Allergies, allegiances and authenticity: Bill T. Jones’s choreography for Broadway

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Nereson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Critical Reception ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of

The critical reception of Bill T. Jones’s choreography for the Broadway stage reinvigorates debates about high and low cultural production and reveals persistent critical biases regarding the requirement of authenticity for non-white artists. Jones’s genre crossing participates in a cultural history of choreographers and dancers who dance(d) across concert and commercial stages; Jones’s work is further complicated by a rubric of authenticity as it contributes to both the mythology of the avant-garde and audience expectations of racialized cultural producers. This article argues that the reception of Jones’s choreography evidences the interdependence between blackness as authenticity and high/low dichotomies of artistic production, particularly those that contour dance reception. I foreground the multiple ways in which the formulation of blackness as authenticity supports Broadway’s commercial, often posited as ‘inauthentic’, aesthetics and aims.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900-1925

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hubert van den Berg ◽  
Irmeli Hautamäki ◽  
Benedikt Hjartarson ◽  
Torben Jelsbak ◽  
Rikard Schönström ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of

Reception History and Beyond: Toward the Cultural History of Scriptures

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Beal
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
Biblical Texts ◽  
Cultural Turn

After highlighting the substantial gains made by the reception historical approach, this article proceeds to point out some of its inherent limitations, particularly when applied to biblical texts. In attending to the material-aesthetic dimensions of biblical texts, media, and ideas of the Bible, especially in dialogue with anthropological, material-historical, and media-historical approaches, these limitations become acute and call for a harder cultural turn than is possible from a strictly reception-historical approach. This article proposes to move beyond reception history to cultural history, from research into how biblical texts and the Bible itself are received to how they are culturally produced as discursive objects. Such a move would involve a double turn in the focus of biblical scholarship and interpretation: from hermeneutical reception to cultural production, and from interpreting scripture via culture to interpreting culture, especially religious culture, via its productions of scripture. As such, it would bring biblical research into fuller and more significant dialogue with other fields of comparative scriptural studies, religious studies, and the academic humanities and social sciences in general.

scholarly journals Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, Tania Orum (eds.), A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2019)

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hoeren
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Nordic Countries ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of

A review of the book: Andrea Kollnitz, Per Stounbjerg, Tania Orum (eds.), A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic Countries 1925-1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2019)

Fashioning Socialist Visual Culture

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
Socialist Revolution ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Patriarchal Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Xia Yan

Xia Yan, the underground leader of the left-wing films in the 1930s and top official of the film industry in the PRC since 1954, embodied the cultural history of the CCP. A brief biography of this Communist feminist artist leader disrupts the reductive dichotomy of the Party vs. artists in film studies and illuminates a tension-ridden history of socialist filmmaking that constituted a highly contentious site in the socialist revolution. Situating his politically engagingartistic creativity inside ashiftingpolitical process, this chapter traces Xia Yan’s major role in transmitting the New Culture agenda of transforming a patriarchal culture in socialist cultural production and delineatesdiverse and contradictory politicalpositions and artistic preferences in artists’ innovative experimentsofcreating a socialist new culture. It also analyzes his films that continued the paradigm of revolutionary heroines.

Queer Encounters in the Music of Billy Strayhorn

2013 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 771-824 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Barg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Queer Identity ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Complex Relationships

AbstractThis article addresses issues of queer identity, aesthetics, and history in jazz through a focus on two midcentury works composed and/or arranged by Billy Strayhorn: a set of four pieces written in 1953 for an Off-Broadway production of Federico García-Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplín for Belisa in Their Garden (Amor de Don Perlimplín con Belisa en su jardín); and several movements from the Strayhorn-Ellington adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite (1960). My study considers how the two works engage artistic figures, themes, topics, and aesthetic practices that have strong queer historical affiliations. These include failed or impossible love, masking, stylized exotica, and other liminal spheres of identificatory ambiguity and reversal. Taken together, these works enable a positioning of Strayhorn within modernist queer cultural history and, more specifically, within the history of African American gay cultural production. At the same time, through showing how queerness inhabits jazz's past, my analyses of Strayhorn's queer musical encounters provide a critical vantage point from which to examine historical and cultural understandings of jazz at midcentury and, more broadly, the complex relationships between social identities (race, sexuality, gender) and composition, arrangement, and collaboration in twentieth-century music.

scholarly journals El teatro clásico español en el cine

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Presotto
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The Political ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Franco Regime ◽  
Spanish Theater ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Dramatic Text ◽  
Creative Contribution ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This book aims to deepen the relationship between classical Spanish theater and cinema through the analysis of a corpus which has been only partially studied and recently rescued by critics. The chapters first deal with theoretical questions about the cinematographic adaptation of a dramatic text, followed by specific studies of significant periods in the political and cultural history of Spain in the 20th century, such as the artistic production of exile and that of the Franco regime, also taking into account the creative contribution of the most recent films based on the theme and their impact on contemporary society.

The cultural production of Cabaret Voltaire: Marxism, the politics of modernism and post-punk

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the contribution of Cabaret Voltaire to the history of industrial and electronic music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Heavily influenced by the music of Kraftwerk, the Cabs drew upon the dystopian landscapes of William Burroughs to create a paranoid soundscape. Like Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire’s music was influenced by the artistic movements of the twentieth century (most prominently Dada) and drew upon modernist techniques. Especially significant in this regard was their location within post-industrial Sheffield and the ideologies of post-punk more generally. This discussion offers a critical assessment of Cabaret Voltaire as a form of avant-garde music that sought to carefully position itself in the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Primarily through the work of Marxist aesthetic theory, I seek to offer a critical appreciation of the relationship between Cabaret Voltaire and the influence of Dada and modernism. The aim of the discussion is to reclaim a more critical understanding of Marxism while exploring its arguments in relation to artistic forms of modernism and popular culture. Especially important at this juncture is the rejection of the cultural populism of postmodernism and the reclaiming of a more critical language of evaluation and critique. Here the argument is that whatever Cabaret Voltaire’s limitations they continue to remind us of modernism’s ongoing capacity to offer arresting forms of art and critique.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document