SCENOGRAPHY AND COSTUME IN JAPANESE KABUKI THEATER: TRADITIONS AND MODERNITY

The article explores the history of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, the stages of its formation and the basic principles of dramaturgy in retrospective and in modern times, the role and symbolic value of costumes, as well as the general features of theater performances. The modern trends of the theater were analyzed and issues of the space of its scene were investigated. Obvious conservatism of kabuki and its fundamental dissimilarity to the theater of the European model were noted. The process of evolution of the Kabuki theater was studied, which responding to the challenges of modernity, acquires new elements and features, together give rise to the fundamentally new phenomenon in the theatrical art. It has been determined that the logic of construction and development of the theater and stage space in Japanese traditional Kabuki theater derived from the need for specific interaction between the performer and the audience. With the formation of the theater, its audience expanded at the same time, in particular due to the privileged strata. The premises of theater and its stage also evolved. Eventually, the design features of Kabuki theater space became not only a prominent element in the interaction between the performers and spectators, but also an important factor that predominantly determined the characteristics of dramaturgy. In Japanese Kabuki theater, such methods as makeup, hair pieces and costumes are simultaneously those means of expression that are necessarily included in the process of staging a performance, and determine its content and storyline, as well as determine the nature of the performer’s acting. These means are kind of sign and symbolic system, which has to be read by the spectator in order to fully understand the nature of performance. The peculiarities of the costume allow us to read in advance nature of the character in performance, to guess his or her actions, etc. The peculiarity of Kabuki is that the play script is dictated by the performers themselves, but not by the scriptwriter. The director as an independent figure in Kabuki theater comes to the first plan only in the modern era, and it is mostly characteristic of innovative and experimental theaters. It is worth noting that given the challenges of modernity, Kabuki still acquires new elements and features, together generating a fundamentally new phenomenon in the art of theater, and in general, Kabuki remains a traditional theater.

The semantics of the traditional women's headscarf as a source of modern design innovations

The purpose of the article is to reveal the influence of the semantic-symbolic system of traditional women's clothing on the formation and development of trends in a modern design using the example of a scarf. Methodology. Comparative-historical and historical-typological methods have been applied in order to identify the tendency in the development of a headscarf as an element of a woman's costume; the hermeneutic method, which helped to understand and interpret signs and symbols as components of traditional culture; systemic method (for considering the system of symbols of a woman's headscarf as a cultural and artistic phenomenon); the method of art history analysis (according to M. Bakhtin and A. Losev); a method of a functional nature (for identifying the main functions of the elements of a semantically sign system and revealing their significance for expressing aesthetic, sacred and ethical motives), etc. Scientific novelty. The semantics of the headscarf as an element of the female national costume, the peculiarities of the coloristic and compositional solutions of the decorative design of the female headscarf are investigated, the main ornamental motifs and forms are analyzed in the context of their use in modern design; revealed and substantiated the influence of the semantic-symbolic system of the traditional women's headscarf on the development of modern clothing design; the semantisation of the elements of the system of symbols of the traditional women's headscarf has been carried out; the features of the integration of the elements of the ornament of the traditional national headscarf into the designer clothes of the 20th century are characterized; analyzed the problems of meaning and its expression by means of pictorial and colored symbols in a modern woman's headscarf. Conclusions. Preserving the ancient sacred symbolism of the canvas, characteristic of the mythological consciousness, as well as mastering the centuries-old experience of Christian understanding, the headscarf has remained an integral part of the traditional female costume for many centuries. In the design of the 21st-century women's scarf. semiotics of color is actively used, which acts as a symbolic guideline for associations that have developed in history, culture, and philosophy. Floral images are the aesthetic value of the subject environment and are realized in the process of artistic creativity of designers, enriching the aesthetics of human ecological space. At the present stage, the appeal of domestic clothing designers to the ethnic style makes it expedient to deepen the understanding of its semantical sign system. Revealing the peculiarities of the semiotics of the color of a traditional Ukrainian women's headscarf, research and analysis of its symbolism provide a modern designer with an almost unlimited dimension for creativity and contribute to the strengthening of national self-awareness.

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. Exploiting this feature, we demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We illustrate how this symbolic system improves numerical computing tasks by showcasing an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

Cangjie's Poetry

This paper describes the conceptual background, artificial intelligent system design, and visualization strategies of an interactive art experience: Cangjie's Poetry. This artwork provides a conceptual response to the human-machine reality in the context of language, symbols, and semantic meanings. In the Cangjie's Poetry art installation, the intelligent system (Cangjie) constantly observes surroundings through the lens of a camera, writes poetry using its symbolic system based on its interpretation, and explains the evolving poem in natural language to audiences in real time. Due to the global pandemic of COVID-19, multiple presentation formats of this work were developed, which include in-person installation, virtual installation, and a special edition with pre-rendered video. This work prioritizes ambiguity and tension between machinic vision and human perception, the actual and the virtual, past and present.

Artistic symbolism of I.Turgenev as a manifestation of romantic spirit of his works

The article considers the artistic symbolism of the writer as a reflection of the literary movement of his work, and analyzes it. The history of the issue on this topic originated a long time ago; it is quite extensive and causes undoubted interest. The peculiarity of the romantic view is associated with the personality of the writer and the inherent deep psychologism, psychophysics of his personality. The symbolic system in the Turgenev’s works is filled with Hegelian ideas about the inextricable relationship between the life of Nature and a man, which the writer adopted and developed. This relationship lies in the field of parallel processes occurring in them. A lot of attention in the work is paid to the forces of inertness and egoism, which, according to the author, are also engines of progress. This whole set of ideas, reflecting the various facets of human being and constituting the basis of the romantic system and the symbolism of his work, gives rise to a significant layer of symbolic details filling his works with a special artistic “sound”, where rich love symbolism has become a separate “ornament”.

Ritual Mandi Pengantin: Kecemasan, Harapan dan Tafsir Simbolis tentang Masa Depan

The ritual of bridal shower reflects a symbolic system and has a relation to the being, the sacred and the profane. Phenomenologically, this study is intended to discuss the ritual of bridal bathing. The approach used to reveal the ritual’s meaning is the interpretation of symbolic. This study used a qualitative. The social setting of this research was carried out in community of Banjar, in the Tambilahan, Indragiri Hilir. Data were collected through interviews, observation and documentation. This study shows that the bridal bath ritual has three fundamental aspects in which the ritual is practiced by Banjar community. First, as a culture heritization of the ancestors. Second, as a diealectic of feelings: fear and hope in the life of the bride family. Third, as a symbolic reflection of the sacred values. The bridal bath ritual on the sequel becomes a path for the brides and their families to spared the disturbance of the being or evil orchestra, repudiating the fear, the anxiety, and as a path of household resilience in the future.

Bapang Mask's Symbolic Power in the Attempt to Break Muri's Record in Malang District

Bapang mask is one of the figures in Malang’s puppet show, which is unique compared to other masks. It has a long nose and a sharp, red-colored face with bulging eyes. It possesses a manly character and enjoys flattery, and is a symbol of the legitimacy of the Malang district government’s power. The symbol of the Bapang mask in MURI’s record-breaking attempt is a practice of power that legitimizes culture in dominating the domain of a discourse struggle (between politics and preserving culture). This study describes Bapang mask’s symbolic power in breaking the MURI’s record in Malang district. This qualitative study used interviews, document analysis, and observations, which were analyzed using a poststructuralist approach through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The results of the study revealed that the symbolic system through the discourse of preserving Bapang masks in MURI’s record-breaking attempt is a representation of a symbolic system capable of producing power on political and cultural domination. This symbolic power forms the legitimacy of truth in the attempt to preserve traditional arts using Bapang mask. Keywords: symbolic power, discourse, preserving

Politics and Eschatology in Iran

The article studies the Iranian political society, starting from the analysis of the Iranian Constitution, the only one in the world characterized by “eschatological” components. The authors retrace the history of the birth of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is fundamental to ensure an interpretation of the politics of that country that takes into account religious and cultural factors and clarifies possible future developments. Furthermore, they address the problem relative to the symbolic system on which the configuration of the Iranian Republic theoretically rests, which must necessarily come to terms with pragmatic reality. In fact, to have a following in his revolutionary project, Khomeini used the “symbolic spring”, in which the politics of Iran in these years have demonstrated the necessity of realism with a parallel with the concept of agnosticism, which thus becomes natural, in opposition to theories that are often more subjective than objective. Finally, the authors go so far as to say that today is the time for a change, even if in a country like Iran, everything proceeds slowly. Young Iranians will have to obtain a role, reorganize and rekindle from below. The involvement of the young people themselves can increase hope in a process that promises to be complex and articulated, which sees the theocratic model as opposed to the model of Muslim politics in a purely eschatological context, which to most, especially in the West, appears anachronistic, but this is not always the case.

Enculturation and the historical origins of number words and concepts

In the literature on enculturation—the thesis according to which higher cognitive capacities result from transformations in the brain driven by culture—numerical cognition is often cited as an example. A consequence of the enculturation account for numerical cognition is that individuals cannot acquire numerical competence if a symbolic system for numbers is not available in their cultural environment. This poses a problem for the explanation of the historical origins of numerical concepts and symbols. When a numeral system had not been created yet, people did not have the opportunity to acquire number concepts. But, if people did not have number concepts, how could they ever create a symbolic system for numbers? Here I propose an account of the invention of symbolic systems for numbers by anumeric people in the remote past that is compatible with the enculturation thesis. I suggest that symbols for numbers and number concepts may have emerged at the same time through the re-semantification of words whose meanings were originally non-numerical.

Heteroclinic Cycles Imply Chaos and Are Structurally Stable

This paper is concerned with the chaos of discrete dynamical systems. A new concept of heteroclinic cycles connecting expanding periodic points is raised, and by a novel method, we prove an invariant subsystem is topologically conjugate to the one-side symbolic system. Thus, heteroclinic cycles imply chaos in the sense of Devaney. In addition, if a continuous differential map h has heteroclinic cycles in ℝ n , then g has heteroclinic cycles with h − g C 1 being sufficiently small. The results demonstrate C 1 structural stability of heteroclinic cycles. In the end, two examples are given to illustrate our theoretical results and applications.