Return to SOURCE: Contemporary Composers Discuss the Sociopolitical Implications of Their Work

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 100-101
Author(s):  
Alyce Santoro
Keyword(s):  
Political Climate ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Single Question ◽  
Source Article

During the heat of the fraught political climate of 1969, the editors of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: “Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?” Forty-five years later the author posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, resulting in a provocative contemporary update to the original 1969 SOURCE article.

Encounter Three: Art and the Socialist State

2019 ◽  
pp. 55-68
Author(s):  
Jan Bryant
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Socialist State ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Free Market Capitalism ◽  
Market Capitalism

This chapter traces the tactics used by the art Slovenian collective, Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), specifically the art section, Irwin and the music group, Laibach, to criticise the socialist state of Yugoslavia. The chapter offers a brief overview of the political climate at the time leading up to and during the Yugoslavian wars (1980s and ‘90s). Closely analysed is NSK’s use of ambiguity and parody to hold a mirror up to authoritarianism and Irwin’s appropriation of early Russian avant-garde motifs to criticise socialist-realism and the State’s ‘misuse’ of art. As protection against retaliation by the state, NSK never prescribed their intentions, so audiences and viewers needed to bring their own context and perspective to events. Once Slovenia left the Yugoslavian Federation to enter into free-market capitalism, NSKs tactics seemed far less potent, flowing neatly into a 1980s western art context (a moment in history) that embraced ambivalence and indeterminacy. As an approach that hides a work’s political intent, allowing its viewers to have their own political views affirmed, it is argued that such a tactic fails to shake the political aesthetic. [181]

scholarly journals Norwegian Political Theatre in the 1970s: Breaking Away from the “Ibsen Tradition”

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Anna Watson
Keyword(s):  
Deep Sea ◽  
Living Room ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Political Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Social ◽  
Experimental Theatre ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Made In

The dominant theatre aesthetic in Norwegian theatre has been, and remains at large to be, psychological-realism and the bourgeois “living room drama”. In a Norwegian context this tradition is best represented by Henrik Ibsen’s dramas, staged at Nationaltheatret and Den Nasjonale Scene. However, throughout the 20th century there have been several attempts to break with the “Ibsen tradition”, especially among left-wing political and socially engaged theatre-makers and playwrights such as Gunvor Sartz, Olav Daalgard, and Nordahl Grieg in the 1930s, and Jens Bjørneboe and Odin Teatret in the 1960s. I argue that the clearest and most decisive break with Realism and the Aristotelian dramaturgy, in a Norwegian political theatre context, was made in the late 1970s, instigated by the independent theatre groups Perleporten Teatergruppe and Tramteatret. Their break did not only constitute an aesthetic and dramaturgical break, but also a break in organizational terms by breaking the hierarchy of the institutional theatre ‘machine’. Perleporten Teatergruppe and Tramteatret aimed at making a political, progressive theatre both in form and content. Perleporten and Tramteatret were both inspired by contemporaneous political and experimental theatre in Europe and Scandinavia as well as by the historical avant-garde experiments, and, for Tramteatret’s part, the workers' theatre movement from the 1920s and 30s in their search for a theatre that could express the social and political climate of the day. In this article, I will place Tramteatret and Perleporten Teatergruppe’s debut performances Deep Sea Thriller (1977) and Knoll og Tott (1975) within a historiographical and cultural-political context.

The Politics, Packaging, and Potential of Performance Art

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (13) ◽  
pp. 17-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. G. Davis
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Epic Theatre ◽  
Founding Director ◽  
The Impact

Is the ‘Performance art’ whose influence is pervasive in today's American theatre truly in the ‘tradition’ of the avant-garde – or merely modish? In an age where fashions, whether in theatre, clothing. or motor cars. are manufactured to facilitate the turnover necessary for mass-produced obsolescence, does ‘imagist’ theatre serve as a force for social change – or merely titillate palates as jaded by yesterday's art as by yesterday's styles? R. G. Davis looks at the ways in which visually- oriented forms of theatre have been constructed and received in America since the ‘happenings’ of the early ‘sixties – and at the changing political climate since that time, which has itself modified the impact of any artistic statement. He asks whether the progressive theatre worker should in today's reactionary climate regard such forms as suspect, or look for ways of harnessing them to the creation of a ‘dialectical view of pleasure’ through the multi-faceted potential of epic theatre. R. G. Davis, who was founding director of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the 'sixties, is a leading director of Brecht and, more recently, of Dario Fo in the United States, and is currently directing his adaptation of llya Ehrenburg'sLife of the Automobile as an imagistc theatre piece. He has been a regular contributor to TQ and NTQ.

Kristeva, Julia (1941–)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Chanter
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Closed System ◽  
Scientific Models ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Symbolic Meanings ◽  
Fluid Process ◽  
The 1960S

Born in Bulgaria, Kristeva entered the Parisian scene of avant-garde intellectuals in the 1960s. Her earliest work in linguistics was shaped by the post-Stalinist communism of eastern Europe, a political climate that exerts its influence on her entire corpus, even as she distanced herself from it, to embrace an increasingly psychoanalytic perspective. Dissatisfied with scientific models of language, conceived as a mere means of communicating preconceived ideas, where words simply function as isolated symbols that represent discrete concepts, Kristeva analyses language as a signifying process. As such, language is not a static and closed system of signs, but a mobile, fluid process that implicates bodily and vocal rhythms in the generation of symbolic meanings. In La Révolution du language poétique (1974) (Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984) Kristeva fuses linguistic insights with psychoanalytic inquiry as she presents two distinct yet interrelated aspects of the signifying process, the semiotic and the symbolic. The semiotic aspect of language is vocal, pre-verbal, rhythmic, kinetic and bodily. The symbolic aspect of language is social, cultural, and rule-governed. Focusing on the interplay between the semiotic and the symbolic, Kristeva is able to analyse literary and historical texts, works of art and cultural phenomena in a way that thematizes the complex relationship between materiality and representation.

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