Performance and Modernity

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia A. Walker

How do ideas take shape? How do concepts emerge into form? This book argues that they take shape quite literally in the human body, often appearing on stage in new styles of performance. Focusing on the historical period of modernity, Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage demonstrates how the unforeseen impact of economic, industrial, political, social, and psychological change was registered in bodily metaphors that took shape on stage. In new styles of performance-acting, dance, music, pageantry, avant-garde provocations, film, video and networked media-this book finds fresh evidence for how modernity has been understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world.

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.


2020 ◽  
pp. 36-40
Author(s):  
M. V. Ternova

The article analyzed concept of the study of art by Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943), a well-known English neo-hegelian philosopher. His significant part of the theoretical heritage is connected with the explanation of the nature of art and with the consideration of its condition during the period of the changing Oscar Wilde era to the era of Rudyard Kipling. The circle of problem such as content and form, character, image, mimesis, reflection, emotion, art and "street man" identified. All of them in Collingwood's presentation and interpretation significantly expanded the space of research not only English, but also European art criticism. The concept of study of art is "built" on the basis of an active understanding of historical and cultural traditions accented. The concept of art criticism of R.G. Collingwood – a famous English philosopher of the XIX-XX centuries, on the one hand, has self-importance, and on the other, although based on the traditions of contemporary humanities, still expands art history analysis of aesthetics through aesthetics and psychology. Recognizing the exhaustion of the English model of romanticism, R.G. Collingwood tries to outline the prospects for the development of art in the logic of the movement "romanticism – realism – avant-garde", which leads to the actualization of the problem of "mimesis – reflection". At the same time, the theorist's attention is consciously concentrated around the concept of "subject", the understanding of which is radically changing at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Theoretical material in the presentation of R.G. Collingwood is based on the work of Shakespeare, Reynolds, Turner, Cezanne, whose experience allows us to focus on the problem of "artist and audience". It is emphasized that Collingwood's position is ahead of its time, stimulating scientific research in the European humanities. The existence of indicative tendencies, which are distinguished in the logic of European cultural creation of the historical period, is emphasized.


2020 ◽  
pp. 60-109
Author(s):  
Richard Porton

This chapter examines cinema's representation of anarchist heroes, martyrs, and fleeting revolutionary moments, formulating a critique of mainstream socialism that is far from the banalities of bourgeois sociology. Two films, Bo Widerberg's Joe Hill (1971) and Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzetti (1971), deal with a transitional historical period before the final polarization of Bolshevism and anarchism. These films are reverential tributes to radical martyrs, and reflect the fact that these members of the Old Left pantheon have long been heralded as all-purpose leftists whose legacies provide useful object-lessons for socialists, liberals, and communists, as well as anarchists. The chapter then looks at the documentary and fiction films inspired by the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. It also considers a prototypical sequence in Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg's Soviet avant-garde epic New Babylon (1929), which sums up the grassroots anti-authoritarianism of the seventy-two-day Paris Commune of 1871, while prefiguring the Spanish libertarian communism of the 1930s and the anti-statist radicalism that erupted during the events of May 1968 in France.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabio I. M. Poppi

Abstract In this article, I identify and describe multimodal hybrid metaphors—the conceptual representation of two elements represented as merged into a new single ‘gestalt’—represented by the machine and human body domains in “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” (鉄男: Tetsuo), a Japanese avant-garde film. Since “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” portrays the genesis of a man whose body becomes a human-machine hybrid, I explore to what extent this film can act as an example of how hybrid metaphors are conveyed. In line with the ideological function of metaphors, where the use of alternative metaphors may produce different meanings and potentially have different effects on the recipient, I also try to interpret how these hybrid metaphors reveal information about the contemporary Japanese society. Specifically, the ideological analysis considers how the notion of ‘artificial’ and the social phenomena of misogyny, homophobia and social deviance are held to characterise the post-World War II Japanese culture.


Author(s):  
Sarah Ann Wells

Arguably the single most influential event of the historical avant-gardes in Latin America, Brazil’s Modern Art Week (São Paulo, 1922) put forth a vision for new art that would prove influential throughout the 20th century. A three-day event held at São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, the Modern Art Week provided a point of connection for different artists and also displayed a new phenomenon to Brazil’s bourgeois public: the heady mix of ‘‘isms’’ which were circulating in cosmopolitan European circles, including Expressionism, Surrealism, and others. Up until then, this vision had only been articulated in Brazil in piecemeal fashion. The Modern Art Week incorporated dance, music, theater, literature, visual arts, and architecture, and featured artists and writers who would become some of the most influential in the boom of Brazilian modernism that was to follow, among them Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira, Anita Malfatti, and Tarsila do Amaral. Influenced by Brazil’s rapid industrialization and modernization, the event featured a heterogeneous group that, together, displayed the ambivalent modernization process that characterizes Brazilian modernism more broadly. Unlike many of their avant-garde contemporaries in Latin America and abroad, women artists played key roles in the Modern Art Week and in Brazilian modernist art more generally, especially in visual culture and dance.


Author(s):  
Raül Sanchis Francés ◽  
José Maria Esteve-Faubel

Resum: El Ball de Torrent és una moixiganga dramàtica popular escenificada a la ciutat de València i altres indrets del País Valencià des de finals del segle XVII fins a principis del segle XX. Estava organitzada per agrupacions gremials, juntes d’hospitals o clavaris de festes i protagonitzada per personatges agrupats en comparses que representaven una paròdia sobre les relacions entre les estructures de poder i les classes populars. Tot i la variabilitat segons el moment històric, es conforma com una mescla de quadres amb danses, música i jocs teatrals. El ball interacciona de diverses formes amb algunes festes valencianes i és, probablement, una de les mostres de teatre de carrer més nostrades i menys estudiades de la València Moderna. En aquest article es realitza una revisió bibliogràfica crítica i una primera anàlisi historiogràfica.Paraules clau: Ball de Torrent, Dansa i música tradicional, Teatre, Moixiganga, Festa valencianaAbstract: Ball de Torrent (Dance of Torrent) is a popular dramatic masquerade staged in Valencia since the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth. It was organized by guilds, hospital managements or festival organizers. The actors were grouped in associations representing a parody on the relationships between power structures and popular classes. Despite the variability depending on the historical period, it consisted of a mixture of episodes or scenes with dance, music and theatre games. Any Festivals in Valencia are connected with the Ball de Torrent. It’s probably one of the most interesting samples of street theatre and studied under of the Modern Valencia. This paper analyses historical sources to review and critique bibliography.Keywords: Dance of Torrent, Traditional Dance and Music, Theatre, Masquerade, Feasts of Valencia


Author(s):  
Barbara Rose Lange

Chapter 8 discusses the orientation of Central European musicians to aesthetics, production technologies, and distribution networks of the turn of the millennium that are collectively termed world music 2.0, arguing that study of local information flow enriches the overall notion of world music 2.0. The chapter reviews how electronic dance music (EDM) became a key component of the millennial sound world and of world music 2.0 in Central Europe. The chapter then describes musicians who continue to think locally as they merge sensibilities: the Slovak duo Longital developed a futurist aesthetic; the Austrian composer and musician Christof Dienz blended alpine ideas, avant-garde art music, and EDM; and Hungarian composer-producer Károly Cserepes infused musical dreamscapes with local sounds. The chapter concludes that the Central European musicians occupy a liminal space between analog world music 1.0 and networked world music 2.0.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-120
Author(s):  
Suzanne Newcombe

How should we read claims about health and well-being which defy common sense?  Are claims of extreme longevity to be viewed as fraudulent, or as pushing the boundaries of possibility for the human body?  This article will consider the narrative and context around a particularly well-publicized incident of rejuvenation therapy, advertised as kāyakalpa (body transformation or rejuvenation), from 1938. In this year, the prominent Congress Activist and co-founder of Banaras Hindu University, Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861–1946), underwent an extreme – and very public – rejuvenation treatment under the care of a sadhu using the name of Shriman Tapasviji (c.1770?-1955). The first half of the article will explore the presentation of Malaviya’s treatment and how it inspired a focus on rejuvenation therapy within Indian medicine in the years immediately following. Exploring this mid-twentieth century incident highlight some of the themes and concerns of the historical period, just out of living memory, but in many ways similar to our own.


2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 150-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Wamberg ◽  
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

The posthuman summons up a complex of both tangible challenges for humanity and a potential shift to a larger, more comprehensive historical perspective on humankind. In this article we will first examine the posthuman in relation to the macro-historical framework of the Anthropocene. Adopting key notions from complexity theory, we argue that the earlier counter-figures of environmental catastrophe (Anthropocene entropy) and corporeal enhancement (transhuman negentropy) should be juxtaposed and blended. Furthermore, we argue for the relevance of a comprehensive aesthetical perspective in a discussion of posthuman challenges. Whereas popular visual culture and many novels illustrate posthuman dilemmas (e.g. the superhero’s oscillation between superhuman and human) in a respect for humanist naturalist norms, avant-garde art performs a posthuman alienation of the earlier negentropic centres of art, a problematization of the human body and mind, that is structurally equivalent to the environmental modification of negentropic rise taking place in the Anthropocene. In a spatial sprawl from immaterial information to material immersion, the autonomous human body and mind, the double apex of organic negentropy, are thus undermined through a dialectics of entropy and order, from abstraction’s indeterminacy to Surrealism’s fragmentation of the body and its interlacing with inorganic things.


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