Performing Ecstasies

The program

When music carries a community into trance

Across the Mediterranean, music and dance have long been used to move people beyond the ordinary: to heal, to mourn, to celebrate and to reach a state of transport. Performing Ecstasies brought scholars, musicians and dancers together to examine those practices as living traditions rather than curiosities.

The conference combined papers with performance. Exhibitions, workshops and concerts ran alongside the scholarly sessions, so that the arguments being made in the lecture room could be heard and felt in the same week.

A record in pictures

The event was documented by a group of volunteer photographers and videographers, and the resulting images form part of the Institute's collection. Their work preserves not only the performances but also the audiences, the workshops and the informal moments that made the conference what it was.

Why it stayed with us

Programs like this show how closely oral history, ethnomusicology and performance studies overlap. A song recorded in a village and a dance performed on a Los Angeles stage are two ends of the same tradition, and the Institute is interested in both.