In our second After Hours event of the term, we explored Dante and his work with an evening full of poetry, music, and lively activities.
Entering the museum, visitors could explore the Greek Underworld through creations from students at Cheney School, whilst elsewhere Cherwell School brought their own creative contributions, including an impressive model of the nine circles of hell.
Continuing on to the atrium, visitors stopped to listen to the Oxford Baroque Ensemble. Later in the evening, Inner Peace records performed original music, including improv rap inspired by Dante. The Atrium window showed Dante-themed videos throughout the night, including the Oxford Festival of the Arts' presentation of La Divina Commedia performed by renowned Italian dance company NoGravity, in a style embracing illusion, sculpture and aerial dance.
In an exciting world-first, Ai-Da, the humanoid artist robot, performed her poetry, responding to Dante's Divine Comedy and acting as a fascinating glimpse of potential futures for poetry. Meanwhile, human poets could write their own poems about journeys and guides in a poetry workshop.
Throughout the evening, bite-size talks gave visitors the chance to learn about Dante through a wide range of perspectives, from the language of Eden, to contemporary Italian street art, to ideas about celebrity. For a more hands-on approach to the Divine Comedy, participants joined 'Dante's Women: Who would you save?', an interactive lecture where participants were given the power to send characters to Purgatory, Heaven or Hell. Visitors could also see the 'Dante and the Invention of Celebrity' exhibition, curated by Professor Gervase Rosser and exploring Dante's fame in his own life and beyond.
TORCH would like to thank the Ashmolean Museum, all the participants who contributed to the evening, and the visitors who joined us. You can find out more about our Humanities Cultural Programme Dante Season here.
HIGHLIGHTS REEL: COMING SOON!
BITE-SIZED TALKS: WATCH AGAIN BELOW:
‘Enthousanding’ words. Dante inventor of language at the ends of the Paradiso
https://www.youtube.com/embed/LY-dKOJWGSg
Dante’s ‘travel report’ of the afterlife is a unique poetic enterprise. The third part of this journey – Paradiso – poses an extreme challenge: finding the words to represent a dimension which is beyond humanity, space, and time. Amongst the many strategies that Dante adopts to try and give an idea of the inexpressible, the most fascinating one is undoubtedly the invention of special new words. By looking at some of these heavenly verbs, we will see how Dante, in attempting to cover the infinite gap between human and divine, at the same time declares his failure and reaches one of the highest points ever reached by poetry. Dr Serena Vandi, Powys Roberts Research Fellow in European Literature, St Hugh’s College
Dante and the Invention of Celebrity
An introduction to the Dante and the Invention of Celebrity exhibition exploring the narrative of the show through a selection of objects. Professor Gervase Rosser, Professor of the History of Art, Ertegun Director and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College
Translating the Language of Eden
In the heights of Paradiso, Dante encounters the soul of Adam, the first human. He asks him a question that he had been pondering for a long time: what language was spoken in the Garden of Eden? Amazingly, Adam replies that that language had been entirely lost even before the Tower of Babel. All he tells Dante of it is that the word for God was something that is written down in manuscripts of the Commedia by a vertical or slightly slanting line. But what is that? What would it have sounded like? Is it a translation into Italian? And how might it be translated into English? Join me to try to recover this fragment of the language of Eden. Professor Matthew Reynolds, Professor of English and Comparative Criticism; Tutorial Fellow, St Anne's College
The Icon, The Exile: Dante and Italian Street Art
Why are Italian street artists interested in Dante Alighieri? In recent years, his face and scenes from the Divine Comedy have appeared in paste-ups and murals across Italy, and he has even had a major street art exhibition dedicated to him. In these works of art, we find two visions of Dante: the national icon and the exile. Touching on 19th-century nationalism, Italian fascism, and the contemporary refugee crisis, this talk will show how street art fits into the long history of art inspired by Dante, and it will examine what new perspectives on Dante are emerging from this encounter between a medieval poet of the eternal and contemporary artists of the ephemeral. Dr Macs Smith, Career Development Fellow in French at the Queen's College
“These dirty avenues to Fame": Scandal and celebrity in eighteenth-cent newspapers
In the second half of the eighteenth century Britain was flooded with new print media trading in scurrilous stories about the rich and famous. This talk will introduce some of the most notorious scandal sheets of this period, explain why regulating gossip was so politically contentious, and give a guide to reading the codes and puzzles of one 1780s newspaper page. Dr Ruth Scobie, Stipendiary Lecturer in English, Mansfield College
Some of the photos from the evening are included below. Credit: Ian Wallman.
