Towards a Language of the Stage: the Work of DV8 Physical Theatre

1995 ◽  
Vol 11 (44) ◽  
pp. 371-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Buckland

In the following article Fiona Buckland describes how the leading British experimental dance company, DV8 Physical Theatre, was formed out of a disillusionment with its own dance medium, and how DV8 now works towards a reinvestment of creative need in stage performance. The first part reviews the company's work, methodology, and content to date, while the second offers a detailed analysis and explication of their award-winning and provocative Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men (1988), which expresses the paradox of gay male cruising as a need for security and desire for risk, both in terms of content and as an exhilarating contact-release form. The article explores the dynamism and theatricality of a style in which the body is both subject and mode of performance, and also the media, critical, and audience response DV8 performances have evoked. The author, Fiona Buckland, received her MA in Film and Theatre from the University of Sheffield in 1993, after which she worked there and at Sheffield College as a part-time lecturer in movement and choreography. She has also held workshops in Loughborough, Sheffield, and New York, and is currently the recipient of a Fulbright award on the doctoral programme in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Lateral ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian Switzer

The review focuses on the practical work of Poor Queer Studies. Rather than retheorize queer studies from the class perspective of "rich" and "poor," Brim makes a case study of his work as a professor of queer studies at the College of Staten Island (CSI). Insisting on the particularity of his and his students’ relationship to queer studies, Brim makes an example of the work they do together in the classroom, and the ways they live their studies on public transit, at home with their families, and in their part-time jobs. This review questions the extent to which poor queer studies differs from the modern university’s reduction of all education to career-training. Brim’s praxis of poor queer studies is always undertaken with individual students in specific socio-economic circumstances—a particularity that makes it different than market-driven job-training. This review also raises questions about the general applicability of this case study. Would poor queer studies work elsewhere as it does at CSI? Berlant’s idea of exemplarity is helpful in answering this question. Unlike examples that confirm a norm, there are examples that change norms. Brim’s example of poor queer studies works to exemplarily change what counts as normal. Practically, this means no longer thinking of queer studies as operating without class distinction—and reclaiming part of the work of the discipline from seemingly classless rich queer studies at places like Yale and New York University.


1987 ◽  
Vol 8 (x) ◽  
pp. 341-352
Author(s):  
Melissa Clegg

Since the founding of the Fifth Republic Paris has been rebuilt to an extent only the reconstructions of the Second Empire under Napoleon III could match. The story of its rebuilding—told by David Pinkney, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Washington—could serve as a fable with a moral about the whole of French cultural and political life for the last twenty-five years. De Gaulle began the transformation of Paris by deregulating the building industry. The threats of that policy to the historical character of the city eventually provoked, under Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand, a return to the centrist practices of a state accustomed to regulation.


2008 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 174-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petra Kuppers

Given the media frenzy over Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential bid, and the ensuing questions about the state of feminism, it seems a serendipitous moment to feature two pieces—written by the women who conceived and performed them—that offer very different but complementary takes on agency, identity, and the conflation of the public and private as one's body becomes the locus of the gaze. Petra Kuppers's dramaturgical meditation on her experiences as part of Tiresias, a disability culture performance project, investigates erotics, change, mythology, and identity. A collaboration between photographers, writers, and dancers, the project, occurring over six months in 2007, posits the body as the site at which myth might be reshaped and movement might become poetry. Lián Amaris critically analyzes her feminist public performance event Fashionably Late for the Relationship, which took place over three days in July 2007 on the Union Square traffic island in New York City. Informed by Judith Butler's citational production of gender, the piece focused on exposing and critiquing the marked visibility of gender construction and maintenance within an extreme performance paradigm.


2019 ◽  
pp. 275-294
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald

Artist/scientist Erin Espelie was trained at Cornell University as a biologist, but turned down opportunities to study biology at the graduate level at Harvard and MIT in order to explore the New York City theater scene, before finding her way into independent, “avant-garde” filmmaking, first exploring her interests in biology and the history of science in a series of short films, then producing the remarkable essay-film The Lanthanide Series (2014), which explores the importance of the “rare earths” (the elements with atomic numbers 57–71) for modern communication and informational technologies. The imagery for The Lanthanide Series was recorded, almost entirely, off the reflective surface of an iPad. In her work as a moving-image artist, Espelie combines poetry, science, environmental politics, and modern digital technologies within videos that defy traditional knowledge categories. She is currently editor in chief for Natural History magazine and a director of the NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder.


Tempo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (251) ◽  
pp. 17-27
Author(s):  
Alona Keren-Sagee

Joseph Schillinger (1895–1943), the eminent Russian-American music theorist, teacher and composer, emigrated to the United States in 1928, after having served in high positions in some of the major music institutions in the Ukraine, Khar'kov, Moscow, and Leningrad. He settled in New York, where he taught music, mathematics, art history, and his theory of rhythmic design at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and the Teachers College of Columbia University. He formulated a philosophical and practical system of music theory based on mathematics, and became a celebrated teacher of prominent composers and radio musicians. Schillinger's writings include: Kaleidophone: New Resources of Melody and Harmony (New York: M. Witmark, 1940; New York: Charles Colin, 1976); Schillinger System of Musical Composition, 2 vols. (New York: Carl Fischer, 1946; New York: Da Capo Press, 1977); Mathematical Basis of the Arts (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976); Encyclopedia of Rhythms (New York: Charles Colin, 1966; New York: Da Capo Press, 1976).


2019 ◽  
Vol 105 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-225
Author(s):  
James E. Bennett

The mission of the University of Hawai’i at Tell Timai in 2009 began excavating the remains of a limestone temple foundation platform in the north-west area of the site. The foundations had been partially recorded in survey work conducted in 1930 by Alexander Langsdorff and Siegfried Schott, and again in the 1960s by New York University, however no known investigations of the structure were conducted. In 2017 as part of an Egypt Exploration Society Fieldwork and Research Grant, excavations were renewed to finalise the understanding of the temple’s construction techniques, and the date of the temple. The foundations were of a casemate design with internal fills of alternating silt and limestone chips. The ceramic evidence from within the construction fills dates its construction from the end of the Ptolemaic to the early Roman Period, and the temple’s superstructure was most likely taken down and the blocks reused in the late Roman Period (fourth to fifth century ce).


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