Performing the humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium

garded as separate from the humanities, in fact bring the humanities to life.1 Through performance, the written word travels from the mind’s eye to the lips and to the ear; painting and sculpture suddenly spring into motion; and music takes wing from the imagination or from a score to 1⁄2ll all available sonic space. A moment of performance, at its best, gathers together various domains of human expression, a sensory experience able at once to narrate history, enact social relationships, symbolize systems of belief, and generate feelings of fear, comfort, or joy. While the humanities are generally conceived as the disciplines spanning 1⁄2elds of knowledge such as literature or philosophy, they simultaneously provide the basis for much of human behavior and patterns of interaction expressed through the arts. Music and its performance, in particular, convey these multiple domains of knowledge as well as provide “audible entanglements,” shaping both individual imaginations and broader communities.2 Performance tells us less about procedures than it does about processes. Ideally, performance incorporates spectators