scholarly journals Psychophysical Approaches and Practices in India: Embodying Processes and States of ‘Being–Doing’

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 244-271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip B. Zarrilli

This essay articulates a South Asian understanding of embodied psychophysical practices and processes with a specific focus on Kerala, India. In addition to consulting relevant Indian texts and contemporary scholarly accounts, it is based upon extensive ethnographic research and practice conducted with actors, dancers, yoga practitioners, and martial artists in Kerala between 1976 and 2003. During 2003 the author conducted extensive interviews with kutiyattam and kathakali actors about how they understand, talk about, and teach acting within their lineages. Phillip Zarrilli is Artistic Director of The Llanarth Group, and is internationally known for training actors in psychophysical processes using Asian martial arts and yoga. He lived in Kerala, India, for seven years between 1976 and 1989 while training in kalarippayattu and kathakali dance-drama. His books include Psychophysical Acting: an Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play, and When the Body Becomes All Eyes. He is Professor of Performance Practice at Exeter University.

2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phillip B. Zarrilli

This article provides an illustrated description and analysis of Speaking Stones – a collaborative performance commissioned by Theatre Asou of Graz, Austria, with UK playwright Kaite O'Reilly and director Phillip Zarrilli as a response to the increasingly xenophobic and reactionary realities of the politics of central Europe. The account interrogates the question, the dramaturgical possibilities, and the performative premise which guided the creation of Speaking Stones. Phillip Zarrilli is internationally known for training actors through Asian martial arts and yoga, and as a director. In 2008 he is directing the premiere of Kaite O'Reilly's The Almond and the Seahorse for Sherman-Cymru Theatre and the Korean premiere of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis. He is also Professor of Performance Practice at the University of Exeter.


Author(s):  
Usha Iyer

Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema, an ambitious study of two of South Asia’s most popular cultural forms—cinema and dance—historicizes and theorizes the material and cultural production of film dance, a staple attraction of popular Hindi cinema. It explores how the dynamic figurations of the body wrought by cinematic dance forms from the 1930s to the 1990s produce unique constructions of gender, stardom, and spectacle. By charting discursive shifts through figurations of dancer-actresses, their publicly performed movements, private training, and the cinematic and extra-diegetic narratives woven around their dancing bodies, the book considers the “women’s question” via new mobilities corpo-realized by dancing women. Some of the central figures animating this corporeal history are Azurie, Sadhona Bose, Vyjayanthimala, Helen, Waheeda Rehman, Madhuri Dixit, and Saroj Khan, whose performance histories fold and intersect with those of other dancing women, including devadasis and tawaifs, Eurasian actresses, oriental dancers, vamps, choreographers, and backup dancers. Through a material history of the labor of producing on-screen dance, theoretical frameworks that emphasize collaboration, such as the “choreomusicking body” and “dance musicalization,” aesthetic approaches to embodiment drawing on treatises like the Natya Sastra and the Abhinaya Darpana, and formal analyses of cine-choreographic “techno-spectacles,” Dancing Women offers a variegated, textured history of cinema, dance, and music. Tracing the gestural genealogies of film dance produces a very different narrative of Bombay cinema, and indeed of South Asian cultural modernities, by way of a corporeal history co-choreographed by a network of remarkable dancing women.


2008 ◽  
Vol 11 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 174-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Brown ◽  
George Jennings ◽  
Aspasia Leledaki

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-13
Author(s):  
Josefine Löfblad

Abstract Recently, an interest in archives and archiving has been noticeable amongst artists as well as scholars. This paper analyses Mette Ingvartsen’s 69 Positions (2014), a dance work in which the audience participates in a guided tour through Ingvartsen’s own “archive”. The aim is to look at how archival traces and archival practices “perform” in the work, with a specific focus on bodily archiving. As a theoretical framework, I draw mainly on André Lepecki’s (2016) conceptualization of “the body as archive”, whereby reenacting becomes a mode of inventive archiving that actualizes not-yet utilized potential in a work. In this analysis, I propose that Ingvartsen’s body and the bodies of the audience create a collective body-archive, which collectively actualizes (previously virtual) intimacy. In addition, I argue that blurring the distinctions between body and archive and between reenactment and archiving are ways of insisting that dance does not disappear but remains, counter to “archival logic” (Schneider 2011, 99), by being stored in bodies and transmitted between bodies and by repeatedly reappearing–always more or less altered–in or as performance.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 114-117
Author(s):  
Adji Purnama Sandi ◽  
Gusti Novi Sarbini

Kyokushin karate in South Kalimantan is one of the martial arts that still applies a full contact fighting system. The kyokushin karate practitioners in South Kalimantan do not have their own practice sites, and are forced to rent a place to practice. The kyokushin karate dojo in South Kalimantan aims to create a special training ground for practitioners of kyokushin karate who have values from the kyokushin philosophy itself, so that they understand that the art of fighting is only a tool to perfect the body and soul, and can be a strong foundation for human development completely. The philosophy of Kyokushin as a concept will be combined with linguistic methods as the goal of solving problems in the design of this dojo.


Author(s):  
Sunaina Marr Maira

The Introduction outlines the major questions regarding Muslim American youth and the turn to rights-based activism and cross-ethnic coalitions that are the focus of the book. It discusses why the concept of “youth,” and particularly Muslim and Middle Eastern youth, is so central to to the War on Terror and also often exceptionalized in the post-9/11 moment. It offers an overview of the context of the ethnographic research in Silicon Valley and Fremont/Hayward, situating the three communities (South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American) in the study against the backdrop of the longer history of contestations over race, class, and immigration in this region. It also provides a discussion of the research methods on which the project is based.


2020 ◽  
pp. 986-1005
Author(s):  
Kholekile Hazel Ngqila

Ukuhanjwa illness was used as an example to understanding abantu illnesses. With attributional theory ukuhanjwa illness is attributed to spiritual and social causes rather than biomedical causes, whereby causal link is socially constructed between ukuhanjwa illness and entry into the body by familiars. Issues explored included conceptualisation of ukuhanjwa illness. The focus of the chapter is on the reasons for continued pluralistic tendencies in healing regardless of the expectation by the West that people should be focusing on the use of the fast evolving biomedical healing methods. The ethnographic study took place among the Southern Nguni people of OR Tambo District Municipality (ORTDM) in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Data was collected using qualitative and ethnographic research methods amongst a sample group of 50 participants. The sample was composed of traditional healers, mothers of children who have experienced ukuhanjwa illness, elderly people (male and female), biomedical practitioners and nurses.


Author(s):  
Man-Fung Yip

This chapter considers how the (male) action bodies in martial arts cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, posed between mastery and vulnerability, served as a site/sight through which the aspirations and anxieties of Hong Kong people living in the flux of a rapidly modernizing society were articulated and made visible. Specifically, it identifies three types of action body—the narcissistic body, the sacrificial body, and the ascetic body—and discusses how each crystallized out of the changing social and ideological dynamics of Hong Kong during the period. As socially symbolic signs, these diverse but interrelated representations of the body are extremely rich in meanings, inscribing within themselves not only fantasies of nationalist pride and liberated labor but also the historical experience of violence, in the form of both colonization and unbridled growth, that lay beneath the transformation of Hong Kong into a modern industrial society.


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