Langoron: Music and Dance Performance Realities Among the Lak People of Southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

<p>This thesis seeks to describe the indigenous realities, meanings, and perspectives that are central to the music and dance practices of the Lak (Siar) people in Southern New Ireland, Papua Now Guinea. The insights recorded here are those gained through the experience of twenty-three months living in Rei and Siar villages as a participant in many aspects of Lak social life. The music and dance practices of the region are examined in the context of the wider social and cultural setting. Lak performance realities, are indivisible from kinship structures, ritual proceedings and spirituality. By contextualising Lak music and dance within the frame of the extensive and socially defining mortuary, rites my intention is to show how music and dance not only reflect but also create Lak realities. By examining the ethnographic materials relating to music, dance and performance in the context of mortuary sequence broader elements of Lak society are brought into focus. In these pages I argue that Lak society is reproduced literally and symbolically in these performances.</p>

Langoron: Music and Dance Performance Realities Among the Lak People of Southern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

<p>This thesis seeks to describe the indigenous realities, meanings, and perspectives that are central to the music and dance practices of the Lak (Siar) people in Southern New Ireland, Papua Now Guinea. The insights recorded here are those gained through the experience of twenty-three months living in Rei and Siar villages as a participant in many aspects of Lak social life. The music and dance practices of the region are examined in the context of the wider social and cultural setting. Lak performance realities, are indivisible from kinship structures, ritual proceedings and spirituality. By contextualising Lak music and dance within the frame of the extensive and socially defining mortuary, rites my intention is to show how music and dance not only reflect but also create Lak realities. By examining the ethnographic materials relating to music, dance and performance in the context of mortuary sequence broader elements of Lak society are brought into focus. In these pages I argue that Lak society is reproduced literally and symbolically in these performances.</p>

The Body’s Memory Archives in the Process of Generating an Aesthetic Movement and `Flow Experiences` for the Audience in the Production of the Performance tXc -TOXIC (after F. Richter’s play Rausch)

"The present enquiry is particularly interested in the performer’s body archiving memory while generating poetic movement on stage. The main site of investigation is a theatre-dance performance and the work engaged by the performers of tXc-TOXIC (after the Falk Richter’s play Rausch, an Insula Creative Hub production, directed by Cristian Grosu, choreographed and co-directed by me). The focal point of my argument is that, with proper and sustained body training, performers can easily incite and produce aesthetic movement after engaging the CI (contact improvisation) means of accessing movement and body memory. Keywords: (Non-toxic) body archives, aesthetic experience, embodiment, dance, performance "

Proposal for a Dance Performance

Proposal for a Dance Performance is an artwork for music ensemble and PowerPoint. This work aims to transform -through the use of self-referential narration- dance notation, emails, program notes and technical rides, into performing instances. The paper puts the above artwork in a dialogue with works by Hanns Eisler, Alfred Johannes and Johannes Kreidler, which use music notation as a conceptual visual tool. Furthermore, this paper discusses the role of music as a character in a play, a technique found in Samuel Becket’s work. This combination of narration and notation is being proposed as a transdisciplinary methodology for breaking fixed notions of artistic practice.

The material culture of music performance on Manihiki

The article analyses the material culture of music performance on Manihiki, northern Cook Islands, and provides a framework within which the material culture may be interpreted in its cultural context. The focus of the paper is the built environment associated with music and dance performance, and the rich and varied types of musical styles heard on Manihiki. According to the argument in the paper, the type of music performance is directly related to the type of place at which the performance is held.

Locating the Tawa’if Courtesan-Dancer: Cinematic Constructions of Religion and Nation

The development of the Hindi/Urdu cinema is intimately connected to the history of artistic performance in India in two important ways. Not only did hereditary music and dance practitioners play key roles in building this cinema, representations of these performers and their practices have been, and continue to be, the subject of Indian film narratives, genres, and tropes. I begin with this history in order to explore the Muslim religio-cultural and artistic inheritance that informs Hindi/Urdu cinema, as well as examine how this heritage has been incorporated into the cinematic narratives that help construct distinct gendered, religious, and national identities. My specific focus is on the figure of the tawa’if dancer, often equated with North Indian culture and nautch dance performance. Analyzing the ways in which traces of the tawa’if appear in two recent films, Dedh Ishqiya and Begum Jaan, I show how this figure is placed in a larger representational regime that sustains nationalist formations of contemporary Indian identity. As I demonstrate, even in the most blatant attempts to define the Indian nation as “Hindu,” the “Muslimness” of the tawa’if—and by extension the cinema she informed in ways both real and representational—is far from relinquished.