Inscribing/Inscribed: Bodies and Landscape in the Ritual of Embodied Remembrance at Souvenance Mystique

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 95-101
Author(s):  
Ann E. Mazzocca
Keyword(s):  
The Earth ◽  
Sacred And Profane ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Embodied Memory ◽  
Embodied Practice ◽  
Embodied History

There are many ways in which Haitian Vodou ceremonies defy Western binaries of ritual and performance, sacred and profane, and choreography and improvisation. Vodou, a danced religion, is an embodied practice. Souvenance Mystique refers to a place and an event. Eponymously named, it is a mystical remembrance that occurs annually in a weeklong ritual of Vodou ceremonies in the Artibonite Valley outside of Gonaives, Haiti. At Souvenance, the reference to memory and remembrance is embodied, and therefore Souvenance greatly reflects what Diana Taylor refers to as a repertoire of embodied memory. As a scholar, choreographer, and practitioner of Haitian folkloric dance, I have read this ritual in terms of its significations occurring through various signs such as the practitioners' clothing, their proximity to one another, movement, gesture, and ritual choreography.Souvenance is a site where the multiplicity of histories and bodies signify in relation to one another. While arguably an embodied history in itself, Souvenance also writes. The practitioners enacting the several-days-long ceremonies inscribe upon the surface of the earth. Repetition reinscribes ritual pathways, while a particularly important and meaningful pathway is traversed only twice—at daybreak toward a site and then at sundown returning to the central peristyle. It is the landscape that is inscribed by the practitioners. However, they also become written upon by sweat and sacred blood. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which the rituals at/of Souvenance write history annually and how, simultaneously, the history of Souvenance is being written.

Wake in Guangzhou

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Thereza Alves
Keyword(s):  
City Center ◽  
Site Specific ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Landscape Transformation ◽  
Deep Layers ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site

Wake in Guangzhou: The History of the Earth is a site-specific installation exhibited in in the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, China, that problematizes issues of migration, trade, and landscape transformation. Wake in Guangzhou investigates the origin of the seeds found on the site of Huagui Lu, in the Liwan district in Guangzhou’s city center, where today a hundred wholesale markets exist. A mound of earth was removed from Huagui lu, a street in the Liwan District, the former merchant quarter’s of Guangdong. The earth sample was put in the courtyard of the Guangzhou Museum so dormant seeds previously buried in deep layers could germinate when exposed. The botanist Heli Jutila writes, “Although seeds seem to be dead, they are in fact alive and can remain vital in soil for decades, and even hundreds of years in a state of dormancy.”

scholarly journals Revisiting the Churchyard

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. LW&D.CM60-LW&D.CM69
Author(s):  
James Metcalf
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sacred Spaces ◽  
Literary Tourism ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Dead ◽  
A Site

The churchyard has always been a site of pilgrimage. The remains of the dead, sanctified as holy relics, conferred a hallowed status on their location in the earth; this, in turn, became a destination for travellers. By the eighteenth century, ‘pilgrims’ consciously mapped their interest in literary remains onto these sacred spaces, drawing their pursuit of literary tourism into a long history of travel to the realms of the venerated dead. Using a series of photographs, I retrace my churchyard pilgrimages in London and Thomas Gray’s Stoke Poges, reflecting on the context of thanatourism and thinking about the ways in which the places of the dead—chief among them the churchyard—still mean today.

scholarly journals Good vibrations: living with the motions of our unsettled planet

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-327
Author(s):  
Tamsin Badcoe ◽  
Ophelia Ann George ◽  
Lucy Donkin ◽  
Shirley Pegna ◽  
John Michael Kendall
Keyword(s):  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Tectonic Activity ◽  
Broadband Seismometer ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Convective Motions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University ◽  
The City ◽  
Large Earthquakes

Abstract. By its very nature Earth is unsettled and in continual motion. Earthquakes and volcanoes are an expression of the convective motions of the planet, and our existence on Earth is a consequence of this tectonic activity. Yet, as humans, we often struggle to understand our role in relation to such unpredictable natural phenomena and use different methods to attempt to find order in nature's chaos. In dwelling on the surface of our “unsettled planet”, we adapt and live with a range of ground vibrations, both natural and anthropogenic in origin. Our project, funded by the University of Bristol's Brigstow Institute, seeks to explore how we perceive and understand the shaky ground we live on, using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together the Earth sciences, the history of art and literature, and performance art. Inspired by historical commentary in the aftermath of large earthquakes, which frequently notes the unscheduled ringing of church bells excited by the shaking around them, we reflect on how these purported unscheduled bell-ringing events were caused not only by near earthquakes but also by distant incidents. To investigate this phenomenon, we installed a state-of-the-art broadband seismometer in the Wills Memorial Building tower to record how Great George (the tower bell) responds to the restless world around him. The installed seismometer has been recording activity around and within the tower on a near-continuous basis between late-March 2018 and January 2019. Here, we present the signals recorded by the seismometer as Great George overlooks the hustle and bustle of the city around him and investigate how connected we are to our unsettled planet, even from our tectonically quiet setting in Bristol. We find that the seismometer not only shows the ebb and flow of activity in and around Bristol but also registers earthquakes from as nearby as Lincolnshire, UK, or as far away as Fiji, halfway around the world. In order to contextualize our findings, our project also considers what determines how people have responded to earth-shaking events, drawing on both historical and recent examples, and looks to contemporary art practice to consider how an awareness of our unsettled planet can be communicated in new ways. The project has led to a number of art installations and performances, and feedback from artists and audiences shows how making art can be used to both investigate our connections with the Earth and to articulate (and even accept) the uncertainties inherent in encountering unstable ground.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

George Hoggart Toulmin: politics and geology

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 481-481
Author(s):  
ROY PORTER
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Great Distance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Christian View ◽  
The Social ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
Political Conservatism ◽  
History Of

The physician George Hoggart Toulmin (1754–1817) propounded his theory of the Earth in a number of works beginning with The antiquity and duration of the world (1780) and ending with his The eternity of the universe (1789). It bore many resemblances to James Hutton's "Theory of the Earth" (1788) in stressing the uniformity of Nature, the gradual destruction and recreation of the continents and the unfathomable age of the Earth. In Toulmin's view, the progress of the proper theory of the Earth and of political advancement were inseparable from each other. For he analysed the commonly accepted geological ideas of his day (which postulated that the Earth had been created at no great distance of time by God; that God had intervened in Earth history on occasions like the Deluge to punish man; and that all Nature had been fabricated by God to serve man) and argued they were symptomatic of a society trapped in ignorance and superstition, and held down by priestcraft and political tyranny. In this respect he shared the outlook of the more radical figures of the French Enlightenment such as Helvétius and the Baron d'Holbach. He believed that the advance of freedom and knowledge would bring about improved understanding of the history and nature of the Earth, as a consequence of which Man would better understand the terms of his own existence, and learn to live in peace, harmony and civilization. Yet Toulmin's hopes were tempered by his naturalistic view of the history of the Earth and of Man. For Time destroyed everything — continents and civilizations. The fundamental law of things was cyclicality not progress. This latent political conservatism and pessimism became explicit in Toulmin's volume of verse, Illustration of affection, published posthumously in 1819. In those poems he signalled his disapproval of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic imperialism. He now argued that all was for the best in the social order, and he abandoned his own earlier atheistic religious radicalism, now subscribing to a more Christian view of God. Toulmin's earlier geological views had run into considerable opposition from orthodox religious elements. They were largely ignored by the geological community in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, but were revived and reprinted by lower class radicals such as Richard Carlile. This paper is to be published in the American journal, The Journal for the History of Ideas in 1978 (in press).

Applying analytical procedures for performance audit of customs authorities

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1035-1055 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Pankova ◽  
V.V. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Distance Method ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Scientific Hypothesis ◽  
Financial Audit ◽  
Promising Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performance Audit ◽  
Analytical Procedures ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Customs Administration

Subject. The article considers the development of a set of methods and indicators of economic analysis, which can be used for performance audit of customs authorities, using the Volga Customs Administration case. Objectives. The aim is to justify the use of analytical procedures to rank the effectiveness of customs payments for the purpose of performance audit of customs authorities. Methods. We employ general scientific methods of research, i.e. dialectical and monographic methods, logical analysis, comparison, as well as the Euclidean distance method. Results. We reviewed works by Russian and foreign scholars on the history of customs audit development and internal financial control of customs authorities, gave scientific credence to attributing the system of customs payment and performance to the indicators of economic activity of customs authorities. Due to the lack of methods for assessing the performance of customs authorities, the use of analytical procedures during the performance audit seems to be a promising area. Conclusions. When verifying the scientific hypothesis put forward in the study, we established that the introduction and development of the ranking system for the performance of customs authorities related to the collection of customs duties can contribute to effective financial audit of customs authorities in general.

From the history of manufacturing Romanian nai at the turn of 20–21 centuries

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-74
Author(s):  
A. Drutsé
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Performance Skills ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

The modern world popularity of the nai — a traditional Romanian instrument — has identified interest in writing this article. This problematic constitutes the circle of our research interest as a doctoral candidate, but also as a concert performer, a graduate of the Academy of Music, Theater and Fine Arts. One of the most interesting aspects of the study of nai is its technical improvement since 60s of the 20th century, which led to the acquisition of a number of new, innovative skills and performance skills. In this article we have identified some pages of the modern history of the manufacture of this ancient instrument associated with these processes.

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