Michael Chekhov and the Search for the ‘Ideal’ Theatre

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Kirillov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
Language Version ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
History And Theory

In a keynote address delivered at the Michael Chekhov symposium ‘Theatre of the Future?’, held at Dartington Hall in November 2005, Andrei Kirillov argued that Chekhov’s ideas have not yet been fully assimilated, pointing out that merely to follow his exercises without understanding their connection to the actor’s imagination and meditative as well as spiritual dimensions is to fail fully to understand him. Andrei Kirillov is a researcher and Assistant Chair at the Theatre Department of the Russian Institute of the History of the Arts. His numerous publications on the history and theory of Russian theatre include Michael Chekhov: the Path of the Actor, co-edited with Bella Merlin (2005), and Teatr Mikhaila Chekhova: Russkoye Akterskoye Iskusstvo XX veca (The Theatre of Michael Chekhov: the Art of Russian Acting in the Twentieth Century, 1993). Bella Merlin originally enhanced the English-language version of this lecture, and with the author’s approval it has been further edited by NTQ for publication.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lincoln Center

The Conclusion briefly examines the current state of the New York City Ballet under the auspices of industrial billionaire David H. Koch at Lincoln Center. In so doing, it to introduces a series of questions, warranting still more exploration, about the rapid and profound evolution of the structure, funding, and role of the arts in America through the course of the twentieth century. It revisits the historiographical problem that drives Making Ballet American: the narrative that George Balanchine was the sole creative genius who finally created an “American” ballet. In contrast to that hagiography, the Conclusion reiterates the book’s major contribution: illuminating the historical construction of our received idea of American neoclassical ballet within a specific set of social, political, and cultural circumstances. The Conclusion stresses that the history of American neoclassicism must be seen as a complex narrative involving several authors and discourses and crossing national and disciplinary borders: a history in which Balanchine was not the driving force, but rather the outcome.

Reinventing Ramanand: Caste and History in Gangetic India

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 549-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
William R. Pinch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Religious History ◽  
North India ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Indian History ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Literature And Religion ◽  
History Of

According to Sir George Grierson, one of the pre-eminent Indologists of the early twentieth century, Ramanand led ‘one of the most momentous revolutions that have occurred in the religious history of North India.’Yet Ramanand, the fourteenth-century teacher of Banaras, has been conspicuous by his relative absence in the pages of English-language scholarship on recent Indian history, literature, and religion. The aims of this essay are to reflect on why this is so, and to urge historians to pay attention to Ramanand, more particularly to the reinvention of Ramanand by his early twentieth-century followers, because the contested traditions thereof bear on the vexed issue of caste and hierarchy in colonial India. The little that is known about Ramanand is doubly curious considering that Ramanandis, those who look to Ramanand for spiritual and community inspiration, are thought to comprise the largest and most important Vaishnava monastic order in north India. Ramanandis are to be found in temples and monasteries throughout and beyond the Hindi-speaking north, and they are largely responsible for the upsurge in Ram-centered devotion in the last two centuries. A fairly recent anthropological examination of Ayodhya, currently the most important Ramanand pilgrimage center in India, has revealed that Ramanandi sadhus, or monks, can be grouped under three basic headings: tyagi (ascetic), naga (fighting ascetic), and rasik (devotional aesthete).4 The increased popularity of the order in recent centuries is such that Ramanandis may today outnumber Dasnamis, the better-known Shaiva monks who look to the ninth-century teacher, Shankaracharya, for their organizational and philosophical moorings.

Invisible Bodies

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 33-68
Author(s):  
Lan A. Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Chinese Medicine ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
English Language ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Material Characteristics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis essay explores the ways in which Lu Gwei-djen (1904–91) served as a gatekeeper for interpreting medicine in China in the second half of the twentieth century. After retiring from science in 1956, Lu set out to write one of the first comprehensive English-language histories of medicine in China. Through a close study of Lu’s work notes and marginalia from later in her life, this essay examines how she carefully articulated the material characteristics of a “Chinese” medicine that gave rise to jingluo, or therapeutic paths often known as “meridians.” I argue that at the heart of this uneasy comparison was the difficult process of translating across multiple expressions of physiology. By placing Lu Gwei-djen at the center of a feminist intellectual history of medicine, this essay further shows how Lu’s translations were influenced by the social hierarchies in which she was embedded, including cultural, gender, and temporal dualities.

scholarly journals Now: A Post-Romantic Countertextuality of the Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Ethical Position ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
To Come ◽  
Ethical Stance

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.

Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria L. Evans
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Colonial Revival ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Living Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modernist Architecture ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
Cultural Connotations

Since every stage of Ron Kirby and Carey Scott's relationship is marked by alterations in their domestic environments, Chapter 6 ("Back to the Future: Modernist Architecture and All That Heaven Allows") explores some of the conflicting social and cultural connotations that have been encoded into their respective dwellings. For instance, Ron's progressive renovation of the Old Mill recapitulates the history of twentieth-century Modernist architecture in reverse. The final incarnation of this structure evokes Le Corbusier's Machine Age villas of the 1920s rather than Frank Lloyd Wright's more organic mid-century Modernist aesthetic, which dissents from the dominant 1950s American view of the ideal home by suggesting a less materialistic way of life. By contrast, Carey's suburban Colonial Revival residence represents the negation of the freedom from traditional conventions that Ron's living space ultimately implies.

On the Applicability of Mathematics to Nature: Roger Bacon and his Predecessors

1982 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Lindberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
History Of Mathematics ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Applicability Of Mathematics ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Roger Bacon has often been victimized by his friends, who have exaggerated and distorted his place in the history of mathematics. He has too often been viewed as the first, or one of the first, to grasp the possibilities and promote the cause of modern mathematical physics. Even those who have noticed that Bacon was more given to the praise than to the practice of mathematics have seen in his programmatic statements an anticipation of seventeenth-century achievements. But if we judge Bacon by twentieth-century criteria and pronounce him an anticipator of modern science, we will fail totally to understand his true contributions; for Bacon was not looking to the future, but responding to the past; he was grappling with ancient traditions and attempting to apply the truth thus gained to the needs of thirteenth-century Christendom. If we wish to understand Bacon, therefore, we must take a backward, rather than a forward, look; we must view him in relation to his predecessors and contemporaries rather than his successors; we must consider not his influence, but his sources and the use to which he put them.

Some Problems with Talcott Parsons'

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 104-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Average Length ◽  
Historical Sociology ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Talcott Parsons ◽  
Language Version ◽  
Continuous Stream ◽  
Almost All

It is a truth sometimes acknowledged in private but not publicly discussed that the only English translation of the most famous work of twentieth century historical sociology is seriously defective. The purpose of this paper is to establish the nature of the defects and to suggest some of their causes and consequences. As I shall seek to show, these involve rather more than matters of technical linguistic competence in German. Although Parsons' translation of Weber is indeed littered with a continuous stream of individual mistranslations, misprints and omissions of up to clause-length which can destroy the meaning of entire paragraphs, a mere catalogue of these would serve little purpose. Nor can one do more than mention his persistent disintegration of Weber's extraordinarily dense and over-burdened sentence structures, which have an average length of something like 8–10 lines: the desire to render Weber into readable English is evident, but so, too, is the damage which necessarily occurs to the meaning and argumentative sequence of the original. In justice to Parsons we must accept that his pioneering achievement was based primarily on an intellectual construction of Weber's meaning; linguistic and stylistic considerations were quite secondary. This order of priorities is one that, rightly, has been observed in almost all subsequent translations of Weber, and one that the present writer also adheres to. On the other hand, precisely the same cause underlies the bulk of Parsons' mistranslations of Weber, since he always believed that the latter required ‘a certain amount of construction’ to bring out his meaning fully [Camic, 22 cf. SOSA 501]. In what follows, then, I shall seek to isolate a series of systematic intellectual distortions occurring in the English-language version of the Protestant Ethic, although this series is selective rather than comprehensive.

scholarly journals On the Russian Concept of Lād, 1830–1945

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Ewell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Harmonic Function ◽  
English Language ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Universally translated into English as “mode,” the Russian term лад (“lād”) first appeared in 1830 as a translation from German Tonart, which is usually translated into English as “tonality.” To Tchaikovsky a lād was, in fact, a tonality, but by century’s end lād had come to signify its pre-tonal cousin, mode. Boleslav Yavorsky’s work on the subject in the early twentieth century gave lād new post-modal and post-tonal meaning with respect to quasi-tonal and post-tonal music. In this article, I delve deeply into the history of this uniquely Russian concept, from its inception to its highly modified mid-twentieth century form. Rather than trying to find an English equivalent, I leave “lād” in its transliterated form, which disentangles it from inaccurate translations. I examine a 1945 Chopin analysis by Yavorsky’s student, Sergei Protopopov, which outlines new interpretations for Russian lād. Sketches for this analysis, from the Russian National Museum of Music, provide a backdrop for a reexamination of basic tonal constructs such as cadence, phrase, form, harmonic function, and melodic diminution. I then look at a famous 1930 conference on Yavorsky’s theories as an example of the high stakes involved in creating a Marxist musical science, in which lād played a primary role. I also briefly discuss Yavorsky’s theories as a counterweight to Hugo Riemann’s encroaching functionality, which was brought to Russia by Gregori Catoire in the early twentieth century. It is my hope that this work on lād will fill in many gaps for the English-language reader, and possibly spur further studies on this uniquely Russian concept.

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