Pilgrimage, Print, and Performance

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Author(s):  
Matthew Coneys
Keyword(s):  
Public Performance ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Verse Form

This article discusses three poems written in the early 1490s by the Florentine Giuliano Dati (1445–1524), a penitentiary priest at the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome: the Stazione e indulgenze di Roma (1492–93), Tractato di Santo Ioanni Laterano (1492–94), and Aedificatio Romae (1494). Composed in the popular cantare verse form, which was strongly associated with public performance, these works are an unusual example of printed guides to Rome aimed specifically at an Italian audience. Situating Dati’s cantari within the broader culture of the Roman pilgrimage, the article assesses their relationship with established textual and performance traditions and considers the pastoral motivation behind their production. In doing so, it advocates for closer attention to the permeability between ephemeral print and performance in late medieval pilgrimage and devotional culture.

Indigenous Novels in Canada

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tara Hyland-Russell
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Indigenous Literature ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Power Of Story ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Place And Identity

Canadian Indigenous novels emerged as a specific genre within the last thirty years, rooted in a deep, thousands-year-old ‘performance art and poetic tradition’ of oratory, oral story, poetry, and drama. In addition to these oral and performance traditions are the ‘unique and varying methods of written communication’ that flourished long before contact with Europeans. The chapter considers Canadian novels by Indigenous writers. It shows that Indigenous fiction is deeply intertwined with history, politics, and a belief in the power of story to name, resist, and heal; that novel-length Aboriginal fiction in Canada built on a growing body of other forms of Indigenous literature; and that many Indigenous novels foreground their relationship with place and identity as key features of the resistance against systemic and institutional racism. It also examines coming-of-age novels of the 1980s and 1990s that are grounded in realism.

Recovery from memory failure when recalling a memorized performance: The role of musical structure and performance cues

2021 ◽  
pp. 102986492110254
Author(s):  
Roger Chaffin ◽  
Jane Ginsborg ◽  
James Dixon ◽  
Alexander P. Demos
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Memory Failure ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Written Recall ◽  
Performance Gains ◽  
Over Time

To perform reliably and confidently from memory, musicians must able to recover from mistakes and memory failures. We describe how an experienced singer (the second author) recovered from mistakes and gaps in recall as she periodically recalled the score of a piece of vocal music that she had memorized for public performance, writing out the music six times over a five-year period following the performance. Five years after the performance, the singer was still able to recall two-thirds of the piece. When she made mistakes, she recovered and went on, leaving gaps in her written recall that lengthened over time. We determined where in the piece gaps started ( losses) and ended ( gains), and compared them with the locations of structural beats (starts of sections and phrases) and performance cues ( PCs) that the singer reported using as mental landmarks to keep track of her progress through the piece during the sung, public performance. Gains occurred on structural beats where there was a PC; losses occurred on structural beats without a PC. As the singer’s memory faded over time, she increasingly forgot phrases that did not start with a PC and recovered at the starts of phrases that did. Our study shows how PCs enable musicians to recover from memory failures.

Emotions in performance: Poetry and preaching

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Carla Petievich ◽  
Max Stille
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Nation State

Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as ‘mushāʿira’ in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as ‘waʿz mahfil’ in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners’ experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers’ narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across ‘religious’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ realms—and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Susannah Crowder
Keyword(s):  
Urban Culture ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Cultural Framework ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Theatrical Representation

In the spring of 1468, a special jeu – probably taking the form of a theatrical representation in verse – was mounted in the courtyard of the Dominican convent of Metz. This performance portrayed the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, the charismatic urban visionary and reformer who had been canonised just seven years before. Two living women shaped the play, however, both of them also called Catherine: an actor who played the saint, and a patron who sponsored the performance. This event and its female creators point to a richness of female practice in contrast with the old stereotype of the “all-male stage”. This first section thus introduces the historical Catherines who anchor the book as well as the performance methodology used to access their hidden lives and activities beyond the play. It integrates theories of bodily performance with new approaches to patronage, personal devotion, and drama; this enables a broader picture of women’s contributions to late-medieval public life and urban culture. Women’s lives must be studied within a wider social and cultural framework to uncover the full scope of public performance that the Catherines and other women engaged in.

Don Asher’s Fictional-Real Jazz World

2020 ◽  
pp. 122-148
Author(s):  
Reva Marin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
New England ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Short Story ◽  
American Music ◽  
African American Music ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
The Rich ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Story Writer

This chapter examines the life and writings of Don Asher, who studied with pianist Jaki Byard before embarking on a career as a New England society band and honkytonk pianist and later as a nightclub pianist in San Francisco, including a long stint at the famed hungry i. Asher was also a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and collaborator, and analysis of selected works of his fiction and nonfiction uncovers his enduring and sometimes transgressive fascination with African American music and culture. While Asher’s work appears to illustrate “the problem with white hipness” (Ingrid Monson) or “love and theft” (Eric Lott), his ethnic satire was aimed not only at African Americans but also at other groups—Italians, Irish, Jews—as well as at himself and his fictional counterparts. This chapter considers the rich stew of literary and performance traditions in which Asher found models for his satirical, comedic impulses.

scholarly journals Local public innovation: an analysis of its perceived impacts on public performance

2020 ◽  
pp. 002085232096321
Author(s):  
Yoann Queyroi ◽  
David Carassus ◽  
Christophe Maurel ◽  
Christophe Favoreu ◽  
Pierre Marin
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Internal Resources ◽  
The Public ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Public Organisations ◽  
The Impact

This article explores public innovations implemented by local authorities, which consider them as a key means of improving their performance in response to a restrictive context. The authors thus propose to grasp the impacts of these innovations in terms of perceived performance from a global and multidimensional point of view. Based on a quantitative study conducted among French local authorities, this research first presents the results obtained from a theoretical point of view, providing insight into the multiple impacts of implementing innovations within the public sector. Then, at the managerial level, the study identifies specific impacts for each type of public innovation, the aim being to structure the innovation portfolio of public organisations. Points for practitioners An increasing number of innovations are being introduced in the public sector. However, the impact of these innovations on public performance is often not assessed. That is why by focusing our research on French local authorities, we guide managers both in analysing this influence by distinguishing several types of innovation and performance, and in building a portfolio of innovations in line with the internal resources of their local authority, as well as the public service provided in response to the needs of the territory.

Baroque Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
VK Preston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Precious Metals ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Spanish Colonial ◽  
French Academy ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
And Performance

This chapter approaches dance archives and reenactment through analyses of the use of precious metals in drawings of dancers by the seventeenth-century French artist Daniel Rabel. Examining the artist’s album at the Louvre, Preston studies the visual effects of images and materials, testifying to French reimaginings of Indigenous performance practices in early seventeenth-century ballets in Paris. Turning to verse and livrets by René Bordier and Claude de l’Estoile, a founding member of the French Academy, she relates Rabel’s drawings to Andean dance, theater, and performance traditions in Cuzco, Peru. The Ballet de la Douairière de Billebahaut (1626) stages the Inca emperor Atahualpa (“Atabalipa”) as an effigy, satirizing Spanish colonial ambitions. Her approach situates global and trans-Atlantic circulations of performance in major works in the early archives of theatrical ballet in France, addressing reenactment through the work of spectatorship and its ties to archives of conquest.

Rhetoric and Comedy

2014 ◽  
pp. 364-374
Author(s):  
Jody Enders
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
Sense Of Humor ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Rhetorical Tradition ◽  
The Law ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Forensic Rhetoric

The rhetorical tradition demands a sense of humor. Thanks to the highly influential group of late medieval French lawyers and legal apprentices (Basochiens), we know that comedy is deeply imbricated in forensic rhetoric, declamation, and delivery (actio) as well as in the law itself. The farcical, forensic antics of the Society of the Basoche shed new light on the intertwined histories of law, rhetoric, theater, and performance studies. Inasmuch as over 200 French farces are extant—many obsessed with juridical discourse—it is clear that the comedic dimensions of rhetoric constitute far more than a silly footnote. Quite to the contrary, when learned medieval rhetoricians theorized and practiced comedy, they articulated not only a view of the five canons of rhetoric but also a dramatic response against the obscenity of social injustice. In so doing, they also showed the transcendence of an expression that remains popular today: That trial is a farce!

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