scholarly journals Non-professionals on the professional stage: Aesthetics of the ordinary in the contemporary theatre and dance

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-99
Author(s):  
Elena I. Gordienko
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Institutional Identity ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Contemporary Theatre ◽  
Stage Directors ◽  
Main Action ◽  
Community Creation ◽  
Professional Artists ◽  
A Performance

The article explores the tendency of inviting non-professional artists to contemporary theatre and dance performances. From the examples of the Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Nicole Seiler, Tatyana Gordeeva, Vsevolod Lisovsky and Dmitry Volkostrelov performances it is shown how the participation of “ordinary” people serves aesthetic and ethical purposes of the stage directors and choreographers. Ordinary bodies, gestures and voices in contemporary theatre are valued as manifesting the extra-institutional identity of the participants, namely, a professional or social one, with which the spectators could easily identify themselves. The non-virtuosity of movements and speech, making mistakes and even fatigue, become specially constructed “signs of naturalness”. Participatory projects in which the main action is expected to be performed by the audience can be seen also as a performance with non-professional artists. The borders between artistic and non-artistic in such projects are blurred. Likewise, the community creation, the attention paid to other people and the inclusion of “everyday” life becomes its main aesthetic feature.

The exceptional and the ordinary

2018 ◽  
pp. 73-106
Author(s):  
Thomas Docherty
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
The Other ◽  
Normative Belief ◽  
University Education ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Mass Higher Education ◽  
The People ◽  
The University

The contemporary institution fails to understand the real meaning of ‘mass higher education’. A mass higher education should address the concerns of those masses of ‘ordinary people’ who, for whatever reasons, do not attend a university. Instead, the contemporary sector simply admits more individuals from lower social and economic classes. Behind this is a deep suspicion of the intellectual whose knowledge marks them out as intrinsically elitist and not ‘of the people’. An intellectual concerned about everyday life is now seen as suspicious, given the normative belief that a university education is about individual competitive self-advancement. This intellectual is now an enemy of ‘the people’, and incipiently one who might even be regarded as criminal in dissenting from conformity with social norms of neoliberalism. There is a history to this, dating from 1945; and it sets up a contest between two version of the university: one sees it as a centre of humane and liberal values, the other as the site for the production of individuals who conform to and individually benefit from neoliberal greed. The genuine exception is the intellectual who dissents; but dissent itself is now seen as potentially criminal.

Beyond Nostalgia

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-92
Author(s):  
Jing Meng
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The State ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
Film Making ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

In Chapter 3, 11 Flowers represents personal and fragmented memories of the Cultural Revolution from an 11-year-old boy’s perspective. These memories challenge the monolithic narrative of history and the Maoist rhetoric of revolution. At the same time, this fragmented narrative mode enables individual agency in narrating and constructing history. In addition, through portrayals of everyday life in the Maoist era, the film reveals how the dominant ideology at that time was strategically misinterpreted by ordinary people and was dispersed in everyday life. Socialism, in this context, becomes a mystery, a joke, and a traumatic awakening. In the lm, art possesses enlightening power for the 11-year-old boy, who begins to obtain self-awareness through painting. The film thus conveys the director’s authorial enunciation and his belief in art as a form of liberation, not only for a boy in the Cultural Revolution but also for Wang Xiaoshuai as a film-maker. The shifting trajectory of Wang’s film-making—from independent to art house—alludes to the shifting relations between film-making, the state, and the market. In 11 Flowers, personal memories become the hallmark of Wang’s auteur expression.

Coming to Everyman

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-142
Author(s):  
Steven J. Osterlind
Keyword(s):  
Probability Theory ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Calculus Of Variations ◽  
Celestial Mechanics ◽  
Great Influence ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Morality Play

This chapter focuses on how quantification began to increase in the everyday life of ordinary people, who are represented in this chapter by the allegorical figure “Everyman” (from the fifteenth-century anonymous morality play Everyman). It discusses the invention of the chronometer and explores the effect that the increasing availability of luxury items such as sugar, as well as the quantifying ideas that were coming into use at that time, had on the general populace. The chapter then introduces Pierre-Simon Laplace, who assiduously worked to bring the newly formed probability theory to Everyman, especially through his efforts on the orthodrome problem in Traité de mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics), his ideas on scientific determinism (symbolized by “Laplace’s demon”), and his General Principles for the Calculus of Probabilities. The chapter also introduces Joseph-Louis Lagrange, whose work on the calculus of variations had a great influence on Laplace.

Case Files as a Source of Alternative Memories from the Maoist Past

2019 ◽  
pp. 199-219
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Supporting Evidence ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Case Files ◽  
Alternative Discourses

This chapter focuses on traces of alternative discourses articulated by ordinary people and recorded in judicial documents, which present a specific type of archival memory not to be found anywhere else. These documents include confession materials, supporting evidence, overheard conversations volunteered by informants or official court verdicts. The chapter highlights memories about life on the fringes of society during the Mao Zedong era in order to show how ordinary people perceived their situation or domestic and international developments. The sources and the embedded snippets of alternative discourses provide us with rare insights into the situation of everyday life in the late Maoist era.

scholarly journals Dominion, Stewardship and Reconciliation in the Accounts of Ordinary People Eating Animals

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 669
Author(s):  
Anna Sofia Salonen
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Food Consumption ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Everyday

Despite the growing popularity of vegetarian foods and diets, the vast majority of people in North America and other parts of the affluent world still eat meat. This article explores what ordinary people think about eating animals and how they navigate the ethical questions inherent in that praxis. Drawing from interviews with 24 people living in Ottawa, Canada, the study shows how the concepts of dominion, stewardship and reconciliation manifest in the everyday lives of ordinary people as models for human relations with nonhuman others and the environment. These ideas resonate in the lives of ordinary people, both religious and nonreligious, and entwine as people try to make sense of how to live with the fact that their everyday food consumption causes suffering and harm. This study shows that in the context of everyday life, dominion, stewardship and reconciliation are not alternative views, but connected to each other, and serve different purposes. The study highlights a need for analyses that constitute practical ways to renew the broken relationships within creation and which incorporate nonreligious people into the scope of analyses that focus on the relationships between humans and nonhuman creation.

Faiths and Films: Countering the Crisis of Thai Buddhism from Below

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pattana Kitiarsa
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Multiple Issues ◽  
Thai People ◽  
Moral Crisis

AbstractThis article addresses multiple issues of how the ongoing debates of 'Thai Buddhism in crisis' (wikrit phutthasatsana) are perceived and discussed in popular films. Purposefully selecting three film stories, namely, Fun, Bar, Karaoke (1997), Mekhong Full Moon Party (2002), and Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), as case studies, the author argues that the contemporary state of Thai Buddhism is narrated and interpreted in remarkably different tones. There is virtually no moral crisis concerning Thai Buddhism reflected in the films, but a firm faith in Buddhist teachings and principles is presented, with some critical concerns of its religious agencies and performances in Thailand's post-1997 economic crisis context. In the turbulent decade of the 1990s and the new millennium, the Thai people have strongly expressed a desire for religious sanctuary. Faith in Buddhism is still strong and powerful, but its form and content are always plural and multi-dimensional. Everyday life religion, not the official or canonical Buddhism, has continuously posted itself as a prominent frame of reference for ordinary people to re-assess and re-define the problems of modernity in the midst of emerging threats of global capitalist challenges.

scholarly journals The Pepys of London E11: Graeme Miller and the Politics of Linked

2005 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-160 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Lavery
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Subjective Form ◽  
A Performance

In 2003, Graeme Miller was commissioned by the Museum of London to produce a sitespecific artwork for its oral history collection. Miller responded by creating Linked, a performance which bears witness to the disastrous impact the M11 link road has had on his local neighbourhood since its construction in the 1990s. Helped by a team of researchers, Miller interviewed local citizens and road protesters and broadcast their testimonies from twenty transmitters that line the route of the link road. In order to activate the work, the participant borrows a headset from a local library and is invited to follow the link road from Hackney to Wanstead, a distance of roughly four miles. This article explores the politics of Linked from a number of different theoretical perspectives: contemporary ethnography, everyday life studies, urban theory, and Situationism. The objective is to show that Linked offers an alternative paradigm for political performance – a paradigm which also necessitates an idiosyncratic and subjective form of writing. The article is followed by an interview in which Miller speaks about the processes involved in making Linked. Carl Lavery teaches performance and theatre at Loughborough University.

Archaeology and the Etruscan countryside

Antiquity ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 62 (237) ◽  
pp. 772-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Barker
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Settlement Systems ◽  
Religious Architecture ◽  
Good Morning ◽  
Artistic Achievement ◽  
City States ◽  
The Way

The Etruscan city states flourished in westcentral Italy from the late 8th century BC until their conquest and absorption by the emergent state ofRome in the 4th century BC. In 1985 Italy celebrated the century or so of work on its oldest civilization with a series of major exhibitions under the slogan, ‘Buongiorno Etruschi’ (‘Good morning, Etruscansi!’). There were eight major exhibitions in Tuscany displaying over 5000 objects from all the major collections in the region, designed to cover most aspects of Etruscan culture – settlement systems, domestic and religious architecture, religion, everyday life, crafts, and artistic achievement. As the sponsors FIAT wrote in their preface to the splendid catalogues produced for the project (e.g. Camporeale 1985; Carandini 1985; Cristofani 1985; Stopponi 1985), the intention of this massive undertaking was to convey to the Italian public that the Etruscans were not just a dead civilization known above all for the way of death of its élite, but ‘a lively culture of ordinary people, merchants, and craftsmen’.

scholarly journals Impacts of Historical Pandemics on India: Through the Lens of 20th Century Hindi Literature

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 294-314
Author(s):  
Prachi Priyanka
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Hindi Literature ◽  
The Ganges

India has been swept by pandemics of plague, influenza, smallpox, cholera and other diseases. The scale and impact of these events was often cataclysmic and writers offered a glimpse into the everyday life of ordinary people who lost their lives and livelihoods and suffered the angst and trauma of mental, physical and emotional loss. This paper focuses on the devastation caused by pandemics especially in the Ganges deltaic plains of India. Through selected texts of 20th century Hindi writers – Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Bhagwan Das, Harishankar Parsai, Pandey Bechan Sharma – this paper aims to bring forth the suffering and struggles against violence, social injustices and public health crises in India during waves of epidemics and pandemics when millions died as they tried to combat the rampant diseases.

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