large events, including the NYU Women’s Leadership Forum. During her time there, she completed a master’s program in higher education at NYU Steinhardt.
Amanda has a keen interest in undergraduate student advising, which began during her former role as a course administrator at Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences. She has also volunteered in the past with New York Cares as a college preparation volunteer, where she mentored eight first generation high school seniors at a NYC public school throughout the college application process. As a first generation student herself, one of Amanda’s goals is to help demystify various university processes for current undergraduate students.
Amanda has a B.A. in Anthropology and Psychology from Cornell University and an M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs from New York University. She enjoys horror movies, visiting museums, and reading and lives in Brooklyn with her pet lizard, a blue-tongued skink named Blue.
Presented by DAH Professor (and former Center for Ballet and the Arts fellow) Meredith Martin and Phil Chan
Contemporary Reinterpretation of the Ballet des Porcelaines (also known as The Teapot Prince)
Presented by DAH Professor (and former Center for Ballet and the Arts fellow) Meredith Martin and Phil Chan
The 18th-Century French pantomime ballet Ballet des Porcelaines, also known as The Teapot Prince, is being reimagined by Meredith Martin, professor of art history at New York University, and Phil Chan, choreographer and co-founder of Final Bow for Yellowface, a grassroots organization committed to eliminating yellowface and creating more positive representations of Asians in ballet. The creative pair will collaborate with several museums and universities—among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum and Royal Park of Capodimonte, the Manufacture and National Museum of Sèvres, the Royal Pavilion & Museums Trust in Brighton, and Princeton University—to revive this lost gem, along with a team consisting primarily of artists of Asian descent.
Chan, who has studied baroque dance for the past year under Patricia Beaman (NYU and Wesleyan professor of dance history, New York Baroque Dance Company member) will blend contemporary choreography with a baroque flavor, including traditional pantomime. Georgina Pazcoguin (NYCB’s first female Asian-American soloist, Final Bow for Yellowface co-founder, author of Swan Dive) and her colleague, Daniel Applebaum (NYCB soloist), will dance the lead roles of the Princess and Prince. Tyler Hanes (Broadway actor, singer, dancer, choreographer) will play the Sorcerer. Harriet Jung (Reid & Harriet) will design original costumes, creating a modern twist on eighteenth-century porcelain. Harpsichordist and musical director Dongsok Shin (REBEL) and violinist Leah Gale Nelson, along with composer Sugar Vendil (The Nouveau Classical Project), will develop a baroque-contemporary musical score that combines live performance of the baroque score (by Nicolas-Racot de Grandval) with Vendil’s modern compositions featuring the sounds of porcelain clinking and shattering. The overall creative concept is based on kintsugi, a Japanese technique for repairing broken ceramics by mending them with gold or lacquer so as to highlight their flaws. In their creative process, they celebrate the lost historical fragments and imperfections of the work by making them stronger and more beautiful with their modern additions.
The original Ballet des Porcelaines, written by the comte de Caylus and staged around 1740 at a château outside of Paris, was based on an Orientalist fairy tale in the same literary milieu as Beauty and the Beast (1740). The story tells of an Asian sorcerer who lives on a “Blue Island” and transforms anyone who dares to trespass into porcelain cups, vases, and other wares. When the sorcerer turns a captive prince into a teapot, a princess comes to rescue her lover by stealing the sorcerer’s wand and turning him into a pagod, an eighteenth-century version of a porcelain bobblehead. Displayed today in museums like The Met, pagods were collectible trinkets that inspired Oriental caricatures in the performing arts. European choreographers mimicked the features and gestures of these porcelain figures, which persist in such iconic, problematic productions as The Nutcracker’s “Chinese Tea” dance.
While the original Ballet des Porcelaines—not performed since 1741—can be seen as an allegory for the aggressive European desire to know and steal the secrets of Chinese porcelain manufacture, the 2021 production will flip the narrative to center the actions and desires of Asian protagonists. Nothing survives of the ballet’s original set design, costumes, or choreography, which provides an opportunity both to reimagine and update the performance for contemporary, multiracial audiences. In the new version, the characters’ identities flip: the royals are now Chinese and the sorcerer is a mad European porcelain collector modeled on Augustus the Strong, founder of Meissen, the first European manufactory to succeed in making true porcelain. Rather than its original aristocratic setting, the dancers will now perform in public museums and spaces surrounded by chinoiserie artworks whose pejorative depictions of Asians are confronted and subverted. Ballet des Porcelaines also aspires to use an18th-century baroque mime vocabulary to comment on contemporary social events, such as Orientalism in the performing arts and the rise in anti-Asian xenophobia and hate crimes.
The ballet will tour the U.S. and Europe throughout 2022, adapting to a variety of settings including museum galleries, gardens, historic houses, and university theaters. Many performances will take place in close proximity to world-renowned porcelain collections and historic manufactories, animating these spaces and linking the 18th-century fairy tale to our present reality.
Please contact Phil Chan (phil@yellowface.org) or Meredith Martin (msm240@nyu.edu) for more information. The performance schedule through summer 2022 is as follows:
6 December 2021: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(Left) Funerary stela from Dahlak Kebir naming a sultan’s daughter, 1171 CE. Modena, Museo Civico Archeologico di Modena. (Right) Judaeo-Arabic merchant’s letter mentioning a Dahlaki ruler, 1130s CE. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Heb MS d66.108
A corpus of funerary inscriptions from the Dahlak Archipelago in present-day Eritrea constitute the strongest evidence for the existence of a long-lived island principality controlling a land-and-sea realm in the Southern Red Sea. Published and unpublished Cairo Geniza documents shed light on commodities traded, services rendered and conditions prevailing across the archipelago in the 11th and 12th centuries; they also refer directly to local rulers that can be cross-referenced with the epigraphic record. Additional if less coherent sets of sources—narrative, visual, environmental, and archaeological—illuminate the nature of a polity at the margins of better-known states, and historicize various aspects of its island culture, from maritime toponymy to the range of locally procured marine goods that entered regional and transregional circuits of exchange.
Roxani Eleni Margariti is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University’s Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies. Her research focuses on medieval maritime history, economic and social networks, and the material culture of maritime societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. She is the author of Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), a study of urban topography and commercial institutions at the Yemeni port from the 11th to the 13th century, based primarily on Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic sources and archaeological and environmental data. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Insular Crossroads: the Dahlak Archipelago, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean History, in which she examines the biography of a maritime polity located at the margins of larger states of the medieval and early modern Middle East and East Africa. Date: Wednesday, December 8th Time: 12:30-2:30pm Location: Online
This event will take place as a live Webinar at 12:30pm EST (New York time). To register as an attendee, please use the following link: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9N0PenCgThaK1lcwJrYesA Only registered attendees will be able to access this event.Silsila: Center for Material Histories is an NYU center dedicated to material histories of the Islamicate world. Each semester we hold a thematic series of lectures and workshops, which are open to the public. Details of the Center can be found at:
Fields of Vision 