Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952), along with her husband, the poet Angehlos Sikelianos,
founded the first modern Delphic Festival in 1927 in an effort to revive the Ancient Greek rites that
took place on that spot over 2,500 years before. She invited “overseers of culture” from around
the globe to convene in the holy city of Delphi for a reenactment of the performance of Prometheus
Bound by Aeschylus in the ancient amphitheater, an Olympic-styled athletic contest,
and an exhibition of Greek crafts. This paper explores Palmer-Sikelianos’s choreography, music
and dramaturgy for her reconstructed Prometheus Bound in light of her own research on ancient
Greek culture and our modern theories of historical reenactment. Based on silent film records of
Palmer-Sikelianos’s 1930 festival, her own autobiography, her collaborations with Natalie Barney
on Greek-themed theatricals in the early 1900s, and comparisons to the movement vocabulary
and other contemporary stagings of ancient Greek festivals and sport, I demonstrate how Palmer-
Sikelianos blended the oldest sources on ancient Greek ritual music and dance that she could find
with what she saw as an authentic “spirit” of Greek culture as observed in modern Greek society.
Compared to the Ballets Russes’s reenactment of ancient Greece, Palmer-Sikelianos’s project to
reenact “authentic” Greek theater and choreography illustrates that theories of theatrical historical
reconstruction in the early twentieth century were heavily influenced by contemporary theatrical,
political, and social events. And like the Fokine and Nijinsky models, Palmer-Sikelianos’s staging
redefines ancient dance through the prisms of ancient sources and modern aesthetics
