Bennington School of the Dance (1934–42)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Candace Feck
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Training Programme ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
College President ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Art Form ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Bennington School of the Dance served as a highly influential training programme, creative laboratory and performance venue for early modern dance. Founded by Martha Hill, Mary Josephine Shelly and Bennington College President Robert Devore Leigh in 1934 on the college campus in south-western Vermont, the school thrived over nine, six-week summer sessions from 1934 to 1942, including one term held at Mills College in California in 1939. Designed to promote and consolidate knowledge of the nascent art form of American modern dance, the Bennington School also became an incubator for the production and presentation of new works by modern dance’s most distinguished exponents: choreographers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Hanya Holm were among its earliest and most consistent faculty members. Dance critic John Martin, composer and advisor Louis Horst, and stage and lighting designer Arch Lauterer were also important faculty members. The programme’s guiding philosophy proposed that to be viable, a dance education must be associated with exposure to its best artists, sharply distinguishing itself from the competing model formulated by Margaret H’Doubler at the University of Wisconsin, where the study of dance was viewed as an educational end in itself. The Bennington School gave way to the Connecticut College School of Dance and eventually the American Dance Festival.

Tamiris, Helen (1902–1966)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Graff
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Social Protest ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Negro Spirituals ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Collaborative Ventures ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
Modern Dancers ◽  
Popular Audience

Helen Tamiris was a key figure in the development of American modern dance; along with Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Hanya Holm, she helped to forge the art form. Born Helen Becker to an immigrant Russian Jewish family on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, she was introduced to dance at the Henry Street Settlement House. After a brief stint in the ballet world and on the commercial stage, she gained recognition as a concert dancer with a suite of dances set to Negro Spirituals. These signature works established her reputation as a choreographic voice for the oppressed; themes of social protest inspired her throughout her career. As a political activist she promoted collective bargaining for dancers, organized collaborative ventures with other early modern dancers, and led the campaign to create a Federal Dance Project for unemployed dancers during the Depression years. She was unusual among early moderns in her desire to reach a broad popular audience, and in the 1940s and 1950s choreographed a succession of Broadway musicals, receiving critical acclaim for choreography in shows such as Annie Get Your Gun and Plain and Fancy. Her political engagement and her success in bridging the divide between high art and popular culture distinguish her among American modern dancers.

The Wisconsin School of African History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Demographic History ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
African History ◽  
Global History ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Ongoing Effort ◽  
Initial Cohort ◽  
The University ◽  
Distinguishing Features

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a prominent producer of doctorates in African history since 1963. As of 2017 the institution had granted more than 110 degrees. Philip D. Curtin and Jan Vansina, both pioneers in launching the field, led the program until 1975 and were joined in 1969 by Steven Feierman. Together, they supervised an initial cohort of graduates, several of whom became leaders of the then still-formative field, particularly in its methodological infrastructure, as well as in economic and demographic history, slavery in Africa and the Atlantic slave trade, and medical history. The distinguishing features qualifying a diverse array of individual intellectual trajectories as a coherent “school” include a focus on epistemologically historical approaches anchored in the intellectual perspectives of Africans as historical actors and often also as they engaged broader commercial Atlantic and Indian Ocean and world contexts; smaller numbers of more recent doctorates had subsequently sustained these orientations. Former graduates of the program, William W. Brown, David Henige, and Thomas T. Spear, returned after 1975 to update this framework by bringing social theory and cultural history to bear on the African historical actors at the program’s core. Since 2005, a third generation of faculty members, Neil Kodesh, James Sweet, and Emily Colacci (all students of Wisconsin PhDs teaching at other institutions), have added contemporary approaches to the Wisconsin school’s continuing commitment to Africans’ distinctive epistemologies as they engaged the flows of modern global history. Professionally, Madison graduates have, accordingly, led the ongoing effort to bring Africa in from its initial marginality—as the continent seen as uniquely without a history—into the historical discipline’s core. An aphoristic summary of the Wisconsin legacy might be “Africans’ worlds and Africans in the world.”

Two Masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Empty Space ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Art Form ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Hebrew University ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The University

Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. The actors and drummers create an entire world in the empty space of the stage by using spectacular costumes and make-up and by an immensely rich interplay of words, rhythms, mime, and gestures. This volume focuses on Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, the two great masterpieces of Kūṭiyāṭṭam. It provides fundamental general remarks and relates them to pan-Indian reflections on aesthetics, philology, ritual studies, and history. Authored by scholars and active Kūṭiyāṭṭam performers, this is the first attempt to bring together a set of sustained, multi-faceted interpretations of these masterpieces-in-performance. With an aim to open up this ancient art form to readers interested in South Indian culture, religion, theatre and performance studies, philology, as well as literature, this volume offers a new way to access a major art form of pre-modern and modern Kerala. The University of Tuebingen in Germany and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel were partners in a long-term project studying and documenting Kūṭiyāṭṭam performances, including initiating full-scale performances of major works in the classical repertoire. We have been, in particular, focusing on the study of the two major, complex and ancient works, Mantrāṅkam and Aṅgulīyāṅkam, both of which we have seen and recorded in full. The articles in this volume are one of the results. They are supplemented with video-clips of lecture demonstrations provided online.

scholarly journals Drilling operations for the South Pole Ice Core (SPICEcore) project

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay A. Johnson ◽  
Tanner Kuhl ◽  
Grant Boeckmann ◽  
Chris Gibson ◽  
Joshua Jetson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Ice Core ◽  
Austral Summer ◽  
South Pole ◽  
The South ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Drilling Operations ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Core Project ◽  
The University ◽  
Drill System

Abstract Over the course of the 2014/15 and 2015/16 austral summer seasons, the South Pole Ice Core project recovered a 1751 m deep ice core at the South Pole. This core provided a high-resolution record of paleoclimate conditions in East Antarctica during the Holocene and late Pleistocene. The drilling and core processing were completed using the new US Intermediate Depth Drill system, which was designed and built by the US Ice Drilling Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In this paper, we present and discuss the setup, operation, and performance of the drill system.

Gerrard, Saida (1913–2005)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seika Boye
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The United States ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Federal Theater Project ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

Toronto-born Saida Gerrard was one of the first artists to import modern dance to Canada following study in the United States. Her early training included character dancing and Dalcroze eurhythmics in Toronto, and in 1931 she moved to New York City to train at the newly opened Mary Wigman School, where she studied with Hanya Holm and Fe Alf. She later continued her training at the Martha Graham School and danced with Charles Weidman through the Federal Theater Project. Gerrard eventually settled in California where she continued to teach, choreograph, and perform. From 1932 to 1936 Gerrard returned to Toronto for personal reasons and opened The Studio of Modern Dance, teaching adaptations of exercises in absolute dance (Ausdruckstanz) learned at the Wigman School. Her influence is seen through to the professionalization of modern dance in Toronto in the 1960s. Gerrard’s professional career blossomed during her return to Toronto. She performed her own work before crowds as large as 8,000 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, exposing many to modern dance for the first time. Her article/manifesto "The Dance" explains the artistic and philosophical impetus behind the developing art form. She eventually returned to New York where there was an infrastructure to support a professional dance career, which was not available in Canada at the time.

Prologue

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Victoria Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
The Public ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
High Level ◽  
Hearts And Minds

In 1955, Martha Graham and her company of diverse dancers landed in Japan to begin their first official State Department–sponsored tour of Asia and the Middle East to countries that President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated as the “domino nations,” or those most likely to fall to communist influence. On the tarmac, Graham was greeted by mass crowds and children bearing bouquets. American modern dance challenged the Soviet ballet, as a tour by Galina Ulanova preceding Graham. Newspapers announced, “U.S. and Soviet Competition in Dancing: Graham and Ulanova.” Graham triumphed with her abstract works alongside tales from the Western canon, fractured narratives, and female protagonists, all to describe the “soul of mankind.” Graham became useful as she attached herself to Eisenhower’s American battle for “hearts and minds,” particularly since she added the frontier and its pioneers to the cast of archetypes presented onstage in “the language that needs no words,” and embodied what she called the “universal.” Graham was heralded as an ambassadress during high-level diplomatic exchanges and embassy parties on the “cocktail circuit of diplomacy.” Graham and her company also functioned as diplomats when they engaged with the public during lecture-demonstrations and shopping for artifacts. While Graham proclaimed that her work was “universal,” and thus not political, one critic remarked that “the patriotic placing of American national interest at the end with Appalachian Spring” served “to underscore the diplomatic nature of this cultural mission.” Graham’s dances were modernist and seemingly apolitical art as creatures of Cold War politics.

scholarly journals Awareness of Open Access Issues Differs among Faculty at Institutions of Different Sizes

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Reed
Keyword(s):  
Open Access ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Liberal Arts University ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Promotion Process ◽  
The University

A Review of: Kocken, G. J. & Wical, S. H. (2013). “I’ve never heard of it before”: Awareness of open access at a small liberal arts university. Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 32(3), 140-154. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1080/01639269.2013.817876 Abstract Objective – This study surveyed faculty awareness of open access (OA) issues and the institutional repository (IR) at the University of Wisconsin. The authors hoped to use findings to inform future IR marketing strategies to faculty. Design – Survey. Setting – University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a small, regional public university (approximately 10,000 students). Subjects – 105 faculty members. Methods – The authors contacted 397 faculty members inviting them to participate in an 11 question online survey. Due to anonymity issues on a small campus, respondents were not asked about rank and discipline, and were asked to not provide identifying information. A definition of OA was not provided by the authors, as survey participants were queried about their own definition. Main Results – Approximately 30% of the faculty were aware of OA issues. Of all the definitions of OA given by survey respondents, “none . . . came close” to the definition favoured by the authors (p. 145). More than 30% of the faculty were unable to define OA at a level deemed basic by the authors. A total of 51 (48.57%) of the survey respondents indicated that there are OA journals in their disciplines. Another 6 (5.71%) of the faculty members claimed that there are no OA journals in their disciplines, although most provided a definition of OA and several considered OA publishing to be “very important.” The remaining 48 participants (46%) were unsure if there are OA journals in their disciplines. Of these survey respondents, 38 answered that they have not published in an OA journal, 10 were unsure, and 21 believed that their field benefits or would benefit from OA journals. Survey respondents cited quality of the journal, prestige, and peer review as extremely important in selecting a journal in which to publish. Conclusion – The authors conclude that the level of awareness related to OA issues must be raised before IRs can flourish. They ponder how university and college administrators regard OA publishing, and the influence this has on the tenure and promotion process.

African Studies Program, University of Wisconsin

1965 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 429-430
Author(s):  
M. Crawford Young
Keyword(s):  
Faculty Members ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Teaching And Research ◽  
University Departments ◽  
University Of Wisconsin ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
A Minor ◽  
The University

The African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin was established in September 1961, thus formalising the co-operation which had been developing over several years between faculty members in various disciplines and departments with research and teaching interests in Africa. The Program provides a centre for the co-ordination of such teaching and research. A certificate in African studies may be obtained in association with an M.A. degree in one of the university departments; at the Ph.D. level, African studies may be offered as a minor field.

scholarly journals Dance, The Divine, and The Devious Other: Orientalism and the Presentation of Race and Gender in the Work of Ruth St. Denis

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Krista Kee ◽  
Class of 2016
Keyword(s):  
Modern Dance ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Eastern Hemisphere ◽  
Isadora Duncan ◽  
American Modern Dance ◽  
And Gender

Ruth St. Denis is considered to be one of the pioneers of American modern dance. She was a performer and choreographer often mentioned alongside the historical giants of modern dance like Isadora Duncan and St. Denis’s own protégé, Martha Graham. Ruth St. Denis’s Eastern-inspired and ornate dance spectacles earned her significant notoriety and enthralled audiences. St. Denis certainly contributed to the evolution of the American modern dance tradition; however, her success also highlights the presence of Orientalist thought in Western culture. St. Denis focused much of her work on what she referred to as Oriental Dancing. Orientalism refers to the idea that the East is spiritual, sensual, and intriguing. Orientalism overlooks the wide variety of cultures and nations in the Eastern Hemisphere and conveniently names them all as exotic other, thus degrading and oversimplifying them. An analysis of two of St. Denis’s most prominent works, Incense and Radha, reveals how Orientalism insidiously affects the perception of both race and gender in dance spectacle while reinforcing imperialist attitudes of Western superiority.

Enhancing the E-Content Skills of Instructors Through the Use of Cloud-Based Mobile Learning Environment: A Case of a Saudi Arabian University

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Ahmed Majoon Alenezi
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Mobile Learning ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Training Programme ◽  
Faculty Members ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Mobile Learning Environment ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Impact

The research aims to design a mobile learning environment based on cloud computing applications to enhance the designing and publishing e-content skills of the faculty members of Northern Borders University, Saudi Arabia. The researcher used the semi- experimental approach to measure the impact of the mobile learning environment on the cognitive and performance aspects of the faculties. Two research tools were used in the study: an electronic achievement test to measure the cognitive aspect and an observation sheet to measure the performance aspects of designing and publishing e- content skills of faculty members (N=53). A training programme on mobile learning environment based on cloud computing was conducted to enhance the faculty members’ e-content designing skills. There was a statistically significant difference between the average scores of the members in their pre-and post-study assessment of the cognitive and performance aspects of designing and publishing e-content skills. Following the training programme, the faculty’s achievement scores increased to 84% from 42% in the pre-test; their performance to apply the learned skills in various activities improved to 91% from 43%. Based on the results of the study, it can be recommended that the mobile learning environment based on cloud computing applications is quite helpful in developing the skills of using technology by the faculty members.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document