The Classical Association of Virginia

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

Time to Renew Your Membership for 2010-2011!
Don't wait and don't miss out on our 100th anniversary festivities!

The CAV Tournament will be adding an ADVANCED LATIN POETRY exam to its offerings. The addition to the syllabus includes:

We are now making some final preparations for the CAV Centennial Celebration in Richmond on Saturday, October 30. There will be, as you know, a tour of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, a lecture by Hunter Rawlings, a reception, and a banquet. You indicated earlier that you were planning to attend this event. We understand that plans need to be changed, but we are hoping that you still will be able to join us for this great celebration... [View the entire message.]

in celebration of the centennial of Mrs. Gertrude Howland
Saturday, September 18, 2010 at 12:30 pm
Open to the public and free of charge

Sponsored by the Richmond Society, Archaeological Institute of America
and the VMFA Friends of Ancient Art

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,
August, and the school year begins to circle around again. The turn from summer activities—work or play, or usually some combination of the two—and the impending return to the familiar and usually fond routine can sometimes seem unwelcome. If it does for me, I try to recall the sentences below, about how new this all is for the young students who join us each fall. It starts with a proposition, then shows how to countermand it... [READ THE ENTIRE MESSAGE]