Stage visions and strategies of contemporary performing practices – a broadly conceived analysis of the phenomena at the intersection of theory and practice: Valentina Valentini, Worlds, Bodies, Matters: Theatre of the Late Twentieth Century

Maska ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (175) ◽  
pp. 146-149
Author(s):  
Nika Arhar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Complex Field ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The first book in the new series Thinking Through Performance offers a mental feat of a concise survey of numerous performances by various artists and theatrical and philosophical concepts, which the author, Valentina Valentini, also observes within the fields of other disciplines. Three basic lines of investigation bring forth the visions of contemporary theatre worlds, their images and the strategies of their establishment, the expansion of the field while blurring the boundaries between visual art, the performative and new media, as well as the transformation of the actor into the autonomous body of the performer and the body that becomes plural, open, hybrid, space itself. With its in-depth and wide-ranging probing of the key phenomena in contemporary performing arts, its taking into account diverse perspectives, and its fragmentary approach within a complex field, the author has created a productive foundation for new starting-points and understandings in the dialogue between theory and practice.

Secretions

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-158
Author(s):  
Rex Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetic Research ◽  
Forensic Analysis ◽  
Dna Profiling ◽  
The Body ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

Serge Daney, Zapper: Cinema, Television, and the Persistence of Media

October ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 157 ◽  
pp. 107-127
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Digital Revolution ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen

The essay considers Serge Daney's transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated by the possibilities of the small screen and the status of cinema as an old medium. Looking in the “rear-view mirror,” Daney challenges foundational film theory that situates cinema at the forefront of technological and cultural modernity, and he introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s, Daney began to chronicle the experience of watching cinema on television, with old and new media spiraling into each other and the critic engaged in a process of archaeology focused as much on absent or damaged images as the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Tweedie's essay frames the critic's work as a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it counters both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding the digital revolution in the years just after his death, with new media in the vanguard once occupied by cinema. Instead of recomposing this familiar narrative of innovation, succession, and obsolescence, Daney constructs a retrospective and intermedial theory of film, with the act of watching cinema on television revealing both the diminution and the persistence of its most utopian ambitions.

“Wir leben, indem wir leiben”

2016 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 45-56
Author(s):  
Joel Michael Reynolds ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Being And Time ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Life Worth Living ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
The Many ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Awaiting execution, Socrates asks, “Is life worth living with a body that is corrupted and in a bad condition (μοχθηροῦ καὶ διεφθαρμένου σώματος)?” “In no way (Οὐδαμῶς),” replies Crito. While one can only conjecture whether Heidegger would agree with this precise formulation, the specter of (the corruptibility of) the body loomed large during his later years and in much scholarship to follow. Among the many scholars who have addressed the question of the body in Heidegger, nearly all agree that he—early, middle, and late—maintains that Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), not the reverse. Adducing the discussion of Sein-zum-Tode in §§51-53 of Being and Time and the role of der Sterbliche in the Bremen Lectures, I argue that this relation is instead mutually reciprocal, for Heidegger’s own accounts of the role of mortality demonstrate that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being. I term what this thinking proffers a corpoietic understanding of the body, and I conclude by discussing what light this might shed on past indictments of Heidegger’s (non)treatment of the body and on late twentieth-century attempts to think bodily difference.

The “Somatic/Linguistic Turn” and Histories of Exercise and Sport

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Gruneau
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Sport History ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the turn to the body that occurred in sport history in the late twentieth century, tracing its connections to the emergence of structuralism in postwar French social theory. Focusing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault, the chapter argues that the “somatic turn” in sport history drew inspiration from an accompanying linguistic turn in French social theory and philosophy. As part of this discussion, the chapter discusses studies of the body in sport history influenced by Bourdieu and Foucault and concludes with some issues, problems, and implications of the somatic/linguistic turn in current historical research.

Gurdjieff in the Theater

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 209-235
Author(s):  
Catharine Christof
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spiritual Experiences ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Fourth Way ◽  
Jerzy Grotowski ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This article focuses on the links between revolutionary and iconoclastic Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999), and G. I. Gurdjieff. Grotowski is widely honored in the theater world, and understood to have been involved in creating what have been called spiritual experiences within theater movements of the late twentieth century. His work articulated experiences of the spiritual within the body; achieving a removal of spirituality from ecclesial authorities and a relocation of it within the body of the performer. This article explores the manifold resonances between concepts used in Grotowski’s work and that of Gurdjieff, demonstrating how Grotowski’s transformative theater work shows strong elements of Gurdjieff’s influence. Because of the striking and numerous similarities explored herein, a place can be affirmed for Grotowski as an independent Western Fourth Way spiritual teacher, working in theater.

Serge Daney, Zapper

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Tweedie
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Screen ◽  
Over Time

This chapter considers Serge Daney’s transition from a film critic schooled in New Wave cinephilia to a television critic fascinated with the possibilities of the small screen and status of cinema as an old medium. Daney challenges foundational film theory and introduces the language of belatedness, aging, and delay into his writing on the “adult art” of film. In the 1980s he chronicled the experience of watching cinema on television and engaged in a process of “archaeology” focused on absent or damaged images rather than the imaginary plenitude of the screen. Daney’s work at the threshold between media provides a key reference point for film studies in the late twentieth century because it questions both the modernist euphoria of theory produced decades before and the enthusiasm surrounding new media. Daney instead constructs a retrospective theory of film that reveals its diminution over time and the persistence of its utopian ambitions.

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