Broken Scenes: Resurrecting Ancient Fragmented Voices Through Animation

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.

The impact of Broken Scenes emerges from this unheard of collaboration between the academic disciplines of classics, philology, papyrology and the animation industry based in Los Angeles, California. Our goal is to foster a knowledge exchange through which both sides create a digital and educationally effective remodelling of an ancient artistic voice that has been dormant for well over a millennium. This innovative remodelling also happens to be a true piece of modern art: an animated short film.

Within the academic and educational communities, the impact of Broken Scenes may at first sight seem obvious. In reconstructing this text based on sound philology and knowledge of ancient performance, our short film is on par with current methods in 3-D modelling of ancient cities based on archaeological remains. We have a visual tool for teaching ancient drama, theatre, and performance. Yet the Greek Mime is not simply a genre that was ignored in the great mediaeval transmission of ancient Greek and Latin literature, but evidence of popular entertainment in antiquity, popular culture - a culture sometimes banned by imperial decree. The fragmentary remains of P.Oxy. 5189 are evidence of a voice engaged with the ebb and flow of daily ancient life. Although it invokes the comic and satiric tradition of the Greek Comedy of Aristophanes and Menander, it was composed not for a learned competition but an ephemeral moment for the enjoyment of its audience, and perhaps never to be performed again. The scholarly research of the project is thus concerned about effectively teaching modern audiences about both ancient drama and the reality of performative pop culture in antiquity, a culture that cannot be extracted from the canon of classical dramatists. In this way we hope to instigate further exploration and discussion of possible connections between modern and ancient pop culture and spectacle.

Be that as it may, the impact of Broken Scenes beyond traditional academic communities is both the most alluring and the site of the most risk. To create an animated film that integrates and moulds the needs and concerns of an academic discipline within a larger artistic construct aimed at a global audience is indeed a challenge. Our film must function as a film, subject to the reception of general audiences, the film industry, and international animation film festivals. Therefore it must not only teach and create a bridge between the past and present constructed upon human laughter, joking, and staged play, but also entertain and challenge the art of animation in style and voice. There is thus an opportunity for classics, papyrology, and ancient popular culture to reach a global audience in an artistic package that engages in a dialogue with both art and modern popular culture. Furthermore, the so-called spin-off factor is a lurking uncertainty. The odds that one of our comic characters, even if only on screen for a few seconds, evolves into the next hero or anti-hero of a future Disney or Pixar major animated film may not be great, but the possibility remains.

In merging the creative talents of Oxford classicists and papyrologists with those of animators and directors from the animation film industry, we have the opportunity to resurrect this nearly lost and ancient artistic voice. In doing so, we might even create an animated short that not just teaches, entertains, and inspires creative communities across the spectrum, but possibly even finds its way to the Academy Awards and the British Academy of Film and Television awards.