Attic Document Reliefs: Art and Politics in Ancient Athens

This chapter deals with the genesis of architectural knowledge. In particular, it explores those rare moments when early modern English authors wrote about newly discovered examples of ancient architecture, the most important forms of architectural knowledge that existed. I will discuss three such accounts (all published in the Philosophical Transactions) of Roman York, Palmyra, and ancient Athens. These three texts share a preoccupation with truth and accuracy, as befitted the task of communicating highly sought-after architectural knowledge. They also demonstrate the degree of confidence of English writers in this period, not only in how they interpreted ancient architecture, but also in how they sought to criticize previous European authors on the subject. But most importantly, these texts reveal the extent of English intellectuals’ knowledge of the architectural principles of the ancient world and how that knowledge was in a state of flux.

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Edwin Denby’s Objectivist Modernism and the New York School

10.1093/oso/9780199342235.003.0006 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Andrea Harris

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

New York School ◽

Intrinsic Properties ◽

Dance History ◽

Art And Politics ◽

Objectivist Theory ◽

Biographical Approach

Whereas chapter 2 examines the emergence of a social modernist theory of ballet in the 1930s, chapter 3 illustrates a new ballet modernism arising in the 1940s through the contributions of Edwin Denby. Denby’s primary innovation to American ballet theory was to reassign dance meaning from social or political themes to the intrinsic properties of the movement itself. This chapter takes a biographical approach to Denby’s criticism to situate this theoretical shift in ballet within the interdisciplinary New York School, in which he was extensively involved, and in which similar challenges to the relation of art and politics were being made by painters, photographers, and composers. This chapter demonstrates that Denby was the architect of a new objectivist theory of dance, which relocates the emergence of objectivism to a much earlier point in dance history, and in a different genre, than previously acknowledged. More than any other critic, Denby was responsible for connecting this objectivist theory of dance to Balanchine’s American neoclassicism, formulating the set of aesthetic principles that still shapes our idea of American ballet to date.

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Epilogue

10.1093/oso/9780199651634.003.0012 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Erika Fischer-Lichte

Keyword(s):

Central Position ◽

Short Discussion ◽

German Culture ◽

Ancient Athens

The book concludes with an epilogue entitled ‘The Return of Dionysus. From Festive Performances to Global Spectacle’. It very briefly retraces the exchange of productions of Greek tragedies between Germany and other countries and ends with the role played by productions of Greek tragedies today, at German as well as international theatre festivals, thus linking them back to the most important festival in ancient Athens, the Great Dionysia. After explaining how such festivals in Germany reassert the central position held by theatre in German culture, the epilogue ends with a short discussion of Jan Fabre’s twenty-four-hour performance Mount Olympus—to Glorify the Cult of Tragedy (Berliner Festspiele, June 2015) as an allegory of and a reflection on Greek tragedy’s endurance on the German stage.

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