Dancing in two worlds: Experiencing n/om inside the Ju/’hoan Bushman dance

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 7-25
Author(s):  
Hillary Keeney ◽  
Bradford Keeney
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Resolution ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
Field Research ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Interviews ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Spiritual Expression

The Ju/’hoan Bushmen or San of southern Africa host one of the oldest surviving dance forms. Openly conducted in public for the whole community, the dance serves as the primary locus for healing, conflict resolution, wellbeing, rejuvenation, social reunion, spiritual expression and performance art. Central to the dance is awakening n/om, what the Bushmen regard as a vibrational force that resides in the body of the strongest dancers. Often described as an energy or power that makes the body shake, n/om is more accurately a blend of somatic vibration, heightened emotion and sacred song. N/om is also the source of a dancer’s capacity to heal sickness in themselves and others. The following composite account of an insider’s perspective of the n/om dance is based on decades of field research interviews with Ju/’hoan n/om dancers and our own experience as accepted members of several Bushman dance communities. We focus on the experience of n/om in the body and how this enables the dancer to dance between two worlds – that of everyday knowing and the ineffable spiritual realm or what the Ju/’hoansi call second creation and first creation, respectively.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

scholarly journals Presença e morte: o carácter efémero das artes do corpo.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pedro Bessa ◽  
Mariana Assunção Quintes dos Santos
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Classical System ◽  
Physical Object ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Technical Reproducibility ◽  
And Performance

This paper aims to reflect on a hypothetical threshold-space between contemporary dance and performance art, questioning at the same time the prevalence of too strict a boundary between them. To this end, a range of works involving hybridization of artistic languages ​​were selected and analyzed, from Signals (1970) by American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham to Café Müller (1978) by German choreographer Pina Bausch. Both dance and performance art are ephemeral arts or, according to the classical system, arts of time as opposed to the arts of space - painting, sculpture and architecture. They have also been called allographic arts, performative arts or, perhaps more specifically, arts of the body (Ribeiro, 1997). Unlike traditional fine arts, which materialize in a physical object other than the body, unlike video-art and cinema, arts without originals, mediated by the process of “technical reproducibility” (Benjamin, 1992), performative arts require the presence of a human body - and the duration of the present - as a fundamental instrument for their realization. In that sense, the paper also focuses on the ephemerality factor associated with dance and performing arts, and the consequent devaluation these have suffered vis-à-vis other artistic practices, considered to be academic and socially more significant.

The Art and Flux of Telepathy 2.0 in Second Life

2011 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Jacquelene Drinkall
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Second Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Western Front ◽  
And Performance

This chapter looks at contemporary art practice in Virtual Worlds, and the effervescence of new technologically mediated telepathies. Avatar Performance Art by Jeremy Owen Turner and Second Front have explored a variety of Second Life telepathies, and have quickly earnt the title of Virtual Fluxus. Second Front’s links to Western Front, Fluxus, Robert Filliou and the Eternal Network assist the continued internationalised new media and performance collaboration work with telepathy. As the body becomes obsolete, it develops new techlepathy1.

Dance Culture and Statuary Politics: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Myth of Primitivism

2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 280-285
Author(s):  
Gregory Sporton
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Universal Values ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Dance is often assumed to have universal values and to manifest a spirit of freedom, especially individual freedom. It is also the case that such freedom is perceived to be deeply rooted in the condition of humanity. In this article Gregory Sporton shows how these assumptions can mislead us about the basis on which dance operates. By citing the body as the original manifestation of expression, and linking dance practice to primitive experience, a sentimental picture of ourselves as dancers emerges. Taking dance practice in Taiwan as an example, the author shows how this ‘naturalist argument’ can be exploited by a political culture and in doing so divert questions of identity. For the visiting observer, dance appears to evidence political culture and social aspiration, identities that are fixed in the present rather than the archaic past. Gregory Sporton has had a substantial performing career in ballet, contemporary dance, opera, and performance art. He is Head of the School for Performance and Moving Image at the University of Central England.

Samuel Beckett and Performance Art

2014 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derval Tubridy
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Body ◽  
Marina Abramovic ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Bruce Nauman

‘Samuel Beckett and Performance Art’ explores the interconnections between Performance Art and Samuel Beckett's prose and drama. It analyses the relations between Beckett's work and that of Franz Erhard Walther, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Alastair MacLennan and Amanda Coogan. It concludes that examining Beckett in the context of Performance Art enables us to reconsider elements vital to his theatre: the experience of the body in space in terms of duration and endurance; the role of repetition, reiteration and rehearsal; and the visceral interplay between language and the body.

Massage, c. 1966

October ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 159 ◽  
pp. 86-102
Author(s):  
Alex Kitnick
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Media Theory ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
The Media ◽  
And Performance

Tied to the body, the word “massage” in the mid-1960s was also associated with media, as well as the idea of mass manipulation. Framed through the work of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the artist Claes Oldenburg, this essay considers the intersections between media theory and body and performance art.

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