Broken Scenes: Resurrecting Ancient Fragmented Voices Through Animation

在过去的十年中，希腊罗马世界的学者们一直面临着通过基于视觉和文本数据的网站和应用程序将他们的学科整合到数字领域的挑战，从而为该领域的专业人员和学生提供工具。然而，直到最近，针对学术领域以外社区的真正的公众参与和教育倡议才在数字经典应用的开发中得到解决。利用动画在视觉上渲染著名的神话场景，并将古代花瓶上的绘画栩栩如生地呈现在课堂上，已经取得了一些成功。但是，虽然将具有明确情节线的知名故事动画化可以起到教学效果，但它提出了一个更大的问题，即动画与古代世界研究之间的潜在关系。动画艺术能否与古代手稿研究相结合，以复活仅保存在碎片纸莎草纸上的表演声音？我们现在提议将牛津大学的纸莎草学家和洛杉矶的奥斯卡获奖动画工作室Acme Filmworks的团队聚集在一起，从保存在p.o.y的希腊哑剧中重建破碎的场景。5189年，一份六世纪埃及的莎草纸碎片。我们的目标是将学术关注和动画制作方法的实践结合起来，制作一部动画短片，在人类开玩笑和舞台表演的背景下具有共时和历时的文化影响。支持这个项目的想法是，基于实践的动画艺术可以帮助研究古代手稿的学者，不仅可以重建碎片化的表演，以供进一步的研究和教学，而且还可以产生一种艺术创作，唤起更大的人类经验。在P.Oxy的案例中。5189年，其目的也是为了复兴一种体裁，尽管这种体裁在希腊罗马世界广泛传播，但作为一种流行的娱乐形式，它并没有进入中世纪传播的熟悉渠道（在这个过程中，选定的作者被抄写员和学者抄写）。哑剧不仅缺乏对希腊悲剧和喜剧的学术关注，而且在现代舞台上也没有任何艺术接受。现存的哑剧支离破碎的状况无疑是这种事业的障碍，但它们所谓的“低”文学价值也可能与相对较少的关注有关。然而，在它们较低的文学伪装中，这些作品更注重表演方面而不是文本本身，这使得它们更能表明古代的实际表演方法，而不是像索福克勒斯的戏剧那样，作为一种文学作品传播，供人阅读，而不是表演。在P.Oxy。5189 .我们发现了一段闹剧式的肢体喜剧和玩笑，其形式不是剧本，而是对舞台动作的叙述和描述，并引用了台词和出场和出场的指示。由于文本的碎片性，纸莎草纸上的文字洞，以及只有59条断行被保存下来的事实，需要有针对性的文字学工作来隔离和定义人物，他们的动作，哪些文本属于叙述，以及实际上构成口语的内容。但是，即使学者们提供了这些数据并设置了场景，结果也非常不完整。这从来都不是用来读的文本，而是用来表演的。动画作为一种包含数字技术和基于实践的绘画和舞台技能的艺术形式，是一种理想的艺术媒介，不仅可以完成文本的学术重建，而且可以输入自己的创造性才能，并产生能够在视觉上告知，教学和激励非学术社区的艺术作品。由于我们只有少量的折线，动画短片的类型，一个三到五分钟的产品，是最适合的任务。

Over the past decade scholars of the Greco-Roman world have been facing the challenge of integrating their discipline in the digital sphere through websites and applications based on visual and textual data to produce tools for professionals and students in the field. However, only recently true public engagement and education initiatives aimed at communities beyond the academic sphere have been addressed in the development of digital Classics applications. The use of animation to visually render famous mythological scenes and bring to life paintings on ancient vases for use in the classroom has been implemented with some success. But while animating well known stories with defined plot lines can have a didactic effect, it raises a larger question about the potential relationship between animation and the study of the ancient world in general. Can the artistry of animation be integrated with ancient manuscript studies to resurrect performative voices preserved only in fragmented papyri? We now propose to bring together papyrologists from the University of Oxford and a team from Acme Filmworks, an Academy Award winning animation studio based in Los Angeles, to reconstruct the broken scene from a Greek Mime preserved in P.Oxy. 5189, a fragmentary papyrus from VI century Egypt. We aim to incorporate scholarly concerns and practice in the methodology of animation production and produce an animated short film that has synchronic and diachronic cultural impact in the context of human joking and staged play. The idea underwriting the project is that the practice-based art of animation can help scholars of ancient manuscripts not only reconstruct fragmented performances for further study and teaching, but also produce an artistic creation that invokes a larger human experience. In the case of P.Oxy. 5189, the aim is also to resurrect a genre that, although wide-spread in the Greco-Roman world, as a popular form entertainment did not make it into the familiar channels of the mediaeval transmission (a process in which selected authors were copied by scribes and scholars). Mime does not only lack the scholarly attention bestowed on Greek Tragedy and Comedy, but also any artistic reception on the modern stage. The fragmentary condition of the extant mimes is certainly an obstacle to such an enterprise, but their supposedly 'low' literary value may also have something to do with the comparatively scarce attention. And yet in their lower literary pretenses these works suggest a strong focus on the performative aspect more than on the text itself, which makes them far more indicative of ancient approaches to actual performance than, for example, a play of Sophocles that was transmitted as a piece of literature to be read instead of acted. In P.Oxy. 5189 we find a moment of slapstick physical comedy and joking in the form not of a script, but of a narration and description of the staged action, with quotations of the words to be uttered and indications of entrances and exits. Due to the fragmented nature of the text, the literal holes in the papyrus and the fact that only fifty-nine broken lines are preserved, targeted philological work is required to isolate and define the characters, their movements, what text belongs to narration, and what actually constitutes spoken lines. But even once scholars produce that data and set the scene, the result is very much incomplete. This was never a text to be read, it was meant to be acted. Animation, as an art form embracing digital technology and the practice-based skill sets of drawing and staging, is an ideal artistic medium to not only complete the scholarly reconstruction of the text, but also to input its own creative talents and produce a work of art capable of visually informing, teaching, and inspiring non-academic communities. And since we have only a small number of broken lines, the genre of the animated short film, a three to five minute product, is best suited for the task.