Feminist Performance as Feminist Historiography

2004 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-233 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Canning
Keyword(s):  
Dual Approach ◽  
Feminist Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
A Performance

Given performance history's disciplinary complexity, not to mention the complications of a “we” comprised by so many different scholars, Theatre Survey's question is, in one sense, unanswerable. In another sense, if I translate the question to what I can do (staying fully aware that others will propose answers different from mine), however, I can offer an answer from my position as a feminist performance historian and historiographer. My response to it is twofold. The argument I make here is for performance that foregrounds historiographical operations, making physical, gestural, emotional, and agonistic the processes that construct history out of the past. Concomitantly, I am arguing for history that overtly acknowledges the ways in which it is a performance of the past, but not the past itself. This dual approach is especially important in feminist accounts of the past because performance has historically been a crucial constituent of feminist theories and practices.

The Macroform in Post-Tonalmusic. Listening and Analysis

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Baroni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Extreme Points ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Recorded Performance ◽  
A Performance

Form in classical music is fundamentally a question of organising musical time in order to facilitate a listening corresponding to author's expectations. In the past this was obtained by coordinating different parameters towards a single goal. In twentieth century music, the more detached relationship between the composer and the listener meant that less importance was given to the idea of “correct” listening and to the coordination of parameters. This article is devoted to one of the extreme points in this process: A quartet by Bruno Maderna composed in 1956 under the influence of the ideologies of Darmstadt. The quartet was examined by three different groups of analysts. The first group examined the score of the quartet, while the third group only had a recorded performance at its disposal; the second group analyzed both the score and the performance. The three groups had to describe the form of the piece in terms of three hierarchical levels: Its microform {i.e. the organisation of minimal units not divisible into smaller parts); its macroform (i.e. its division into the minimum possible number of parts); the medium form {i.e. a collection of minimal units that could also be interpreted as an acceptable division of the parts at a macroformal level). Two basic criteria were used: Segmentation (local parametric discontinuity between two adjacent parts) and similarity (coherence between the parameters within each part). The results of the three analyses were somewhat diverse, thus demonstrating the tendency to relax the sense of form in such a quartet, as well as the presence of different procedures used when listening to a performance and analysing a score.

scholarly journals Approaching new piano literature: composition and interpretation of four piano etudes

Ricercare ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 64-79
Author(s):  
Marco Alunno ◽  
Andres Gomez-Bravo
Keyword(s):  
Learning Process ◽  
Piano Etudes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Specific Instrument ◽  
Piano Literature ◽  
Interpretive Approach ◽  
A Performance ◽  
Solo Instrument

In the literature for solo instrument, etudes typically present different kinds of technical and expressive challenges. In fact, they often focus on unique and problematic aspects of performance on a specific instrument. The short group of piano etudes presented here has the same purpose, although, in some cases, it recalls writing techniques and melodic-rhythmical modules usually associated with composers and styles of both the past and present times. In this article in particular, four etudes (Scales, Expressive Fingering, Parallel Thirds and Broken Octaves) are briefly described and analyzed from both a compositional and an interpretive approach, given the case that both the composer and the interpreter were in contact during the creative and learning process of the pieces. The result of this kind of collaboration is twofold: a composition whose playability and effectiveness are warranted by the practice of the interpreter, and a performance with a better understanding of the direct wishes of the composer.

scholarly journals Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-283
Author(s):  
Blossom Stefaniw
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Early Christianity ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Race Theory ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Feminist Historiography

Two recently-published works involved in the representation of women in the Christian past show two contemporary but divergent historiographic modes. The following essay examines each study within a larger frame of inquiry as to how patriarchy continues to shape both the institutional and embodied orders within which feminist historiography of early Christianity and Late Antiquity takes place. Using Critical Race Theory as the best available perspective from which to engage with systems of oppression, I articulate certain revisions which should be made to current efforts towards equality and consider what it would mean to write feminist historiography as counter-narrative or counter-storytelling without that becoming a decorative or extra-curricular practice in the academy. When feminist historiography is treated simultaneously in institutional, embodied, and epistemic terms it becomes evident that the way we think about women is part of a high-stakes conflict around the use of the past.

scholarly journals The Forgotten 1979 MoMA Sound Art Exhibition

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-46
Author(s):  
Judy Dunaway
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Museum Of Modern Art ◽  
Art Exhibition ◽  
Feminist Performance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Lives Of The Artists ◽  
Physical Manifestation

Over the past 40 years “sound art” has been hailed as a new artistic category in numerous writings, yet one of its first significant exhibitions is mentioned only in passing, if at all. The first instance of the hybrid term sound art used as the title of an exhibition at a major museum was Sound Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), shown from 25 June to 5 August 1979. Although this was not marketed as a feminist exhibition, curator Barbara London selected three women to exemplify the new form. Maggi Payne created multi-speaker works that utilized space in a sculptural fashion; Connie Beckley combined language and sounding sculptural objects, showing sound in both a conceptual and physical manifestation; and Julia Heyward’s work used aspects of feminist performance art including music, narrative, and the voice in order to buck abstract aesthetics of the time. This paper uses archival research, interviews, and analysis of work presented to reconstruct the exhibition and describe the obstacles both the artists and the curator encountered. The paper further provides context in the lives of the artists and the curator as well as the surrounding artistic scene, and ultimately exposes the discriminatory reasons this important exhibition has been marginalized in the current discourse.

Work in Progress: Rimini Protokoll's Karl Marx: Capital, First Volume and the Experience of the Future on Stage

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
BJÖRN FRERS
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Performance

This article examines how the future is expressed and experienced in the theatre. Referring to the performance Karl Marx: Capital, First Volume by the German artistic collective Rimini Protokoll, the article exemplifies the relation between the past, the present and the future, showing how the different layers of time are interrelated. The performers involved are not professional actors but so-called ‘experts’, whose lives are connected to Marx's Capital in different ways. Based on the experts’ biographies, the performance not only offers a rereading of Marx's ideology, but also shows similarities between Rimini Protokoll's artistic and Marx's scientific approach, between the conceptualization of one's life and watching a performance in theatre.

Experiencing Expectation: Perceiving the Future in Performance

2009 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-172
Author(s):  
JOY KRISTIN KALU
Keyword(s):  
Complex System ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Wooster Group ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emergent Phenomena ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
A Performance ◽  
The Hamlet

This article examines the realization of the future in performance through aesthetic experience. Following the historian Reinhardt Koselleck, who introduces the category of ‘experience’ as the present past, and ‘expectation’ as the present future, in order to formulate a theory of possible histories, I examine the interconnection of different time layers and the potentiality of a performance. I argue that every performance constitutes a space of possibility, defined by a permeation of traces of the past and the future, emergent phenomena characteristic of performance, and a dimension of future inherent in the performative materiality. Hamlet by New York's Wooster Group serves as an example for an analysis focusing on the aesthetic experience of the future in performance. The Hamlet performance proves exceptionally suitable, since the staging is based on a theatrical repetition of the film document of a Hamlet performance long past, and unfolds a complex system of past and future bound time layers.

An Eye for an Eye: the Hapticality of Collaborative Photo-Performance in Native Women of South India

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (02) ◽  
pp. 118-134
Author(s):  
SHARANYA
Keyword(s):  
South India ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Native Women ◽  
Collaborative Practices ◽  
Feminist Performance ◽  
Native Woman ◽  
Transnational Solidarity ◽  
Colonial Representations ◽  
A Performance

This article examines the haptic politics of the Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004) ‘theatre museum’ composed by Indian performance artist Pushpamala N. and British photographer Clare Arni. Through a transnational collaboration, Native Women re-creates a visual genealogy of ‘popular’ Indian women images, reckoning with legacies of colonial and photographic studio photography. The article focuses on the engagements of Native Women with colonial representations of ‘the native’ (woman) in particular and asks: How does a transnational project resituating colonial ethnographic practices inform feminist performance methodologies? How does this photo-performance develop a haptic attempt at transnational solidarity? In what ways do haptic entanglements with photo-performance constitute new imaginations for collaborative practices? The article repositions Native Women as a performance work that reflects collaboration as a process of political intimacy.

How to Find Rhythm on a Piece of Paper

2019 ◽  
pp. 174-196
Author(s):  
Thomas Cable
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Specific Event ◽  
Temporal Features ◽  
Temporal Object ◽  
A Performance

For the past two centuries discussions of the meter and rhythm of a line of poetry have often been at cross-purposes because of different assumptions about whether the poem is a temporal object. References to the idiosyncrasies of a “performance” have confused the question by contrasting a specific event with a supposedly independent, enduring, timeless object. The conclusion of this line of thought rejects any reference to temporal features as part of the poem’s structure. By contrast, the ontology of the present essay is firmly temporal. It draws on ideas of “embodiment” in cognitive science to argue that the poem does not exist until it is performed and perceived. These actualizations of a poem may find cues in the conventional written representation of a poem, but the marks on paper are not the poem.

Analogy, Proportion, and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith H. Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Past ◽  
Heaven And Earth ◽  
The Erotic ◽  
A Performance

The term proportion, a variant of analogy, occurs repeatedly in Donne’s two Anniversaries, epic commemorations of a young woman’s death. In The First Anniversarie, this word-concept extends to the loss of cosmic coherence, form, harmony, correspondence, and even comprehension. Donne’s dramatized speaker stages a performance that shows him to be stuck in the past, the Old Testament, the body, and this ruined world. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne’s speaker has a new lease on life, and he offers a dynamic renewal of vision that is fundamentally analogous. In this Anniversarie, unlike The First, the very physicality of death, captured in analogy, enables redemption. At its end, desire returns as the erotic, Christian-Neoplatonic connector between heaven and earth, between the soul’s longing for God and God’s for the soul. Desire has become the affective realization of analogical construction.

“Whose Emancipatory Politics?” Toward a Postcolonial Technological Subject

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Avrina Jos
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Transnational Feminism ◽  
New Age ◽  
Politics Of Representation ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Politics Of Technology ◽  
Emancipatory Politics ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
Digital Cultures

With Donna Haraway, a new age of the feminist imaginary was born. This imaginary evocatively constructs new feminist subjectivities that are an amalgam of species, sensibilities and ambiguities. Despite the liberating potential of these imagined cyborgs devoid of normativity, the material digital cultures, and technological cultures, that enabled a social movement to this imagined cyborg was/is at a significantly different place in time without subjectivities. Writing on the “Metaphor and Materiality” of technofeminisms, Judy Wacjman opines, “Haraway is much stronger at providing evocative figurations of a new feminist subjectivity than she is at providing guidelines for a practical emancipatory politics” (101). This paper intends to extend the possibilities of feminist imaginaries for theorisations of technology by first looking at this gap between imagined and material subjectivities. I ask “Whose emancipatory politics?” to point out that despite their insistence on fragmentations of identity and forms of totalisation, western feminist imaginaries of technology do not convey or derive from an inclusive politics of representation or location. Drawing from feminist historiography and transnational feminist frameworks, I insist on the radical potential of feminist imaginaries that are written and rewritten through transnational endeavours and consideration of “nested differences”. The second part of the paper derives from the first – building on the importance of transnational feminist imaginaries – and asks how? How can western feminist imaginaries expand their potential by transgressing their postmodern notions of subjectivity and agency without abandoning them? Here I introduce the “postcolonial technological subject” as a representational figure for a transnational feminist politics of technology by drawing guidelines for transnational feminist theories of technology. My guidelines are informed by Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s conception of transnational feminism, visions for solidarity such as Black Cyberfeminism, Data Feminism and The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

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