Chinese Revolutionary Ballet

Author(s):  
Xiaomei Chen

Introduced to China in the 1920s, Western ballet evolved into a significant performance genre in modern and contemporary China. Its popularity grew in the twentieth century when political history, revolutionary wars, the impact of Western cultures, and the artistic visions of a new and modern state all played a significant role in the formation of Chinese revolutionary ballet. The revolutionary ballets took over this Western classical form and transformed its aesthetics, turning an elite spectacle into a socialist realist portrayal of everyday life and its challenges. The introduction of Western ballet into China can be traced to 1894, when the first Sino-Japanese War broke out. At that time, Yu Rongling (裕容龄) traveled to Japan with her father, a Manchu aristocratic diplomat of the Qing Court. She learned modern Japanese dance before pursuing a formal training in Western ballet in Paris, and her teachers included Isadora Duncan. Yu’s quick rise to stardom on the Western stage brought her into the Qing Court, from 1904 to 1907, as a lady-in-waiting to entertain Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), who developed an interest in Western modern dance. Yu also initiated a combination of Western modern dance with traditional Chinese folk dance, therefore paving the way for the future development of a unique choreography which blended Western and Chinese tradition.

2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Squires

Modernism is usually defined historically as the composite movement at the beginning of the twentieth century which led to a radical break with what had gone before in literature and the other arts. Given the problems of the continuing use of the concept to cover subsequent writing, this essay proposes an alternative, philosophical perspective which explores the impact of rationalism (what we bring to the world) on the prevailing empiricism (what we take from the world) of modern poetry, which leads to a concern with consciousness rather than experience. This in turn involves a re-conceptualisation of the lyric or narrative I, of language itself as a phenomenon, and of other poetic themes such as nature, culture, history, and art. Against the background of the dominant empiricism of modern Irish poetry as presented in Crotty's anthology, the essay explores these ideas in terms of a small number of poets who may be considered modernist in various ways. This does not rule out modernist elements in some other poets and the initial distinction between a poetics of experience and one of consciousness is better seen as a multi-dimensional spectrum that requires further, more detailed analysis than is possible here.


Author(s):  
Adrian Daub

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction that contextualizes the impact that these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.


Author(s):  
Bernardo Bátiz-Lazo

Chapter 1 (‘A Window to Internal and External Change in Banking’) provides a wide-arch view of the themes in the book. It highlights how in spite of being deeply embedded in our culture as an object of everyday life, the interaction with ATMs is largely inconsequential for most people. This chapter also forwards a case to study the ATM to better understand the possibilities for technological change to bring about a cashless economy. Another argument put forward is that the ATM is essential to appreciate the technological and organizational challenges that gave rise to self-service banking. As a result, the case is made that business histories of the late twentieth century will be incomplete without proper consideration to the impact of computer technology on the different aspects of business organizations.


Author(s):  
Christel Lane

This chapter examines the impact of rapid urbanization and industrialization on food and eating out. It draws attention to the growing standardization of food and, with greater class differentiation, to the growing diversity in eating-out venues. Class, gender, and nation are again used as lenses to understand the different eating-out habits and their symbolic significance. Towards the end of the twentieth century, pubs moved more fully towards embracing dining. However, the quality of food, in general terms, began to improve significantly only towards the end of the century, and hospitality venues also moved towards selling food from diverse national origins.


Author(s):  
Samuel Llano

This chapter analyzes the impact on the population of the expansion of nightlife in Madrid from the 1880s on. More particularly, it studies public fears raised by alcoholism and flamenco that led to this music being identified with social disorder and immorality. The Fuencarral Street murder (1888), in which a flamenco aficionado was involved, shocked the public and triggered a campaign against flamenco and the culture associated with it, known as flamenquismo. Behind this campaign, however, was fear and hatred of rural immigrants from Andalusia, who transformed Madrid’s culture and elicited the opposition of the population most affected by the rise of hunger and deprivation in Madrid. At the turn of the twentieth century, this situation led to flamenquismo being used as a catchword to designate any social problems affecting Spain in the wake of the 1898 desastre.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (03) ◽  
pp. 195-208
Author(s):  
Silvia Mei

Brevity in experimental Italian theatre is not merely an expressive dimension of scenic creation, but a forma mentis, a conceptual vocation of young companies. The 2000s produced a minor theatre in Italy – first because of the reduced stage size, and second because of the brevity of works such as installation pieces. Moving from the linguistic disintegration of the historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century, this theatre is especially inspired by the visual arts, even though its historical roots remain fragmented and art is still seen in the synthetic language of modern dance and Futurist variety. Short forms actually become a tool for crossing artistic genres and languages. Starting from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophical concept of minor literature, in this article Silvia Mei explores and analyzes work by such Italian contemporary companies as gruppo nanou, Città di Ebla, Anagoor, Opera, ErosAntEros, and Teatro Sotterraneo – all representative of what can be called installation theatre, a new theatrical wave that crosses the boundaries and specificities of artistic language, leading to the deterritorialization of theatre itself, a rethinking of the artistic work as well as its relationship with the audience. Silvia Mei is Adjunct Professor of the History of Theatre Directing and Theatre Iconography at the University of Bologna, having been a Research Fellow at the University of Turin. Her recent publications include ‘La terza avanguardia: ortografie dell’ultima scena italiana’, in Culture Teatrali, No. 14 (2015), and Displace Altofest (Valletta: Malta 2018 Foundation).


2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (13) ◽  
pp. 3055-3069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter A. Stott ◽  
John F. B. Mitchell ◽  
Myles R. Allen ◽  
Thomas L. Delworth ◽  
Jonathan M. Gregory ◽  
...  

Abstract This paper investigates the impact of aerosol forcing uncertainty on the robustness of estimates of the twentieth-century warming attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Attribution analyses on three coupled climate models with very different sensitivities and aerosol forcing are carried out. The Third Hadley Centre Coupled Ocean–Atmosphere GCM (HadCM3), Parallel Climate Model (PCM), and GFDL R30 models all provide good simulations of twentieth-century global mean temperature changes when they include both anthropogenic and natural forcings. Such good agreement could result from a fortuitous cancellation of errors, for example, by balancing too much (or too little) greenhouse warming by too much (or too little) aerosol cooling. Despite a very large uncertainty for estimates of the possible range of sulfate aerosol forcing obtained from measurement campaigns, results show that the spatial and temporal nature of observed twentieth-century temperature change constrains the component of past warming attributable to anthropogenic greenhouse gases to be significantly greater (at the 5% level) than the observed warming over the twentieth century. The cooling effects of aerosols are detected in all three models. Both spatial and temporal aspects of observed temperature change are responsible for constraining the relative roles of greenhouse warming and sulfate cooling over the twentieth century. This is because there are distinctive temporal structures in differential warming rates between the hemispheres, between land and ocean, and between mid- and low latitudes. As a result, consistent estimates of warming attributable to greenhouse gas emissions are obtained from all three models, and predictions are relatively robust to the use of more or less sensitive models. The transient climate response following a 1% yr−1 increase in CO2 is estimated to lie between 2.2 and 4 K century−1 (5–95 percentiles).


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