Our “New Approaches to the Senses in the Renaissance” series continues with a lecture by Sherry Velasco (University of Southern California)
The lecture will be followed by a roundtable with IU scholars Massimo Ossi (Musicology), Matt Peisen (Spanish and Portuguese), and Sonia Velázquez (Comparative Literature and Religious Studies), by a Q&A, and a reception. The event has received generous support from the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Musicology, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
Abstract: This talk considers how aural, visual, kinetic, and affective features of early modern theater music and dance can perform the past and choreograph a political agenda for the future. Specifically, I consider what we gain by listening and looking attentively to Antonio Mira de Amescua’s “Máscara de la expulsión de los moriscos” [Masque of the Expulsion of the Moriscos] (1617, now lost) as described by Pedro de Herrera in his published account of the musical dance event. The courtly masque wields strategies unique to music and dance that are perhaps best embodied in the performance of a female vocalist/musician who sings a signature ballad with such virtuosity and emotional depth that the dramatic hook of her song’s refrain is repeated at critical moments throughout the masque. Taking into consideration the missing libretto and score, a deeper understanding of Herrera’s detailed account and other supporting materials such as music treatises, dance manuals, costume and emblem books, and political documents compels us to think differently about the ways in which moving bodies, emotions, performance and politics are interconnected.
Sherry Velasco is Professor of early modern Spanish literature and culture in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. Velasco is the author of four books: Lesbians in Early Modern Spain (2011); Male Delivery: Reproduction, Effeminacy, and Pregnant Men in Early Modern Spain (2006); The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, and Catalina de Erauso (2000); and Demons, Nausea and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús (1611-1682) (1996). Her current book project is Listening in the Age of Cervantes: Moriscas and Gendered Sound from Spain to Algiers.