“After arriving in Delo while he was returning from Crete … Theseus danced with the young Athenians a dance still performed by the inhabitants of the island, consisting of twisting and twisted movements that reproduce the shapes of the labyrinth. Dicearchos states that this dance is called “Crane” (Plutarch, Theseus, 21).

The upper register of the decoration of the attic crater with black figures (François jar ca. 570″“565 BC), Florence, Archaeological Civic Museum.
The Crane dance (Geranos) was performed for the first time in Delos by the young Athenians (seven males and seven females) whom Theseus had freed from the Minotaur and led out of the Labyrinth thanks to Arianna’s thread. Although the writers of antiquity have described the Geranos in very vague terms, the historians of dance have worked hard in an attempt to reconstruct its development and understand its meaning. In the oldest descriptions of dance, the three repeating elements – Arianna’s thread, labyrinth, crane – although the mutual implications are not clear, could actually be read as three distinct ways of expressing the same concept. The thread is the instrument that Arianna offered to Theseus to find the way from the outside towards the center of the labyrinth and from the center towards the exit from the labyrinth. This is what Marcel Detienne called “the longest journey in the shortest space”. A few centuries later Virgil (Aeneid, VI) will mention the labyrinth depicted on the door of the cave of the Cuman Sibyl, which the ancient Latins considered a gateway to the underworld. For the Greek-Roman culture, the kingdom of the dead was a physical place present in the world, which could be accessed through inaccessible and secret ways that men could travel only on the day of their death.

Tarquinia, tomb of the Aninas family (3rd century BC). Two infernal spirits stand guard at the door of the Beyond: On the left, Charun (Charon), ferryman of the river of the underworld, on the right is Vanth, the winged goddess with the torch in one hand, and the key to the entrance to the underworld in the other.
0 Comments
Trackbacks/Pingbacks