Cruel Optimism, Ironic Pessimism, Poetic Terrorism

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-50
Author(s):  
Annelies Van Assche
Keyword(s):  

Meyoucycle (2016) was the eagerly awaited result of a collaboration between choreographer Eleanor Bauer and composer Chris Peck. The characters of this dance and song–cycle have developed tactics to withstand the exploitative demands of neoliberal semiocapitalism; the creative team deployed performative and dramaturgical tactics for the same purpose.

Author(s):  
Pablo Romero-Fresco

Despite their importance in the reception and distribution of films, translation and accessibility have traditionally been neglected in the film industry. They are regarded as an afterthought, which results in translators being isolated from the creative team and working in conditions that hamper their attempts to maintain the filmmaker’s original vision. As a potential solution to this problem, accessible filmmaking (AFM) aims to integrate translation and accessibility into the production process through the collaboration between the creative team and the translator. This chapter outlines, firstly, the theoretical framework that underlies AFM, drawing on both translation/media accessibility and film studies and incorporating the notion of the global film. It then reviews the application of AFM in the filmmaking industry through the collaboration between accessible filmmakers and directors of translation and access. Finally, it introduces a new engagement-based approach to media accessibility that has resulted from AFM and compares it to the comprehension-based approach that has traditionally been used in this area.


Author(s):  
Dean Adams

Marketability is the focus of this chapter on The Producers and Hairspray, movies that were based on stage musicals that were originally based on low-budget, largely nonmusical movies. The chapter compares the two movie adaptations, noting that Susan Stroman restaged her original work for film, and many of the original creative team (including costume designer William Ivey Long) reprised their Broadway visual contributions for film, while the producers of Hairspray selected Hollywood professionals instead of the original Broadway creative team to supervise the making of the film. In another contrast, the 2005 film of The Producers is 134 minutes long to Hairspray’s 116, and The Producers used its Broadway stars rather than using the latest Hollywood names; Hairspray chose movie stars. With these contrasting strategies, and their relationship to the audience demographics for cinema today, it is unsurprising that Hairspray was a hit on the screen and that The Producers was a flop.


10.34690/125 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 6-36
Author(s):  
Роман Александрович Насонов

Статья представляет собой исследование религиозной символики и интерпретацию духовного смысла «Военного реквиема» Бриттена. Воспользовавшись Реквиемом Верди как моделью жанра, композитор отдал ключевую роль в драматургии сочинения эпизодам, созданным на основе военных стихов Оуэна; в результате произведение воспринимается подобно циклу песен в обрамлении частей заупокойной мессы. Военная реальность предстает у Бриттена амбивалентно. Совершая надругательство над древней верой и разбивая чаяния современных людей, война дает шанс возрождению религиозных чувств и символов. Опыт веры, порожденный войной, переживается остро, но при всей своей подлинности зыбок и эфемерен. Церковная традиция хранит веру прочно, однако эта вера в значительной мере утрачивает чистоту и непосредственность, которыми она обладает в момент своего возникновения. Бриттен целенаправленно выстраивает диалог между двумя пластами человеческого опыта (церковным и военным), находит те точки, в которых между ними можно установить контакт. Но это не отменяет их глубокого противоречия. Вера, рождаемая войной, представляет собой в произведении Бриттена «отредактированный» вариант традиционной христианской религии: в ее центре находится не триумфальная победа Христа над злом, а пассивная, добровольно отказавшаяся защищать себя перед лицом зла жертва - не Бог Сын, а «Исаак». Смысл этой жертвы - не в преображении мира, а в защите гуманности человека от присущего ему же стремления к агрессивному самоутверждению. The study of religious symbolism and the interpretation of the spiritual meaning of “War Requiem” by Britten have presentation in this article. Using Verdi's Requiem as a model of the genre, the composer gave a key role in the drama to the episodes based on the war poems by Wilfred Owen; as a result, the work is perceived as a song cycle framed by parts of the funeral mass. The military reality appears ambivalent. While committing a blasphemy against the ancient belief and shattering the aspirations of modern people, the war offers a chance to revive religious feelings and symbols. This experience of war-born faith is felt keenly, but for all its authenticity, it is shaky and ephemeral. The church tradition keeps faith firmly, but this faith largely loses the original purity and immediacy. Britten purposefully builds a dialogue between the two layers of human experience (church and military), finds those points where contact can be established between them. But this does not change their profound antagonism. In Britten's work, faith born of war is an “edited” version of the traditional Christian religion: in its center is not the triumphant victory of Christ over evil, but a passive sacrifice that voluntarily refused to defend itself in the face of evil-not God the Son, but “Isaac.” The meaning of this sacrifice is not in transforming the world, but in protecting the humanity of a person from his inherent desire for aggressive self-assertion.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-282
Author(s):  
Svetlana Sergeevna Smirnova

The paper characterizes the contribution of domestic and Western scientists to the study of social identity problem (A.V. Averchenko, I.V. Baryshnikova, L.V. Kalinina, A.V. Nechaev, D.P. Sidorenko, H. Arendt, J. Ranciere, H. Tajfel). The role of childrens creative team and favorable moral and psychological climate of childrens creative team in determining students social identity are outlined. The paper contains the results of the study of psychological climate of childrens creative team of the Russian folk instruments orchestra. The author also characterizes relations in the collective and students perception of themselves in the collective as members of the Russian folk instruments orchestra. The author also presents a process of formation of moral and psychological climate of childrens creative team in the context of value-meaningful and contextual approaches realization to create conditions for students social identity search and definition. The author has proposed types of lessons (informational, problem-based, discussion, double lecture, reflective, exploratory) and methods of educational and extracurricular creative activities that contribute to students social identity search and definition.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Burton

The genre of song cycle is complex and heterogeneous. As well as attracting significant contention in relation to matters of typology, the inherent aesthetic issues that arise from any intermedial union of words and music are compounded in the potential narrative consequences of the song cycle. Advocating melopoetic practices, my research seeks to examine the different cycle structures that emerge within the twentieth-century, English repertory. Gerald Finzi’s Earth and Air and Rain, composed in 1936, has a somewhat ambiguous genesis and complex history in performance and publication. This article explores the work’s potential to be characterized by structural pluralism; that is, the possibility that there may be more than one way of understanding and navigating the cycle’s structure. The genre of song cycle is complex and heterogeneous. As well as attracting significant contention in relation to matters of typology, the inherent aesthetic issues that arise from any intermedial union of words and music are compounded in the potential narrative consequences of the song cycle. Advocating melopoetic practices, my research seeks to examine the different cycle structures that emerge within the twentieth-century, English repertory. Gerald Finzi’s Earth and Air and Rain, composed in 1936, has a somewhat ambiguous genesis and complex history in performance and publication. This article explores the work’s potential to be characterized by structural pluralism; that is, the possibility that there may be more than one way of understanding and navigating the cycle’s structure.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Imogen Thirlwall

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Imogen Thirlwall

<p>My experience of learning and performing Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, can be explored through the lens of Foucault’s ‘docile bodies’ theory – that is, bodies that are ‘subjected, used, transformed, improved’. Participating in the disciplinary practice of self-policing, my obedience to the social, cultural and musical orders shaping western art song performance is enforced through self-imposed internalisation of normative practices and values. The singer’s body – my own body – is regulated in the Foucauldian sense; ‘disciplined’ through training and conditioning to align with normative practices, and, simultaneously, I act as ‘discipliner’ through self-imposed policing and monitoring of my body. The compulsive need to engage in the acts and processes of discipline implies inherent deficiency or deviance; the body must be transformed and ‘corrected’ through the processes of discipline that reflect the internalised value systems a body is measured against. In this exegesis, I explore my processes of self-regulation as disciplined and discipliner, investigating an intersection of ideals and tensions in my pursuit of technical command of vocal technique, obedience to the score, and the expectation of emotional abandon that an expressionist song cycle demands. Framed through narratives of ‘service’ and ‘prohibition’, I position the political anatomy of an eroticised, reproductive female body, exploring resistance and ‘rupture’ through the sexual agency of a disobedient and disruptive female singer.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-83
Author(s):  
Marie-Anne Kohl

This article discusses the construction and representation of nature in the composition and performance of Meredith Monk’s song cycle “Facing North” by analyzing the quality of the performing voices, their physicality, and by bringing them into relation to the associations and contexts evoked by the songs’ titles. Based on voice and nature concepts in cultural studies, this article argues that this approach creates a very specific concept of nature, which is artistic and artificial at the same time. Through contextualising the concept of nature established in “Facing North” with a specific, gendered construction of nature as basis of a narrative of North American identity as depicted by musicologist Denise Von Glahn, it becomes evident how the composition and performance of “Facing North” at once accord with and oppose to a gendered concept of nature.


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