Dream weaving: A conversation with Jennifer Irwin

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margot Anderson
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Indigenous Culture ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
30Th Anniversary

In December 2019 as I made my way through Bangarra Dance Theatre’s exhibition Knowledge Ground, Australia was in the early stages of a devastating bushfire season and Sydney was shrouded in a cloud of smoke. It was Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 30th anniversary and I was fully immersed in a theatrical display of set pieces, soundscapes and costumes from landmark productions by Australia’s premier First Nations performing arts company. Bangarra’s body of work draws on over 65,000 years of Indigenous culture and fuses the language of traditional and contemporary dance to create a compelling narrative based on a shared knowledge of country. These works have served as markers of revelation in the development of my own understanding of Australia and have made Bangarra an internationally acclaimed source of powerful story telling. They have also fuelled a long-lasting appreciation of the costumes designed for the company by Jennifer Irwin with whom I shared a series of discussions.

A Body of Accents

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-51
Author(s):  
Ami Skånberg Dahlstedt
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Dance Education ◽  
Cultural Exchange ◽  
Foreign Accent ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Professional Dance ◽  
Year 2000 ◽  
Exchange Programmes ◽  
Nihon Buyo

Abstract Dance practice is often hidden inside dance studios, where it is not available for dialogue or interdisciplinary critique. In this paper, I will look closer at one of the accents that my body has held since the year 2000. To Swedish dance academies, it is perhaps the most foreign accent I have in my dance practice. It has not been implemented as ‘professional dance’ in Western dance studios. This foreign accent is called Nihon Buyō, Japanese dance, also known as Kabuki dance. Nihon Buyō, Nō or Kabuki are local performing arts practices for professional performers in Japan. A few foreigners are familiar with these practices thanks to cultural exchange programmes, such as the yearly Traditional Theatre Training at Kyoto Art Centre. There is no religious spell cast over the technique or a contract written that it must be kept secret or that it must not leave the Japanese studio or the Japanese stage. I will compare how dance is being transmitted in the studio in Kyoto with my own vocational dance education of many years ago. Are there similarities to how the female dancer’s body is constructed? Might there be unmarked cultural roots and invisible originators of the movements we are doing today in contemporary dance?

The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Short Film ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Experimental Theatre

This book examines different kinds of analogies, mutual influences, integrations, and collaborations of the audio and the visual in different art forms. The contributions, written by key theoreticians and practitioners, represent state-of-the-art case studies in contemporary art, integrating music, sound, and image with key figure of modern thinking constitute a foundation for the discussion. It thus emphasizes avant-garde and experimental tendencies, while analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. The book is organized around three core subjects, each of which constitutes one section of the book. The first concentrates on the interaction between seeing and hearing. Examples of classic and digital animation, video art, choreography, and music performance, which are motivated by the issue of eye versus ear perception are examined in this section. The second section explores experimental forms emanating from the expansion of the concepts of music and space to include environmental sounds, vibrating frequencies, language, human habitats, the human body, and more. The reader will find here an analysis of different manifestations of this aesthetic shift in sound art, fine art, contemporary dance, multimedia theatre, and cinema. The last section shows how the new light shed by modernism on the performative aspect of music has led it—together with sound, voice, and text—to become active in new ways in postmodern and contemporary art creation. In addition to examples of real-time performing arts such as music theatre, experimental theatre, and dance, it includes case studies that demonstrate performativity in visual poetry, short film, and cinema.

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.

scholarly journals Gravettian hand stencils as sign language formatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 376 (1824) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo Etxepare ◽  
Aritz Irurtzun
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Upper Palaeolithic ◽  
Story Telling ◽  
Theme Issue ◽  
Sign Languages ◽  
Plains Indians ◽  
Cave Wall

Several Upper Palaeolithic archaeological sites from the Gravettian period display hand stencils with missing fingers. On the basis of the stencils that Leroi-Gourhan identified in the cave of Gargas (France) in the late 1960s, we explore the hypothesis that those stencils represent hand signs with deliberate folding of fingers, intentionally projected as a negative figure onto the wall. Through a study of the biomechanics of handshapes, we analyse the articulatory effort required for producing the handshapes under the stencils in the Gargas cave, and show that only handshapes that are articulable in the air can be found among the existing stencils. In other words, handshape configurations that would have required using the cave wall as a support for the fingers are not attested. We argue that the stencils correspond to the type of handshape that one ordinarily finds in sign language phonology. More concretely, we claim that they correspond to signs of an ‘alternate’ or ‘non-primary’ sign language, like those still employed by a number of bimodal (speaking and signing) human groups in hunter–gatherer populations, like the Australian first nations or the Plains Indians. In those groups, signing is used for hunting and for a rich array of ritual purposes, including mourning and traditional story-telling. We discuss further evidence, based on typological generalizations about the phonology of non-primary sign languages and comparative ethnographic work, that points to such a parallelism. This evidence includes the fact that for some of those groups, stencil and petroglyph art has independently been linked to their sign language expressions. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

From the ground up: growing an Australian Aboriginal cultural festival into a live musical community

2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Ryan ◽  
Jasmin Williams ◽  
Alison Simpson
Keyword(s):  
First Nations ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Event Management ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Organic Growth ◽  
Performance Development

PurposeThe purpose is to review the formation, event management, performance development and consumption of South East Australia’s inaugural 2018 Giiyong Festival with emphasis on the sociocultural imaginary and political positionings of its shared theatre of arts.Design/methodology/approachA trialogue between a musicologist, festival director and Indigenous stakeholder accrues qualitative ethnographic findings for discussion and analysis of the organic growth and productive functioning of the festival.FindingsAs an unprecedented moment of large-scale unity between First and non-First Nations Peoples in South East Australia, Giiyong Festival elevated the value of Indigenous business, culture and society in the regional marketplace. The performing arts, coupled with linguistic and visual idioms, worked to invigorate the Yuin cultural landscape.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional research was curtailed as COVID-19 shutdowns forced the cancellation of Giiyong Festival (2020). Opportunities for regional Indigenous arts to subsist as a source for live cultural expression are scoped.Practical implicationsMusic and dance are renewable cultural resources, and when performed live within festival contexts they work to sustain Indigenous identities. When aligned with Indigenous knowledge and languages, they impart central agency to First Nations Peoples in Australia.Social implicationsThe marketing of First Nations arts contributes broadly to high political stakes surrounding the overdue Constitutional Recognition of Australia's Indigenous Peoples.Originality/valueThe inclusive voices of a festival director and Indigenous manager augment a scholarly study of SE Australia's first large Aboriginal cultural festival that supplements pre-existing findings on Northern Australian festivals.

Comanaging communication crises and opportunities between Northern Secwepemc First Nations and the province of British Columbia

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (7) ◽  
pp. 1935-1946 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Greskiw ◽  
J.L. Innes
Keyword(s):  
British Columbia ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Traditional Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Survey Method ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Ecological Knowledge ◽  
Communication Challenges ◽  
And Training ◽  
Adequate Staffing

The Northern Secwepemc First Nations of central British Columbia are facing serious communication challenges in relation to the comanagement of natural resources in their traditional territories. For First Nations’ managers, communication by speaking and listening and by sharing stories continues to be important for maintaining traditional ecological knowledge and culture. However, in the dominant discourse currently used by management authorities, emphasis is placed on communication products represented in reading and writing, often in electronic format. This dichotomy is leading to communication crises, with traditional ecological knowledge being required to fit within a rigid technology of literacy. The hypothesis that the Northern Secwepemc First Nations are leading transformation initiatives toward sustainable management in their territories and that shared knowledge and responsibility emerges from new growth opportunities in crisis situations has been tested using the case study survey method for inquiry. Results indicate there is potential for transformation towards forest comanagement in Northern Secwepemc territories in times of crises; however, certain conditions such as adequate staffing, funding, and training must first exist at the site level of management for both provincial and Aboriginal managers, to make the best use of emergent opportunities for collaboration.

We all know! Cultural politics from the viewpoint of managers and creators of performing arts

Maska ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (157) ◽  
pp. 31-74
Author(s):  
Jure Novak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Public Institution ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Common Cause ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship

A series of discussions about Slovenian cultural politics from the viewpoint of managers and creators of the performing arts. We interview three practitioners, producers and artists who question and contextualize their own actions. Simon Kardum has transitioned from activist to practitioner, from dreamer to politician. He is the manager of the public institution CUK Kino Šiška. Janez Janša considers the relationship between the public and private cultural sectors. He describes what the differences between the two are and were, and what they could be, and the consequences of erasing these differences. He is the longtime manager of Maska Institute, one of the biggest NGOs in the field of the performing arts in Slovenia. Iztok Kovac is a pragmatist, thinks in the long-term and focuses on the institution in the context of the individual and the contemporary dance genre. He is a pioneer in institutionalizing Slovenian contemporary dance and the manager of the Španski Borci Culture Centre. The interviewees see more errors and possibilities for development in the areas that they are perhaps less familiar with. Between the lines, we find space for possible dialogue, common work for a common cause.

scholarly journals Roots to Routes

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 13-30
Author(s):  
Nicholeen DeGrasse-Johnson ◽  
Christopher A. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Visual And Performing Arts ◽  
Theatre Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

Presented as a retrospective dialogue between the two co-authors, this essay highlights the history of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), and the Visual and Performing Arts School of Dance, Edna Manley College (EMCVPA). The essay traces the post-independence evolution of modern dance in Jamaica. Furthermore, it examines the intersections, the respective roles, functions and contributions of the two major institutions which have shaped Jamaica’s distinctive, modern dance teaching and public performances. By concentrating on their lived experiences, the co-authors explore themes of identity, educational modern dance’s history and philosophies, and Jamaican dance’s cultural and aesthetic dimensions. Finally, the essay invites a reimagining of the Caribbean contemporary dance which values folk, traditional and popular dance as sources for art and scholarship.

How small charities formulate marketing responses to major reductions in income

2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Web Sites ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Government Funding ◽  
Instructional Materials ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Government ◽  
Dance Companies ◽  
Management Functions ◽  
The Impact

Purpose – The purpose of the study was to examine how heads of small charitable performing arts organisations who did not possess backgrounds or qualifications in marketing interpreted the implications, for future marketing activities, of significant cuts in government funding and how their views on the value of marketing changed consequent to the cuts. Design/methodology/approach – Dervin's sensemaking interview method was employed to explore the processes, whereby the heads of 26 small nonprofit contemporary dance companies made sense of the marketing demands of newly constrained funding situations. Findings – Three groups of respondents were identified, respectively, labelled as marketing reductionists, knowledge seekers, and marketing activists. Many of the respondents did not distinguish between marketing and human resource management functions. Major confusions existed vis-à-vis pricing policies and how to evaluate returns on marketing expenditures. Research limitations/implications – The study covered a single sector in just one country. Replication of the study in other sectors and countries would be worthwhile, as would the comparison of how small arts companies deal with various other types of financial crisis. Practical implications – National bodies that award performing arts qualifications need to include marketing in their curricula and syllabuses. Arts marketing associations should make available on their web sites instructional materials relating to marketing. The government should encourage the formation of marketing co-operatives among small performing arts companies. Originality/value – The study applied a qualitative interview technique unfamiliar to most researchers in the marketing field. It was the first to investigate the impact of cutbacks in government funding on the interpretations of marketing held by heads of small arts organisations.

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