UnCaging Cunningham’s Animals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carrie Rohman
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
First Century ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Animal Part ◽  
Natural Strains

This chapter excavates the natural strains in John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s composing and choreographic habits vis-à-vis animality. Cage and Cunningham reveal their recognition that the artistic is primarily about pleasure and affect, and that it is the animal part of us that responds most fully to such provocations. I read the little-known Cunningham book of drawings, Other Animals (2002), in the context of such ambitious performance pieces as Beach Birds (1991) and Ocean (1994). Cunningham’s propensity for drawing vibrantly colored animals in his notebooks links him back to Duncan, a founder of modern dance, who modeled her movement on the “free animals.” Moreover, specific illustrations in Other Animals are remarkably reminiscent of the depictions of animal hordes in Virginia Woolf’s Lugton tale. This chapter, therefore, allows me to trace the vibratory, excessive impulse of bioaesthetics from modernism to the early twenty-first century.

Continuing Visions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Activism ◽  
William Blake ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ridley Scott ◽  
American Novel ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Protest Group ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Dead Man

The questions that drove Blake’s American reception, from its earliest moments in the nineteenth century through to the explosion of Blakeanism in the mid-twentieth century, did not disappear. Visions of America continued to be part of Blake’s late twentieth- and early twenty-first century American legacy. This chapter begins with the 1982 film Blade Runner, which was directed by the British Ridley Scott but had an American-authored screenplay and was based on a 1968 American novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It moves to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film, Dead Man and Paul Chan’s twenty-first century social activism as part of a protest group called The Friends of William Blake, exploring common themes of democracy, freedom, limit, nationhood, and poetic shape.

Contrasting patterns of early twenty-first-century glacier mass change in the Himalayas

Nature ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 488 (7412) ◽  
pp. 495-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Kääb ◽  
Etienne Berthier ◽  
Christopher Nuth ◽  
Julie Gardelle ◽  
Yves Arnaud
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Mass Change ◽  
Early Twenty ◽  
Twenty First Century
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