A GLANCE AT FOLK PERFORMANCE AND NON-NATIVE AUDIENCE

Performance is an interesting subject of study and it is the point of intersection for many academic fields within humanities and social sciences. The studies on performance, thus, could provide opportunities for exploring different aspects of human behaviours and their creative reflections on the matters that are intrinsic to the concept of performance. In pursuit of performance studies, one could come across various knots that connect performance with every aspect of the socio-cultural life of people by redefining the stereotypical notions of “stage”, “actors” and “audience.” Further, the studies on performance could not be placed on a single trajectory as several approaches, perspectives and orientations that have emerged ever since the delimitation of performance happened by opening up its boundary for interdisciplinary studies lead by the undefined ‘performance studies’ of Richard Schechner. However, by dealing with the performance as a live presentation in all perceived forms of “stages”, a significant question has been asked in this paper as a token of beginning on the “problematic” presence of audience as outsiders (non-native and non-belonging) who, by their nature of reception and response, are understood as those who have no concern either for the performance or for the performers. While each form, in the folkloristic sense, is comprising of its natural context along with a dedicated or defined audience, it seems to be a surprising phenomenon as it developed over a period of time as a result of the prodigious and irresistible globalization process. Thus, the unintended and unsolicited transformation, as an impact of globalization, in the traditional and modern performances has shaped the nature and role of ‘audience’, making it an insignificant and irrelevant entity for the consumption with aesthetic appreciation and conviction on the values demonstrated. So this article problematizes the nature of audience in the decontextualized performance context by drawing insights from performance studies, semiotics, and other cognate disciplines. Based on the insights drawn from the fieldwork on Sarhul festival held in Ranchi district a few years ago, this paper argues that the role of audience cannot be understood unless there is a clear perspective on the nature of performance and performance tradition as defined by the community.

Māori Performing Arts and the Weaving Together of Local, National and International Communities

<p>Māori performing arts provides a valuable contribution to Aotearoa New Zealand society. Māori performing arts has an intrinsic link to Māori culture and is used to connect 1) Māori who are disengaged from iwi/hapu/whanau, as well as 2) non-Māori, in New Zealand and around the world with Māori culture. Performance genres such as waiata-a-ringa, haka and mōteatea contain a body of knowledge that communicate Māori ways of being and doing and provide participants with an opportunity to become connected to a culturally literate and informed community. Using ethnographic techniques of participant observation, interviews and performance, this thesis examines the experiences of individuals who engage with Māori performing arts and the meaning they attribute to their engagement with the art form. Drawing on contemporary ideas of community and meaning, this thesis also investigates how Māori performing arts builds and strengthens relationships and whanaungatanga by connecting participants to local, national and international Aotearoa New Zealand communities. This thesis draws on two contexts in Wellington where people engage with Māori performing arts - The Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club at Pipitea marae and Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music. Along with exploring two Māori performance context in detail, this these explores how Māori performing arts is used as a platform to educate participants about Māori knowledge, language and culture while also discussing how Māori performing arts is used to symbolise and represent Aotearoa New Zealand nationally and internationally.</p>

Māori Performing Arts and the Weaving Together of Local, National and International Communities

<p>Māori performing arts provides a valuable contribution to Aotearoa New Zealand society. Māori performing arts has an intrinsic link to Māori culture and is used to connect 1) Māori who are disengaged from iwi/hapu/whanau, as well as 2) non-Māori, in New Zealand and around the world with Māori culture. Performance genres such as waiata-a-ringa, haka and mōteatea contain a body of knowledge that communicate Māori ways of being and doing and provide participants with an opportunity to become connected to a culturally literate and informed community. Using ethnographic techniques of participant observation, interviews and performance, this thesis examines the experiences of individuals who engage with Māori performing arts and the meaning they attribute to their engagement with the art form. Drawing on contemporary ideas of community and meaning, this thesis also investigates how Māori performing arts builds and strengthens relationships and whanaungatanga by connecting participants to local, national and international Aotearoa New Zealand communities. This thesis draws on two contexts in Wellington where people engage with Māori performing arts - The Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club at Pipitea marae and Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music. Along with exploring two Māori performance context in detail, this these explores how Māori performing arts is used as a platform to educate participants about Māori knowledge, language and culture while also discussing how Māori performing arts is used to symbolise and represent Aotearoa New Zealand nationally and internationally.</p>

Some Preliminary Soundings

This chapter presents a series of “soundings” of short hexametrical genres. The aim is to investigate the following: (i) how the Homeric poet, in Hector’s description of the burial mound of his antagonist, plays with his audiences’ expectations of the generic and preexisting form of the hexametrical epitaph and how both he and the Hesiodic poet use the hypothêkê, a traditionally hexametrical form of avuncular advice in the Homeric speeches of elders like Peleus or in the Hesiodic address to Perses; (ii) how a mimetic poem composed by Theocritus helps us to imagine the performance context of some fragments of Sappho’s “wedding poems” as epithalamia in hexameters composed in ten-line stanzas and chanted before the door of newlyweds; and (iii) how the short poems embedded in the Pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer reflect the rich array of short hexametrical performances.

EXPRESS: Dispositional and Situational Predictors of Coping with Violated Achievement Expectations

Most students experience expectation violations during their academic career, such as unexpected failed tests. However, contradictory evidence does not always result in expectation change (accommodation). Expectations often persist through stronger efforts to fulfil the expectation (assimilation) or ignoring the discrepancy (immunization). Our study addresses possible situational and dispositional predictors that may be decisive influences on the use of the three coping strategies. We conducted an experimental study with n = 439 students who experienced an expectation violation in an achievement test. Dispositional coping tendencies, valence of expectation violation, and the interaction of valence and degree of expectation violation were found to predict situational coping. Furthermore, higher need for cognitive closure predicted stronger accommodation, and a large degree of expectation violation predicted stronger immunization. Thus, our study provides initial evidence on which situational and dispositional factors predict coping with expectation violations in an educational context. Expectation violation in a performance context mainly resulted in stronger efforts to protect positive achievement expectations.

Carnivalizing Imoinda’s Silence

In this essay, I analyze Joan Anim-Addo’s libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name (2008) and illustrate how its narrative poetry generates a speculative, gendered history around the slave past. Informed by Srinivas Aravamudan’s observation of parodic subversion in the afterlives of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), I return to Anim-Addo’s oeuvre in order to read Imoinda as a work that counter-writes the colonial gaze of “Western” knowledge. By centering on Caribbean carnival as the performance context for the libretto, I examine how histories of rebellion and survival carried out by enslaved Africans and their descendants unfold through the libretto’s narrative poetry. I argue that Imoinda, under the guise of artistic forms associated with “the West,” breaks from Eurocentric perspectives that misrepresented subaltern struggles while ushering forth the question of “who speaks?” in critical discourses. I conclude by aligning Anim-Addo’s Imoinda in relation to Sylvia Wynter’s conceptualization of “demonic grounds” to highlight a transformative epistemic space of Caribbean women’s literature.

‘Beware The Word'

This paper considers the potential of utilizing ethnotheatre methods to investigate the experiences of butoh artists and practitioners as they struggle to verbalize the dance of the ineffable. While an unlikely approach, ethnotheatre-based research may offer an alternative methodology for grappling with the ineffable and the inarticulate in performance as an intermediary research process capable of not only attending to but foregrounding both language and the places where language fails through and of the body, utilizing language to foreground its limits. Through the labor of creating a script for performance, it offers a method of textual engagement within movement practice, one that gives data a body through which to ‘speak’ or express meaning. For the purposes of butoh research, its formal processes allow us to bring the silences and struggles with language into greater relief, spotlighting them, in a performance context. As an arts-based research methodological thought experiment, this paper seeks to demonstrate how taking an ethnotheatre approach to butoh research may provide captivating insight into the art of butoh, as well as yield a different kind of evidence of or living testimony to the operative force of language and the creative possibilities of failure.

The Silent Prophet of the Muses: Text and Scene in Aesch. fr. 60 R.

Among the fragmentary plays of Aeschylus, the Lycurgeia has received particular attention from scholars in all periods, since it has been unanimously recognized as the literary archetype of the Dionysian tetralogy that inspired Euripides’ Bacchae. Handling the extant fragments nonetheless requires considerable effort, due to problems related to the citation technique employed by the testimonia as well as corruptions in the manuscript tradition over the course of the centuries. In this respect, one fragment (Aesch. fr. 60 R., test. schol. vet. Tr. Aristoph. Av. 276 a-b, II 3, 49 Holwerda + Suda μ1301 Adler) of Edonians, the first play of the tetralogy, is particularly difficult as a result of the apparently incurable corruption that afflicts it. Beginning from the textual assessment of Radt (TrGF III 181), the main purpose of this paper will be to shed new light on the editorial issues affecting this fragment, by offering both a fresh collation of the variant readings in the manuscripts of Aristophanes and a meticulous examination of the most significant conjectures by editors of Aeschylus. I offer a fresh critical text of the fragment, in an attempt to demonstrate how a more accurate evaluation of the manuscript tradition might help restore part of the (allegedly) genuine Aeschylean text. In addition, I undertake a broad examination of the most salient exegetical issues, along with a hypothetical reconstruction of the performance context of the fragment.

Toward an anthropological approach to musical empathy

This chapter proposes an anthropological approach to musical empathy, relying on Alfred Gell’s notion of agency. It is claimed that: (1) musical emotions are best approached as empathetic phenomena, as opposed to cognitive acts involving the decoding of a message; (2) it is possible to distinguish between different types of musical empathy, depending on the type of agency relationship: “empathy with the musical being,” “empathy with the artist,” “empathy with musical memory-images,” and “intersubjective musical empathy”; (3) the representation of a network of agency can reveal the role played by the performance context in the emotions attributed to music; (4) The notion of agency makes it possible to consider “personal” tunes as “distributed persons,” as opposed to signs of persons; (5) the highly ornamented de jale (“sorrowful”) tunes can be seen as “sonic agents,” or “sonic beings” arousing in the listeners feelings of attachment, rapture, and loss.

Musical emotions in the Roma community of Ceuaş

In this chapter, the three contexts of musical tears (professional service, parties in the Roma neighborhood, funerals) are compared in order to determine whether they have any characteristics in common. The analysis of their differences leads to a concentric model illustrating three different modes on which musical emotions are experienced: “making emotion,” “sharing emotion,” and “expressing emotion.” The analysis of their similarities brings out three invariants of musical emotions: an aesthetic system (sorrowful tunes), “personal” tunes, and a specific way of being (milos, i.e., compassionate, empathic). It is argued that such invariants, since they are unaffected by the performance context, should be viewed as the “focal points” or “deep structures” of the relationship between music and emotion. While this result is local in scope, it makes it possible to sketch a few cross-cultural comparisons.