The Amplification of Affect: Tension, Intensity and Form in Modern Dance

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Atkinson ◽  
Michelle Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Classical Ballet

In Chapter 5 affect is considered as corporeal tension and intensity in two modernist works by the Ballets Russes, Léonide Massine’s Parade (1917) and Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune (1912). Following Massumi’s theory of affect as an autonomous intensity and Susan Langer’s similarly transcorporeal notion of a “continuum of feeling,” the chapter explores forms of dance in which affect is grounded in the material gestures of the body and located in the tensions required to create these abstract forms. Feeling was not suppressed in avant-garde dance but rather depersonalised and de-psychologised, following a different logic from the model of emotion as self-expression that dominated classical ballet in the nineteenth century.

The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-66
Author(s):  
Idoia Murga Castro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Original Work ◽  
Silver Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
Rite Of Spring ◽  
Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽  
Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Rainer, Yvonne (1934--)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Miller
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Founding Member ◽  
Dance Theater ◽  
Postmodern Dance ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Judson Dance Theater ◽  
Functional Task

Yvonne Rainer is a key figure of both American postmodern dance and avant-garde feminist cinema. Rainer was a founding member of New York City’s Judson Dance Theater, a hub of postmodern dance experimentation in the 1960s. In her choreography, Rainer rejected the spectacle, virtuosity, and drama exhibited by classical ballet and modern dance, choosing instead to present functional, task-like, neutral movement. Her approach to choreography, which refused to provide easy pleasure, is demonstrated in her "No Manifesto" (1965). Between 1966 and 1969, Rainer began to experiment with film, creating several short works that play with the antihumanist idea that bodies can be equated with objects. In the 1970s Rainer turned her attention exclusively to feature-length experimental filmmaking. Her films in the 1970s and 1980s are works of bricolage that use radical juxtapositions of sound and imagery to create experiences of discontinuity that challenge conventional narrative cinematic structures. Rainer’s first feature-length film, The Lives of Performers (1972), blends fiction and reality by including rehearsal footage from previous dance works, and featuring several dancers from her company, Grand Union, as characters in the film. Rainer’s early films have been described as almost structuralist, owing their inspiration to filmmakers such as Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, and Andy Warhol.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 138-144
Author(s):  
Doran George
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Small Community ◽  
American Government ◽  
Authentic Self ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Concert Dance ◽  
Classical Ballet

This study has traced the relationship between training, dissemination, and choreography within a small community that identified itself as concerned with experimentation in contemporary dance. Applying insights about the body gleaned from earlier in the twentieth century, this group of artists and teachers slowly consolidated around their mutual disapprobation of modern and classical training regimens and their eager interest in exploring new paradigms based in the body’s anatomical truths. Referring to this aggregate of overlapping practices as Somatics, I have argued that dancers worked to achieve an unencumbered individuality that contrasted markedly with the more authoritative imposition of aesthetics in classical and modern concert dance. By focusing on the experience of dancing, Somatics encouraged practitioners to connect with their “unique” embodiment of natural principles and to retrieve an authentic self that was thought to be integral to the physical body. This notion that the dancer embodies individual authenticity by accessing a natural body is probably the major contribution that Somatics has made to Western concert dance compared with, for example, the technical excellence in the idealized vocabulary of classical ballet or the codification of emotional expression in modern dance. Yet, despite the seemingly progressive thrust of Somatics, dancers, in their pursuit of individual authenticity, actually fulfilled postwar liberal ideals that were central to American expansionism and that permeate contemporary capitalism. The postwar American government justified military, economic, and cultural expansion by insisting they were protecting and propagating a universal right to individual freedom; dancers invested in the same idea by touting, as universally applicable, the notion that individual creative freedom can be accessed through functional imperatives of the body. This study consequently argues that Somatic authenticity embodies a late twentieth-century capitalist ideal of propagating universal individual freedom....

Diaghilev and British Writing

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

This article explores the diversity of British literary responses to Diaghilev's project, emphasising the way in which the subject matter and methodologies of Diaghilev's modernism were sometimes unexpectedly echoed in expressions of contemporary British writing. These discussions emerge both in writing about Diaghilev's work, and, more discretely, when references to the Russian Ballet find their way into the creative writing of the period, serving to anchor the texts in a particular cultural milieu or to suggest contemporary aesthetic problems in the domain of literary aesthetics developing in the period. Figures from disparate fields, including literature, music and the visual arts, brought to their criticism of the Ballets Russes their individual perspectives on its aesthetics, helping to consolidate the sense of its importance in contributing to the inter-disciplinary flavour of modernism across the arts. In the field of literature, not only did British writers evaluate the Ballets Russes in terms of their own poetics, their relationship to experimentation in the novel and in drama, they developed an increasing sense of the company's place in dance history, its choreographic innovations offering material for wider discussions, opening up the potential for literary modernism's interest in impersonality and in the ‘unsayable’, discussions of the body, primitivism and gender.

Shakespeare’s Dancing Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 172-196
Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Somatic Psychology ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Early Modern Times

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.

SEEING AND HEARING DISABILITY IN MAURICIO KAGEL'S REPERTOIRE FROM STAATSTHEATER

Tempo ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (296) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Bethany Younge
Keyword(s):  
Disability Studies ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Hearing Disability ◽  
Physical Action ◽  
The One ◽  
Traditional Roles

AbstractThis article adopts a disability studies perspective to evaluate the ways in which Mauricio Kagel's Repertoire from Staatstheater reimagines human bodies. Objects and bodies interact in myriad ways within the one hundred vignettes of Repertoire: some objects hinder or aid the bodies on stage, while others become incorporated within the body, acting as a single expressive unit. My analysis demonstrates the ways in which both objects and bodies transform their traditional roles as ascribed by society, rejecting procrustean physiques. Using disability studies concepts such as embodiment and experientialism I evaluate sound and physical action as inextricable expressions of imaginative corporealities. Reflecting upon Kagel's identity as an outsider of the European avant-garde, as well as his irreverence for oppressive social institutions, I evince that other forms of hierarchical disruptions are at play, namely that abled bodies do not preside over disabled ones and notions of beauty hold no clout.

Staging the Folk: Choreographic Issues of National Representation

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-246
Author(s):  
Anthony Shay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Folk Dance ◽  
Ethnic Representation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Dance Companies

This article looks at the multiple ways that folk dance has been staged in both the nineteenth century when character or national (the two terms were used interchangeably) dance was widely used in classical ballet, and the twentieth in which Igor Moiseyev created a new genre of dance related to it. The ballet masters that created character dance for ballet often created ballroom dances based on folk origin, but that would be suitable for the urban population. This popularity of national dance was the result of the burgeoning of romantic nationalism that swept Europe after the French Revolution. Beginning in the 1930s with Igor Moiseyev founding the first professional ‘folk dance’ company for the Soviet Union, nation states across the world established large, state-supported folk dance companies for purposes of national and ethnic representation that dominated the stages of the world for the second half of the twentieth century. These staged versions of folk dance, were, I argue an extension of nineteenth century national/character dance because their founding directors, like Igor Moiseyev, came from the era when ballet dancers were trained in that genre.

“The Blackness of Darkness”

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
Lara Langer Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
White Writers ◽  
The World ◽  
Newspaper Articles ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.

Distributed corporeality: Anatomy, knowledge and the technological reconfiguration of bodies in ballet

2018 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 869-890
Author(s):  
Sophie Merit Müller
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Network Theory ◽  
Analytical Approach ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Black Box ◽  
The Body ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Anatomical Knowledge ◽  
Classical Ballet ◽  
Anatomy Knowledge

Various specialist cultures configure bodies as complex technological devices. We know little about how exactly this is done. I focus on one of these cultures, classical ballet, to praxeologically reconstruct the conceptual, situational and material configuration of bodies as particular instruments. The technologization of the body is closely intertwined with the scientification of the practice – its ladenness with scientific knowledge about the body and an elaborate apparatus for the production of bodies. When anatomical knowledge and didactics intertwine in ballet class, this facilitates an opening of the black box ‘body’ for technical improvement. ‘A body’ becomes a plurality of (in this case, anatomically distinguished) actants. This distributed corporeality suggests that ‘the body’ is an assemblage that becomes apparent as such in moments of its modification. The empirical case as well as the analytical approach here give reason to reconsider the distinction between humans and non-humans that still prevails in actor-network theory and elsewhere.

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