A Reflection on The Inter-Semiotic Transformation of Select Vacanas of Akka Mahadevi into a Music-Dance Production

This project was set out to curate dance videos of select vacanas, meaning, religious free verses in Kannada, of Akka Mahadevi, a twelfth century poet from Karnataka, India. Vacanas are religious lyrics in free verse which mean ‘a saying’ or ‘a thing said’. By translating Akka’s vacanas to music and dance the project aimed to transport the essence of her poetry to the viewer. The symbols, images and metaphors used by the poet from discursive fields such as Bhakthi movement (a spiritual reform movement in India), Vedas, Upanishads, Yoga and feminism were re-interpreted through traditional music and dance styles recognized as classical arts by the national government, by a process of, what I theorize, as inter-semiotic transformation. Inter-semiotic transformation is the reinterpretation of symbols from one semiotic system, say, literature into others like music, dance, film or theatre. This paper analyses strategies of bringing poetry into the realm of aesthetic experience of viewers through the performing arts.

Introduction: Early Medieval Earth Consciousness

The existential threat of environmental collapse loomed large in the early medieval English imagination. In particular, the work of Wulfstan, Archbishop of York and Ælfric of Eynsham pointed to the imminence of the apocalypse. Wulfstan explicitly attributed environmental collapse to human sin, while Ælfric urged the faithful to look hopefully to the post-apocalyptic establishment of a new Earth. The broad audience and didactic intent of these prolific and well-connected theologians makes their work a useful representation of English theology at the turn of the millennium. Similarly, the 10th-century manuscript called the Exeter Book—the largest, most diverse extant collection of Old English poetry, including religious lyrics, obscene riddles, and elegies—may serve as a representative of the contemporaneous poetic corpus.

The heavy metal genre in an Islamic city of Padang: struggle and promotion

A qualitative research was conducted on how heavy metal survived and competed with other genres in a sacred city of Padang Indonesia, where metal and religion seemed to be unmatched. This research aims at understanding why heavy metal showed no significant progress despite its long existence in the city. An interview of five musicians from the five most popular metal bands in the city revealed that the metal music genre had struggled to survive for two reasons: the stigma of its negative influence on society and the failure of metal musicians in proving that metal symbols and lifestyle were irrelevant to the arts of metals. A SWOT analysis suggests that the metalheads need to utilize their subcultural capital by modifying their music using religious lyrics within the scene and by following social norms outside the scene.

Tokens of Love

Contextualist scholars working on the rhetoric of corporeal presence in seventeenth-century English religious lyrics have naturally focused their attention on sacramental discourse of the Reformation era. As part of the Common Knowledge symposium on the future of contextualism, this full-length monograph, serialized in installments, argues that the contextualist focus on a single and time-limited “epistemic field” has resulted in a less than adequately ramified understanding of the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton. What the contextualist approach misses is that even the religious discourses of the period were tied to a long and in no way local epistemological debate about signs and their meaning, whose roots are to be found in Greek and Latin rhetorical theory. This first installment of “Tokens of Love” commences a discussion of the role of classical pagan sign-theory in the development of Reformation sacramental discourse.

Religious Lyrics

Although dimly anticipated by certain Old English poetic texts, the Middle English religious lyric appears in the manuscript record in the first half of the 13th century, when a rich and diverse collection of largely religious lyrics sprang into being in what must have seemed like a Russian spring. The phenomenon almost certainly owes its birth to the entry into Britain of the Franciscans, and to the preaching these Franciscans initiated, and to the warm, engaged, and meaningful spirituality their order both practiced and inculcated. Preceded and informed by Latin and Continental examples, the English religious lyric soon developed its own practices and its own audience, sometimes simply translating into English familiar Latin hymns, at other times producing texts of extraordinary originality and complexity. The English religious lyric retained from its earliest appearances elements of instruction, learning, and joy, and these qualities came to inform later production, thus remaining central to its identity. Changes having been made, religious lyrics in English continued to be written in large numbers well into the 17th century, informed by a number of traditions, that of Latin (and latterly, vernacular) meditation and European devotional practices and images, among them. The roughly two thousand medieval lyrics now known, many preserved in only one version, were no doubt only a fraction of the total number sung, recited, and inscribed, and although they have been long known to students of the period, an understanding of their cultural importance and their literary artistry is of relatively recent date. Since the 1960s, however, the depth, complexity, and beauty of these extraordinary works of art have been widely accepted, and, though their study was somewhat curtailed by the advent of literary theory, it has now begun again and continues with interest, learning, and vigor. The new study of the English religious lyric reaches out as well to carols and ballads, and the diverse, compelling, and not infrequently brilliant poems that make up the genre are now increasingly understood to be, as Douglas Gray has written, “the glory of late medieval English literature.”