scholarly journals India and the Translocal Modern Dance Scene, 1890s–1950s

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-59
Author(s):  
Gabriela Vargas-Cetina
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Ted Shawn ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
Indian Dance ◽  
Variety Show ◽  
Delsarte Method

At the end of the nineteenth century and during the first half of the twentieth, lead dancers from different countries became famous and toured internationally. These dancers—and the companies they created—transformed various dance forms into performances fit for the larger world of art music, ballet, and opera circuits. They adapted ballet to the variety-show formats and its audiences. Drawing on shared philosophical ideas—such as those manifest in the works of the Transcendentalists or in the writings of Nietzsche and Wagner—and from movement techniques, such as ballet codes, the Delsarte method, and, later on, Eurythmics (in fashion at the time), these lead dancers created new dance formats, choreographies, and styles, from which many of today’s classical, folk, and ballet schools emerged. In this essay, I look at how Rabindranath Tagore, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, Uday Shankar, Leila Roy Sokhey and Rumini Devi Arundale contributed to this translocal dance scene. Indian dance and spirituality, as well as famous Indian dancers, were an integral part of what at the time was known as the international modern dance scene. This transnational scene eventually coalesced into several separate schools, including what today is known as classical and modern Indian dance styles.

Researching Audience Behaviors in Nineteenth-Century Paris

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katharine Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gold Standard ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Concert Programs

This chapter starts by revisiting a now-familiar text: James H. Johnson’s book Listening in Paris (1995). On the basis of concert and opera reviews, images, and the paratexts of concert programs, Ellis reframes Johnson’s question “When did audiences fall silent?” as “Where and why did audiences fail to fall silent?” Multilayered answers show how (1) many of the noisier phenomena of the eighteenth century resurfaced in new guises from the 1850s onward; (2) the democratization of art music took place in contexts that could not always impose “religious” listening; and (3) there was a resurgent demand, possibly concomitant, for music as pure entertainment in venues where silence was neither required nor expected. The chapter argues that although attentive listening was a gold standard during the latter two-thirds of the nineteenth century in Paris, practice rarely lived up to such expectations, and it was in effect a niche activity.

TROUBLING CONJUGAL LOYALTIES: THE FIRST INDIAN NOVEL IN ENGLISH AND THE TRANSIMPERIAL FRAMEWORK OF SENSATION

2014 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-489
Author(s):  
Sukanya Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Scant Attention

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee(1838–94) is widely recognized as one of the preeminent novelists of nineteenth-century India. A literary forerunner of the much-celebrated Rabindranath Tagore, he authored fourteen Bengali novels which set the benchmark for Bengal's foray into novelistic territory. Bankim acquired national and international repute over the course of his lifetime, and not only were his novels translated into other Indian languages over the course of the nineteenth century, but translations of his work also appeared in Russia from as early as the 1870s (Novikova ii). While Bankim's fame rests on the strength of his Bengali writings multiply translated as they were, his first novel,Rajmohan's Wife(1864), was written in English. Interestingly,Rajmohan's Wife, usually considered the first Indian novel in English, is now seldom read, a neglect replicating the scant attention that the novel garnered when it was first serialized in the 1860s.

The ‘Nautch’, the Veil and the Bayadère: The Indian Dance as Musical Nexus

2019 ◽  
pp. 213-235
Author(s):  
Margaret E. Walker
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
Indian Dance ◽  
The Veil

During the early period of mercantile contact with India, the exotic spectacle of the Bayadères or Nautch Girls seized the imagination of western sojourners and inspired an abundance of artistic production back in Europe. The ‘dancing girl’ is found everywhere in late 18th- and 19th-century orientalist paintings, poetry, novels, and of course, ballets, operas and other musical compositions. Although there are substantial studies exploring musical orientalisms in western art music, little attention has been paid to the role of real-life performances in such musical creation. This chapter explores the influence of the colonial interaction with Indian dance performances over the long 19th century. It argues not only for a nuanced and historicised approach to musical encounter but also, given the centrality of the Nautch in the Indian context, for the crucial inclusion of dance in the global history of music.

Wiesenthal, Grete (1885–1970)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Kolb
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Ballet Dancer ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
The Aesthetic

The Austrian dancer and choreographer Grete Wiesenthal was a transitional figure at the crossroads of ballet and modern dance. Initially trained and employed as a ballet dancer at the court opera in Vienna, she soon became disillusioned with the aesthetic traditionalism of ballet and in 1907 embarked on an independent career. Performing with two of her sisters and later as a soloist, she devised a new dance style and technique that emphasized bodily expressivity with motivational impulses provided by music. In the context of Viennese modernism, Wiesenthal’s work offered a novel interpretation of the Viennese waltz as a theatre dance form, oscillating between art nouveau and symbolism. She was groundbreaking in the Austro-German dance scene, exploring female creativity and individualism while contravening balletic principles. Although her career began in Vienna, she toured extensively across much of Europe and overseas, notably in New York, and hence extended her influence internationally. Wiesenthal shared with female contemporaries Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan a natural grace, expressive artistry, and flexibility of hands and arms. However, unlike Pavlova, Wiesenthal transgressed the confines and repertory of ballet – for instance, eschewing pointe work. Like Duncan, her body image was liberated, but she was less daring in her choice of costumes – for instance, dancing in sandals rather than barefoot – and drew inspiration from local cultural traditions and not from Greek antiquity.

Pneumatic Dancing Girls

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-188
Author(s):  
Anya P. Foxen
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
New Thought ◽  
Isadora Duncan

Chapter 4 examines American Delsarteism as a form of harmonialism, positioning it between harmonial breath and movement practices being advocated within the broader New Thought movement and the development of modern dance. It focuses on the work of Genevieve Stebbins, whose use of esotericism closely connects her to prominent proponents of New Thought such as Warren Felt Evans, but whose influence on women such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis makes her something of a grandmother of modern dance. It then traces the innovations within American Delsarteism exemplified by Stebbins into Duncan’s work, which exhibits a strong esotericist influence and a harmonial subcurrent. In this context, it points out the lack of Asian content in these formulations as they culminate in Duncan’s strong Hellenic neoclassicism. Finally, it positions St. Denis as a contrast to Duncan’s Hellenism by focusing on her engagement with a resurgent and popularly explosive Orientalism.

scholarly journals Chaikovsky and the Economics of Art Music in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-227
Author(s):  
Philip Ross Bullock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art World ◽  
Systematic Account ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Musical Institutions ◽  
The One ◽  
Musical Genres ◽  
The Relationship

As Russia’s first professional, conservatory-trained composer, Petr Il'ich Chaikovsky operated in the rapidly evolving social and economic context of post-emancipation Russia, identifying ways to interact with Russia’s musical institutions—its opera houses and theaters, its concert organizations and publishers—to fashion a career that was as successful financially as it was critically. Yet the myth of Chaikovsky’s financial incompetence persists, and the image, whether popular or scholarly, is still one of Chaikovsky as a spendthrift, unable to manage his income or regulate his outgoings. This article challenges such views by drawing on the recently published complete correspondence between Chaikovsky and his publisher, Petr Iurgenson, as well as on financial records preserved in the composer’s archives. In particular, this article analyzes the relationship among Chaikovsky, Iurgenson, and the operation of Russia’s musical “marketplace” at the level of genre, examining the interaction between financial considerations on the one hand and Chaikovsky’s decision to work in particular musical forms on the other. By examining the connections among Russia’s nascent musical institutions, Chaikovsky’s particular collaboration with his publisher, and the relative status of different musical genres, it becomes possible to establish the nature of Russia’s musical “art world” in the second half of the nineteenth century. In proposing a more nuanced and systematic account of Chaikovsky’s economic agency than has been attempted previously, this article thus contributes to a growing body of work on the institutional structures that shaped the Russian arts in the nineteenth century.

THE DISCOURSE OF SOUND

Tempo ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (277) ◽  
pp. 5-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kaltenecker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Compositional Styles ◽  
Technical Features ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractThis article offers a short overview of the development of listening theories concerning Western art music since the end of the eighteenth century. Referring to Michel Foucault, I consider such theories as discourses which produce ‘power effects', such as the training of listening attitudes, or the construction of specific spaces, such as the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. During the eighteenth century, predominant discourses considered musical pieces as orations and, since the nineteenth century, as complex organisms or structures. In the last third of the twentieth century a focus on sound, evinced for instance by the field of ‘sound studies', has produced a new configuration that dissolves the prevailing model of structural listening. This perspective may shed light on some technical features of contemporary compositional styles, which I examine by considering the use of melodies, gestures and loops in two compositions by Fausto Romitelli and Simon Steen-Andersen.

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