scholarly journals INVISIBLE SOUNDS FOR CALVINO’S INVISIBLE CITIES: COLLABORATION IN A CREATIVE PROCESS

Orfeu ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jônatas Manzolli ◽  
Helena Marinho

Inspired by Italo Calvino's novel Le città invisibili (1972), which presents Marco Polo's description of several invisible and fictional cities, the authors embarked on an imaginary journey to create invisible sounds with the subtlety of the fortepiano. In a process akin to Calvino's novel, the article presents the comings and goings of an exchange process of ideas between the composer and the performer. Physically separated, in Brazil and Portugal, they used video conferences and e-mails to create the work. As the process evolved, technical aspects of the fortepiano and its peculiar sounds were intertwined with adjustments to the composer's creative writing. On the other hand, the combinatorial structure of Calvino's artwork anchored the exchange of musical materials among the work’s movements. This artistic-research project began in April 2014, and led to a recording of Sons Invisíveis (Invisible Sounds), included in the CD Música Nova for Antique Instruments II in 2016. In order to describe this trajectory, this article addresses recent literature in collaboration and performance studies, composition for historical instruments, particularly the fortepiano, the combinatorial nature of Calvino's writing, how the collaborative process was developed, and its final organization, expressing the ineffable character of Calvino's masterpiece through invisible sounds.

Author(s):  
Brahma Prakash

Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.


Author(s):  
Raaj Kishore Biswas ◽  
Rena Friswell ◽  
Jake Olivier ◽  
Ann Williamson ◽  
Teresa Senserrick

Author(s):  
Yugo Hayashi

AbstractResearch on collaborative learning has revealed that peer-collaboration explanation activities facilitate reflection and metacognition and that establishing common ground and successful coordination are keys to realizing effective knowledge-sharing in collaborative learning tasks. Studies on computer-supported collaborative learning have investigated how awareness tools can facilitate coordination within a group and how the use of external facilitation scripts can elicit elaborated knowledge during collaboration. However, the separate and joint effects of these tools on the nature of the collaborative process and performance have rarely been investigated. This study investigates how two facilitation methods—coordination support via learner gaze-awareness feedback and metacognitive suggestion provision via a pedagogical conversational agent (PCA)—are able to enhance the learning process and learning gains. Eighty participants, organized into dyads, were enrolled in a 2 × 2 between-subject study. The first and second factors were the presence of real-time gaze feedback (no vs. visible gaze) and that of a suggestion-providing PCA (no vs. visible agent), respectively. Two evaluation methods were used: namely, dialog analysis of the collaborative process and evaluation of learning gains. The real-time gaze feedback and PCA suggestions facilitated the coordination process, while gaze was relatively more effective in improving the learning gains. Learners in the Gaze-feedback condition achieved superior learning gains upon receiving PCA suggestions. A successful coordination/high learning performance correlation was noted solely for learners receiving visible gaze feedback and PCA suggestions simultaneously (visible gaze/visible agent). This finding has the potential to yield improved collaborative processes and learning gains through integration of these two methods as well as contributing towards design principles for collaborative-learning support systems more generally.


2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 362-392
Author(s):  
Diana Looser

In the closing scene of René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt's melodramaLa Tête de mort; ou, Les Ruines de Pompeïa(1827), audiences at Paris's Théâtre de la Gaîté were presented with the spectacular cataclysm of an erupting Mount Vesuvius that invaded the city and engulfed the hapless characters in its fiery embrace. “The theatre,” Pixérécourt writes, “is completely inundated by this sea of bitumen and lava. A shower of blazing and transparent stones and red ash falls on all sides…. The red color with which everything is struck, the terrible noise of the volcano, the screaming, the agitation and despair of the characters … all combine to form this terrible convulsion of nature, a horrible picture, and altogether worthy of being compared to Hell.” A few years later, in 1830, Daniel Auber's grand operaLa Muette de Portici(1828), which yoked a seventeenth-century eruption of Vesuvius with a popular revolt against Spanish rule in Naples, opened at the Théâtre de Monnaie in Brussels. The Belgian spectators, inspired by the opera's revolutionary sentiments, poured out into the streets and seized their country's independence from the Dutch. These two famous examples, which form part of a long genealogy of representing volcanic eruptions through various artistic means, highlight not only the compelling, immersive spectacle of nature in extremis but also the ability of stage scenery to intervene materially in the narrative action and assimilate affective and political meanings. As these two examples also indicate, however, the body of scholarship in literary studies, art history, and theatre and performance studies that attends to the mechanical strategies and symbolic purchase of volcanic representations has tended to focus mainly on Europe; more research remains to be undertaken into how volcanic spectacles have engaged with non-European topographies and sociopolitical dynamics and how this wider view might illuminate our understanding of theatre's social roles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mabel Giraldo

Starting from the finding of the performative drift that marked the theatrical research through the Seventies and Eighties, this essay aims to show how two of the main protagonists of the period – Theatre Anthropology and Performance Studies – have contributed in their affinities and specificities to marginalizing of the theatre as a cultural phenomenon and devaluating of the artistic work, inaugurated (and not yet rectified) by Postmodernity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 199-222
Author(s):  
Hannah Bradshaw

This article examines the early representations of Prince Albert that either satirize or attempt to reconcile the hierarchical ambiguities and issue of threatened masculinity that resulted from unconventional male consortship and female rule. It concludes that the latter was achieved through the development of a suitable and legible iconography for a nineteenth-century male consort in adherence with British iconographic tradition and values. Drawing from methods in nineteenth-century art history as well as gender and performance studies and anthropology, it argues that images of the male body play a fundamental role in the construction and perpetuation of masculine ideology and subjectivity through the creation of the semblance of an innate and axiomatic masculine archetype. In doing so, this article problematizes and historicizes masculinity by illuminating the plurality of expressions of masculinity and rejecting the essentialist narrative of masculinity as something measurable or quantifiable, as well as ahistorical, atemporal, apolitical and heteronormative.


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