On-line Resources Fall 2004

"Performing Medieval Narrative Today: A Video Showcase"

http://euterpe.bobst.nyu.edu/mednar/

This website, produced through the Studio for Digital Projects and Research at New York University, offers resources for scholars, teachers, students, and performers to explore the performance of medieval narrative.

Our purpose is to see how medieval stories can be brought to life in performance for modern audiences, and how performance can be used to teach medieval literature in the classroom. We hope as well to promote a better understanding of ways in which medieval narratives may have been performed for their original audiences.

Video clips constitute the primary resource on the website. The clips feature a variety of actors, storytellers, singers, musicians, mimes, puppeteers, and dancers, among them professionals, teachers, and students. They perform scenes drawn from a range of medieval narrative genres, including epics, romances, lais, tales, fabliaux, and others. Some performances of narratives from analogous traditions (such as the Egyptian Hilali epic) are also represented.

In the future, we plan to expand the site's holdings and add other resources to the site, including further information bearing on pedagogical uses of performance, and videoed interviews with performers and with faculty and students who work with performance.

We hope you will visit, and use, the website. We welcome your feedback, which may be sent to perf-med-narr@forums.nyu.edu.


Timmie (E.B.) Vitz, New York University - ebv1@nyu.edu
Marilyn Lawrence, New York University - lawrence@alumni.princeton.edu
Project Directors