scholarly journals Issues of Dance Notation: Domenico da Piacenza's Dance Writing in Fifteenth-Century Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Chloe Spedding
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music Notation ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Dance Notation ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Many

<p>Dance is an art form that is traditionally taught through physical demonstration. Choreography is forgotten if it is not practised repetitively, as dancers must rely on physical memory without the help of a written score to remind them of the steps. So many great works have been lost over time as choreographers have neglected to preserve their routines in written form. To prevent this, multiple notation systems have been created but none of them have ever become as popular or standardised as music notation. Many of these systems involve symbols that can only be understood by those who have studied the system in depth and are therefore inaccessible to the everyday dancer or choreographer. The origins of dance notation in Western culture come from fifteenth-century Italy. Dance masters who served at the many courts of the country recognised the need for dance to be intellectually understood as well as performed. The popularity of manuals as a way to discuss art, music, philosophy and many other subjects that formed the education of the elite during the Renaissance led to the writing of dance manuals. Domenico da Piacenza (c.1400-1476) was the first to do this, and his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (c.1455) is an eloquently written model text for all dance manuals that followed. Domenico does not notate his dances with symbols, but rather uses word descriptions to explain his choreography. His manual includes sixteen chapters which discuss the qualities one should aspire to achieve when dancing, the nature of the different misure (speeds) of the music, and how one should dance to each of these. This is followed by descriptions of eighteen of Domenico’s balli accompanied with his self-composed music, and five bassadanze. By examining closely three of Domenico’s balli, and attempting to reconstruct them, this thesis engages with issues regarding the preservation of dance and how effective the use of the written word is for doing so. Although there are several flaws in Domenico’s system, the idea of using the written word to notate dance still seems the most practical to date. The method created by Domenico in fifteenth-century Italy for his court dances is still the most common way for modern dance forms such as ballet and ballroom to be notated, transmitted to others and learned by dancers today.</p>

scholarly journals Issues of Dance Notation: Domenico da Piacenza's Dance Writing in Fifteenth-Century Italy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Chloe Spedding
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Music Notation ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Written Form ◽  
Dance Notation ◽  
Written Word ◽  
The Many

<p>Dance is an art form that is traditionally taught through physical demonstration. Choreography is forgotten if it is not practised repetitively, as dancers must rely on physical memory without the help of a written score to remind them of the steps. So many great works have been lost over time as choreographers have neglected to preserve their routines in written form. To prevent this, multiple notation systems have been created but none of them have ever become as popular or standardised as music notation. Many of these systems involve symbols that can only be understood by those who have studied the system in depth and are therefore inaccessible to the everyday dancer or choreographer. The origins of dance notation in Western culture come from fifteenth-century Italy. Dance masters who served at the many courts of the country recognised the need for dance to be intellectually understood as well as performed. The popularity of manuals as a way to discuss art, music, philosophy and many other subjects that formed the education of the elite during the Renaissance led to the writing of dance manuals. Domenico da Piacenza (c.1400-1476) was the first to do this, and his treatise De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (c.1455) is an eloquently written model text for all dance manuals that followed. Domenico does not notate his dances with symbols, but rather uses word descriptions to explain his choreography. His manual includes sixteen chapters which discuss the qualities one should aspire to achieve when dancing, the nature of the different misure (speeds) of the music, and how one should dance to each of these. This is followed by descriptions of eighteen of Domenico’s balli accompanied with his self-composed music, and five bassadanze. By examining closely three of Domenico’s balli, and attempting to reconstruct them, this thesis engages with issues regarding the preservation of dance and how effective the use of the written word is for doing so. Although there are several flaws in Domenico’s system, the idea of using the written word to notate dance still seems the most practical to date. The method created by Domenico in fifteenth-century Italy for his court dances is still the most common way for modern dance forms such as ballet and ballroom to be notated, transmitted to others and learned by dancers today.</p>

Costumes and Choreography from Bodenwieser's Trunk: The Coat as Affective Memory

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-110
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Cain And Abel ◽  
Embodied Research ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Material Evidence ◽  
Selection Of

The Viennese modern choreographer Gertrud Bodenwieser's black coat leads to an analysis of her choreography in four main phases – the early European career; the rise of Nazism; war's brutality; and postwar attempts at reconciliation. Utilising archival and embodied research, the article focuses on a selection of Bodenwieser costumes that survived her journey from Vienna, or were remade in Australia, and their role in the dramaturgy of works such as Swinging Bells (1926), The Masks of Lucifer (1936, 1944), Cain and Abel (1940) and The One and the Many (1946). In addition to dance history, costume studies provides a distinctive way to engage with the question of what remains of performance, and what survives of the historical conditions and experience of modern dance-drama. Throughout, Hannah Arendt's book The Human Condition (1958) provides a critical guide to the acts of reconstruction undertaken by Bodenwieser as an émigré choreographer in the practice of her craft, and its ‘materializing reification’ of creative thought. As a study in affective memory, information regarding Bodenwieser's personal life becomes interwoven with the author's response to the material evidence of costumes, oral histories and documents located in various Australian archives. By resurrecting the ‘dead letters’ of this choreography, the article therefore considers how dance costumes offer the trace of an artistic resistance to totalitarianism.

Lyric Cousins

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Early History ◽  
Sight Reading ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Way

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.

At Nature's Edge

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Impacts ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
East African ◽  
African Countries ◽  
The Road ◽  
European Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Long Time ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
The Many

In an epoch when environmental issues make the headlines, this is a work that goes beyond the everyday. Ecologies as diverse as the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean coast, the Negev desert and the former military bases of Vietnam, or the Namib desert and the east African savannah all have in common a long-time human presence and the many ways people have modified nature. With research in six Asian and African countries, the authors come together to ask how and why human impacts on nature have grown in scale and pace from a long pre-history. The chapters in this volume illumine specific patterns and responses across time, going beyond an overt centring of the European experience. The tapestry of life and the human reshaping of environments evoke both concern and hope, making it vital to understand when, why, and how we came to this particular turn in the road. Eschewing easy labels and questioning eurocentrism in today’s climate vocabulary, this is a volume that will stimulate rethinking among scholars and citizens alike.

Dewey, Adorno, and the Purpose of Art

2017 ◽  
pp. 470-488
Author(s):  
Espen Hammer
Keyword(s):  
Modern Art ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Many

The chapter focuses on Dewey’s claim that art should be viewed as a model of full, unrestricted human experience. Art, in this sense, is supposed to serve as a cognitive correction of certain key trends in modernity, including the transformation of experience in line with social and scientific requirements of abstraction, quantification, and instrumentality. Drawing on Adorno’s competing account, it is argued that Dewey’s position does not sufficiently grant art autonomy and that modern art, in particular, does not offer a direct alternative to the forms of experiential deformation identified by Dewey. Unlike Dewey, Adorno views art as radically separated from the everyday and able to offer insight only in an indirect, self-negating manner. Despite the many similarities between the two thinkers, the chapter argues that Dewey did not respond with sufficient care to aesthetic modernism, which by and large resisted the organicism he attributes to art in general.

XIV.—On the Roof of the Church of St. Andrew, Mildenhall, Suffolk

Archaeologia ◽  
1895 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-266
Author(s):  
J. G. Waller
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Early English ◽  
The Church ◽  
Grey Colour

The interior of the beautiful church of Mildenhall in Suffolk is remarkable for its spacious and noble proportions. Its roof of oak must take a chief place amongst the many fine examples in the eastern counties. The chancel is of Early English architecture, but the nave and aisles belong to the fifteenth century. It is to the roof of the latter to which I shall direct your attention. It has never been painted, as was so commonly the practice in the county, and therefore has that grey colour which ensues when no extraneous matter has been applied. The roof of the nave is divided by seven principal beams, supported by spandrels with tracery, with additions sustaining the rafters.

Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within. By Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno. Translated by John Barrett. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004; pp. 344. $34.95 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 315-317
Author(s):  
Kurt Wurmli
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Deep Understanding ◽  
Research Centers ◽  
The West ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The World ◽  
Inside View ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Kazuo Ohno and Tatsumi Hijikata are recognized as the most influential creators of the contemporary Japanese dance form known today as butoh. Since its wild and avant-garde beginnings in the late 1950s, butoh has evolved into an established and appreciated art form throughout the world. Despite its popularity and strong influences on the international modern dance world, butoh only recently became an accepted subject for academic research in Japan as well as in the West. With the new opening of butoh research centers and archives—such as the Ohno Dance Studio Archives at BANK ART 1929 in Yokohama, the Kazuo Ohno Archives at Bologna University in Italy, and the Hijikata Tatsumi Archives at Keio University in Tokyo—serious scholarly attention has been given to the art of butoh's founders. However, the lack of firsthand sources by butoh artists reflecting their own work still poses great limitations for a deep understanding of the art form. Kazuo Ohno's World from Without and Within is not only the first full-length book in English about the master's life and work, but also offers a rare inside view of butoh.

Waste

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eiko Maruko Siniawer
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Mass Consumption ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Many ◽  
Central Forces

Affluence of the Heart explores the many and various ways in which waste—be it of time, stuff, money, possessions, and resources—was thought about in Japan from the immediate aftermath of devastating war to the early twenty-first century.It shows how questions about waste were deeply embedded in the decisions of the everyday and shaped by the central forces of postwar Japanese life from economic growth and mass consumption to material abundance and environmentalism.What endured from the late 1950s onward was a defining element of Japan’s postwar experience: the tension between the desire to achieve and defend the privileges of middle-class lifestyles made possible by affluence, and the discomfort and dissatisfaction with the logics, costs, and consequences of that very prosperity. This tension complicated the persistent search in these decades for what might be called well-being, happiness, or a good life. Affluence of the Heart is a history of how people lived—how they made sense of, gave meaning to, and found value in the acts of the everyday.

Landart plein air “Between Sand and Foam” – Between the Everyday and the Ephemera

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bissera Valeva ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Financial Support ◽  
High Tide ◽  
Research Fund ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Traditional Artists

The text focuses on the realization of the plein air as a part of a larger project (ARTguments) implemented with the financial support of the Research Fund of Sofia University. The art form “landart” was chosen not by chance. It is characteristic for artists to “argue”, to transform their ephemeral visual sensations into art installations – materialized in nature, digitally stored emotional provocations, which also rely on the “co-authorship” of the elements. The pictorial focus is on “unnecessary”, discarded, marginalized objects, without utilitarian application, but discovered and recognized as necessary in the process of creating a work of art. This is the so called by Juri Lotman process of renaming “external” to the artistic installation elements in which they “invade” from the outside world implanting themselves in the imaginary space of the visual work. The art event aims to unite different artists as a way of expression, to gather and impose diverse, even dissimilar concepts.The forum realizes conceptual works by traditional artists, materializes the artistic reaction viewed from different angles, meets a random audience with non-randomly created installations, and last but not least, embodies different works as different visual emotion. The concept of the plein air is subordinated to the philosophy of Khalil Gibran and in particular to his sentences from the eponymous edition „Sand and Foam“:“I am forever walking upon these shores, Between the sand and the foam, The high tide will erase my foot prints,And the wind will blow away the foam...”

Writing About Dance

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy R. Oliver
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Critical Thinking Skills ◽  
Research Papers ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Writing Assignment ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Brain

Master the art of writing about dance! And learn about dance at the same time. This comprehensive guide provides students with instructions for writing about dance in many different contexts. It brings together the many different kinds of writing that can be effectively used in a variety of dance classes from technique to appreciation. In addition, it offers strategies for improving critical thinking skills, and shows how writing and critical thinking are closely linked. Part I focuses on informal writing such as freewriting, with sample exercises and prompts. Part II outlines approaches to writing three different kinds of formal papers: critiques, essays and research papers. Writing about dance teaches on two levels. First, the writer is learning dance content as s/he writes. Engaging in the writing assignment causes the writer to take a look at an aspect of dance and to become a 'momentary expert'. Secondly, writing itself is a way of learning. Writing involves the brain in three kinds of interaction, that is, the intellectual act of critically thinking, the physical act of writing or typing, and the visual aspect of seeing the writing on the page. The critical thinking and contemplation involved in writing can deepen students understanding of dance technique, dance creativity, and dance as an art form. Students will use this book on their own, or teachers may make assignments from it. It teaches about dance writing, but also about the very basics of dance appreciation.

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