oa Re-constructing Jesuit Theatre for the Modern Stage: Daphnis, Pastorale, an Eighteenth-Century Jesuit College Music-Drama

This essay examines the practical processes involved in the 2008 recreation of Daphnis, Pastorale, a drama first performed by the students of the Jesuit College of Namur in 1728. The recreation necessitated new approaches to stage design and action, as well as contemporary solutionsor the casting and linguistic content. Daphnis, Pastorale is a form of Jesuit college music-drama characteristic of the francophone regions of Europe, and is the only known surviving example of its kind from Belgium. This work is all the more rare in that it uses French sprinkled with loan-words, rather than the neo-Latin typical of Jesuit drama. The process of constructing a historically informed performance of this unique member of the Jesuit music-drama repertoire reveals a reciprocal three-way relationship among knowledge gained through primary research, academic study, and informed experimentation.