Chapter 6 Dancing Io’s Life: Hurt Body, Tragic Suffering (Prometheus Bound 561–608)
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Abstract
This chapter discusses dance-based characterisation in Attic tragedy and analyses the case of the scene of Io in (Ps.-)Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. After assessing the importance of Io’s dance for the dramaturgy of the play (Section 1), I will argue that the main purpose of this dance was to portray Io’s character as defined by the experiences she herself recalls, thus adding considerable power to her autobiographic narrative (Section 2). The lines at which Io performs will be searched for information about the states of body and mind that the dance was supposed to express (Section 3): there is hardly any evidence to support the widespread assumption that Io danced wildly and leapt furiously; on the contrary, the dancer-narrator complains about the extenuating journeys and tortures endured and says that she is exhausted, ill, and half-starved. The experiences Io narrates, all of which are physically impairing, and the emphasis she puts on her own resulting infirmity while dancing suggest that the autobiographic story was told not only through words but also through movement and body registers that resonated with them by expressing fatigue and prostration: it was, ultimately, the accordance of verbal and body language that made Io a credible stage character and her narrative compelling. Finally, Io’s scene will be embedded in the context of ancient and cross-cultural discourses about appropriate ways to embody madness in high-brow performance genres (Section 4). This context indicates that mad characters would not dance in uncompromisingly realistic fashions, but would be stylised according to the gravity of the genres.