The Classical Association of Virginia

Members chat before the Spring 2010 Meeting at St. Stephen's & St. Agnes School in Alexandria.

SALVI (Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum, or North American Institute for Living Latin Studies) proudly presents Rusticatio—a week of total immersion in the Latin language with high-energy conversation exercises at Claymont Mansion, Charles Town, West Virginia (greater Washington, D.C.). The program will be held July 18-24, 2010.

Complete info and application are available for download on SALVI's newly revamped web page at http://www.latin.org/

Registration is now open for

ANCIENT DRAMA IN PERFORMANCE:
THEORY AND PRACTICE

http://faculty2.randolphcollege.edu/ancientdrama

Ancient Drama in Performance will be an opportunity for conference-goers to witness and reflect on an original-practices Greek play that aims to be a living drama rather than a museum piece and also to share and discuss other productive ways of playing Greek drama. The meeting will coincide with the production of a new translation of Euripides’ Hecuba directed by Amy R. Cohen, and we look forward both to demonstrating the dramatic power of original practices and to learning much from the responses of the conference-goers. We encourage all scholars of ancient drama to attend, whether or not performance issues have ever been part of their work, and all practitioners of ancient drama to attend, whether or not they use original practices. For those who do involve performance in their scholarship, the meeting will be an opportunity to use our remarkable theatre to test their own theories about how the ancients practiced drama. For those who have not made performance a factor, it will be an opportunity to discover the large and small ways that practical questions of theatre inform and enrich the philological and literary study of plays. We will also share research and scholarship in a context that insists on the play as an experience.

The conference will feature a keynote address by Kenneth Reckford, and a response to Hecuba by Mary-Kay Gamel.

We are also pleased to announce that the program will include Paul Woodruff, John Given, Nancy Nanney, Jaclyn Dudek, Eric Dodson-Robinson, Gwen Compton-Engle, Diane Rayor, Jennifer S. Starkey, David Jacobson, and Laura Banducci.

The meeting will be held at Randolph College because it is blessed with an architectural treasure: the Mabel K. Whiteside Greek Theatre. Built in 1939 and 1961 with an eye to recreating the space in which Greek drama was originally performed, it honors the work of Mabel Whiteside and her students, who performed forty Greek plays in the years from 1909 to 1954.

Now the theatre is host to the only regular series of original practices productions of Greek drama in the United States (or perhaps anywhere). By “original practices” we mean that we replicate as far as possible the conventions and conditions for which the ancient playwrights composed their works. We perform the plays in English and include women in our casts, but otherwise attempt to perform the dramas as the original casts might have. We believe that we have a better understanding of ancient drama because we are facing the same challenges, economies, and opportunities that the ancient playwrights faced.

Ancient Drama in Performance: Theory and Practice will inaugurate a new era in which we mean to share our methods of understanding with other students and scholars of the ancient stage, both Greek and Roman. We are responding to a growing interest in ancient drama as it is practiced, of which Didaskalia, the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and numerous recent international conferences on ancient performance are witness. Inspired by the success of the Blackfriars Conference, which brings together Shakespeare scholars and practitioners to learn from one another within the context of an early modern playing space, we invite students, scholars, and practitioners of ancient drama to come together in the Greek theatre on the Randolph College campus.

HONOR A VIRGINIA TEACHER
on the Occasion of the Centennial of the Classical Association of Virginia

The CAV Centennial Committee invites donations towards the expenses of the Fall Centennial Meeting made in honor of past and/or present Virginia teachers of Latin and Classics. The Fall Centennial Meeting will be held in Richmond at the Omni Hotel on Saturday, October 30, 2010.

The Centennial Committee asks for $100 for each honoree listed in the Centennial Program. Both the honoree and the sponsor will be named in the program listing.

Salvete omnes,
If I may take a page from Shakespeare, we can only hope that "the winter of our discontent" will be followed rapidly by a truly glorious summer – with a beautiful and balmy spring to herald it in. It’s been a rough few weeks in many parts of our fair Commonwealth, but hopefully you have begun to dig out from the mountains of snow and are beginning to see signs of the spring that is surely just around the corner. How much better it will be to feel like Horace, enjoying his wine in the shade of the myrtle tree, than like Hannibal, braving the snowy Alps with his elephants! [READ THE ENTIRE MESSAGE]