Scores of Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-172
Author(s):  
Ana Hedberg Olenina

Chapter 3 examines the approaches to film actor training developed by the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Lev Kuleshov in the early 1920s. Inspired by the radical innovations of contemporary theater, Kuleshov’s perspective on film acting relied on Ivan Pavlov’s and Vladimir Bekhterev’s reflexology, as well as psychotechnics and Taylorist labor efficiency training. Based on archival materials, this chapter establishes Kuleshov’s connection to the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral’nyi Institut Truda) in Moscow, which promoted a utopian program of ingraining effective working skills in the nervous systems of factory workers by optimizing their trajectories of movement. Kuleshov embraced the concepts and techniques popularized by this Institute. He theorized his actors’ ideal performance in terms of energy expenditure and maximal use of the audiences’ attention span. My analysis of Kuleshov’s program for actors’ bodily discipline scrutinizes the training apparatuses he relied on in the hopes of achieving geometrically precise, rhythmical gestures, which he believed could form a legible “ornament” in rapid montage.

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Adlington

Luigi Nono's Voci destroying muros for female voices and small orchestra was performed for the first and only time at the Holland Festival in 1970. A setting of texts by female prisoners and factory workers, it marks a sharp stylistic departure from Nono's political music of the 1960s by virtue of its audible quotations of revolutionary songs, its readily intelligible text setting, and especially its retention of the diatonic structure of the song on which the piece is based, the communist “Internationale.” Nono's decision, following the premiere, to withdraw the work from his catalogue suggests that he came to regard it as transgressing an important boundary in his engagement with “current reality.” I examine the work and its withdrawal in the context of discourses within the Italian left in the 1960s that accused the intellectuals of the Partito Comunista Italiano of unhelpfully mediating the class struggle. Nono's contentious reading of Antonio Gramsci, offered as justification for his avant-garde compositional style, certainly provided fuel for this critique. But Voci destroying muros suggests receptivity on the part of the composer—albeit only momentary—to achieving a more direct representation of the voices of the dispossessed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Fensham

The radical innovations of African-American artists with artistic form during the 1960s and 1970s, according to black performance theorist Fred Moten, led to a new theorization of the avant-garde. His book, In the Break: The Radical Aesthetics of the Black Tradition, discusses the poetry and jazz music of artists, from Amiri Baraka and Billie Holiday to Charles Mingus, and extols their radical experimentation with the structures and conventions of aurality, visuality, literature, and performance dominant in European art and aesthetics. In this essay, I consider the implications of these processes of resignification in relation to the choreographic legacy of the artist, Eleo Pomare, whose work and career during this period was both experimental and radical and, I will suggest, critical to the formation of a transnational, multiracial conception of modern dance.


Author(s):  
Ana Olenina

In the 1920s Soviet avant-garde film was developing alongside modern dance, and the two arts often drew on each other’s stylistic and conceptual achievements. This chapter considers approaches to the cinematic mediation of dance and expressive movement, as they were articulated by the Choreological Laboratory of the Russian State Academy of Artistic Sciences (RAKhN) and two pioneers of montage, Lev Kuleshov and Dziga Vertov. In a historicization of the techniques and instruments used for staging and representing movement, Moscow’s Central Institute of Labor (CIT) promoted chronophotographic studies of labor efficiency and biomechanics. It then disseminated its methods in avant-garde circles; thus studies of movement inherited from science formed a conceptual amalgam with modern choreographic and theater discourses. Meanwhile, Russian thinkers theorized the capabilities of cinema to convey the character and duration of movement, and how film viewing differed from real-time observation in the theater, further enriching the future of dance’s potential on the screen.


2020 ◽  
Vol 134 (5) ◽  
pp. 473-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan P. Ceddia ◽  
Sheila Collins

Abstract With the ever-increasing burden of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, it is generally acknowledged that there remains a need for developing new therapeutics. One potential mechanism to combat obesity is to raise energy expenditure via increasing the amount of uncoupled respiration from the mitochondria-rich brown and beige adipocytes. With the recent appreciation of thermogenic adipocytes in humans, much effort is being made to elucidate the signaling pathways that regulate the browning of adipose tissue. In this review, we focus on the ligand–receptor signaling pathways that influence the cyclic nucleotides, cAMP and cGMP, in adipocytes. We chose to focus on G-protein–coupled receptor (GPCR), guanylyl cyclase and phosphodiesterase regulation of adipocytes because they are the targets of a large proportion of all currently available therapeutics. Furthermore, there is a large overlap in their signaling pathways, as signaling events that raise cAMP or cGMP generally increase adipocyte lipolysis and cause changes that are commonly referred to as browning: increasing mitochondrial biogenesis, uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) expression and respiration.


1962 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 288-289
Author(s):  
AUSTIN H. RIESEN
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