Re-Thinking Lupercalia

Abstract

This paper is an addendum to the article “Choreography ofLupercalia: Corporeality in Roman Public Religion”, published in the latest issue ofgrms. In my previous essay, I explored the methodological possibilities of the notion ‘choreography’, a concept that has been critically re-elaborated by dance scholars in the past two decades, and applied it to the wandering of theLuperciin order to understand the performative role of their mobility and physicality as traits shared with other dances within the realm of Roman public religion. The aim of the current article is to refine the approaches proposed forLupercaliaby examining aspects of training, performance, and reception that are intrinsic to this choreographic practice, and to observe these elements in light of the Roman idea ofsodalitas(‘corporation’). This approach will allow us to determine how dancing—and, more exactly, corporeality—works in the construction of Roman identities.