Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks is an American television series that first aired on the ABC network in the United States on 8 April 1990. Despite its critical acclaim the show was cancelled at the end of its second season in 1991 and remained off-air until its third series, titled Twin Peaks: The Return, was aired on the premium television network Showtime in 2017. The show was created by renowned filmmakers David Lynch and Mark Frost, whose television successes included police drama Hill Street Blues, and it was widely promoted as the series that would “change television.” The program, set in the fictional northwestern US town of Twin Peaks, was focused on the central mystery surrounding the murder of local schoolgirl Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and the efforts of FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) in solving the case. The show featured a cast of inhabitants of the town and was renowned for quirky characters, dream sequences, and surrealism, which were seen as hallmarks of David Lynch’s cinematic work. The question of “who killed Laura Palmer?” constituted the key narrative enigma for the first season of the show. When this mystery was resolved at the midpoint of the second series, audience interest waned, and the show’s declining viewing figures led to its cancellation. The program’s original run ended on a cliffhanger where lead character Dale Cooper became possessed by the evil spirit BOB (who was responsible for Palmer’s death while possessing her father Leyland Palmer [Ray Wise]). In 1992, David Lynch directed the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, which involved a return to Twin Peaks to depict the events leading up to Laura Palmer’s murder. The film was initially viewed as a disappointment, especially for those who wanted resolution to the show’s cliffhanger ending. Fire Walk with Me has since been reappraised and is now widely viewed as a groundbreaking piece of filmmaking. In 2016, David Lynch and Mark Frost began teasing a Twin Peaks–related announcement on their social media, with The Return of the series on Showtime announced soon after. While some setbacks were encountered when Lynch temporarily departed due to conflicts over budget and artistic vision, Twin Peaks: The Return aired in 2017 and was widely hailed as a return to form for the series. Throughout its history, Twin Peaks has attracted a loyal fanbase and critical attention on issues, including authorship, aesthetics, narrative, and genre.

Taking the Reins

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Traduire les albums pour enfants d’Hervé Tullet en polonais

This paper concentrates on the translation of the text-image interaction in postmodern and multimodalpic turebooks for children, as illustrated by the Polish translations of Hervé Tullet’s picturebooks. The sophisticated and artistic vision of this author-illustrator raises questions about methods and criteria to be adopted by anyone who wishes to translate the delicate balance between what is told by the verbal and pictured by the visual. In particular, as the present analysis reveals, the translator’s interventions in the original text-image interaction cannot be regarded as intersemiotic translation, but as undesired explicitation limiting the creative actions of the active child-reader.

Collective and Individual Factors in the Development of Creative Ideas in Art: The Perspective of Film Directors

The study focuses on the question if and how it is possible to balance the freedom of developing artist’s individual creative idea and the societal demand for art defined in a concrete political context. The theoretical basis for the article is formed by research approaches grounded on sociology of creativity and social psychology. The object of the case study is film directors who had obtained funding for the production and dissemination of their films within the funding program ‘Latvian Films for Latvia’s Centenary’ (2016–2018). The experience of film directors (N 16) was examined by using in-depth interviews and transcriptions analysed in accordance with qualitative methodology. The study identified two contingent levels of creativity inspiration – the individual and the societal or collective level. The authors identify several development models of the film directors’ creative ideas, three of which are dominant: the independent outsider who stresses individual, seed-incident based creativity factors independent of the Latvian Centenary program; the independent idealist who stresses both individual and collective factors, independent of the Latvian Centenary program; the conforming patriot who stresses collective creativity factors that stem from the Latvian Centenary program. The view represented in the film directors’ interviews has in common the assumption that the Latvian Centenary call had a positive influence on the film ideas, allowing the development of the artistic vision and conceptualising the framework for the expression of their ideas. The directors emphasise that there was no intentional configuration of the film creative ideas by formally adjusting them to the demand, thus circumventing the barriers of social field’s gatekeepers. In many cases the idea had been developed long before the film idea call. Most directors admitted that the goal of the Centenary call appeared important to them both in terms of the state, and on the social and personal level.

Contemporary Najafi Poetry of (The Poet Ahmed Al-Dujaili and the Significance of the Place in his Poetry)

The city of Najaf is an environment full of scholars, writers and poets, and this benevolent city has produced stallions of poets, including the poet Sheikh Ahmed Al-Dujaili (1924-1991 AD), whose poetic output I chose in his Diwan (palms) and the significance of the place in it is the subject of this research. Extrapolation of the historical, social and political context in which the poetic experience was born and its impact and influence on the place and an attempt to dismantle its connotations, structures and forms of presence in the text from the poet's relationship with the place and his artistic vision of it. The poets looked at the place with a creative view that transcends the material to reveal its emotional repercussions generated as a result of the active relationship between the poet and the place. And a place that enables him to determine the dimensions of his experience and give it the space in which it was formed. Recent critical studies have tended in recent years to study spatial structures in the narrative narratives, which have taken the place as a tool for dealing with and treating, and as a means of relying on literary works, whether those related to poetry or the novel. Skipping theorizing and defining the terms and definitions related to the place from a philosophical, linguistic and literary point of view, because I think that they do not enrich the research with anything, especially since many studies have preceded us in this field. The research consists of three axes, the first axis: talks about the life of the poet Ahmed Al-Dujaili, the second axis: the place between the poetic and the poet, and the third axis: the semantics of the place in his poetry, including: religious places, political places, scientific places, military places, and finally natural places, then the conclusion, the margins, the list of sources and from God Good luck and payment.

Female Authority Figures in Dorothea Tanning’s Chasm: A Weekend

Little girls and young women are Dorothea Tanning’s recurrent archetypes, defining and structuring her conceptual archive concerning gender and the feminine. A celebrated painter and sculptor who shaped her artistic vision in the proximity of the historical avant-gardes, Tanning was also a writer who revealed the mystery and estrangement of family ties in Chasm: A weekend, a novel she started writing in 1943 and published six decades later, in 2004. This singular book offers a privileged dialogue between literature and art, as several episodes revisit and translate the high tension of some of her most representative paintings. From within a feminist framework, the article will discuss aspects of female authority and control in Tanning’s novel as dominant forms of female empowerment, present throughout her visual Surrealist oeuvre. I argue that examining these allegories reveals their role as connectors between the literary and the visual arts, between Dorothea Tanning’s fiction and her painting.

Coda

The Coda offers a short survey of the decline and eclipse of the speculative (literary) reformist mode around the mid-twentieth century. In doing so, it highlights one last reformist moment, namely the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1946. The reformist vision associated with the Arts Council involved a self-reflexive artistic turn as writing itself came to be seen as the embodiment of a democratic Lebensform and the aesthetic image of a state-mediated classless future. This reformist vision is speculative insofar as it involved the successive democratization of an experimental (‘modernist’) artistic vision that had originated among the Bloomsbury modernists Williams had criticized as ‘a fraction of the upper class’.

The Mind of the Artist

Because artists make something out of nothing, the process can seem like magic, divinely inspired and inexplicable. It’s not. A single, potent factor lies at the heart of most everything creative: the mysterious, multifaceted trait of “openness.” This book describes the role of the openness dimension in the typical artist mind: how it loosens thinking, how it widens feelings, how it motivates behavior, and how it foments a useful inner chaos encouraging artistic invention. For creatives, openness is a unifying glue. It binds together states and processes at the core of the art-making impulse. A related key variable is trauma, according to scientific findings: the raw material with which so many artists work. In novels, poems, stories, and photographs, trauma gets symbolically repeated, shaped in the direction of a torturous beauty. Scientifically astute, conceptually subtle, and packed with richly detailed artist examples—from David Bowie to Frida Kahlo, from John Coltrane to Francesca Woodman, from Diane Arbus to Kurt Cobain—The Mind of the Artist demystifies artistic genius. It is a new, true portrait of artistic vision.

Cultural and artistic education strategies

The relevance of this study is conditioned by the dual standards of institutionalisation of artistic and educational practices, must meet the principles of creating cultural objects as material products of high culture and aesthetic level, but, at the same time, must meet the requirements of the time, standards and educational tendencies of its time. Thus, a conflict of artistic vision and the standards of accumulated artistic experience is formed, which must be resolved in a process of dialogue and permanent collaboration of the two practices: educational and artistic. The purpose of this article is to investigate the basic vectors of the institutionalisation of educational and artistic practices, identifying priority ways of institutionalising both practices and the space for their interaction in scientific research. The main scientific methods for researching the topic are the basic general scientific theoretical methods of analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, comparative to deduce the main regularities and characteristic features in the processes of institutionalisation of artistic practices, as well as systematisation and classification methods to form the structure of the main educational artistic strategies based on common and unique features.

Performance as Product, Process and Pedagogy: Laboring for Truth as Artist and Academic

As part of my practice-based doctoral thesis, I designed an experiment to develop a model of collaborative theatre-making based on collective ownership, in contrast to prevailing hierarchical collaborative practice, where artistic vision lies mainly with the director, and divisions of labour dominate. I conducted the experiment in the real world of rehearsals and performances with a theatre collective I established for this purpose. In this article I discuss my Marxist framework, justifying why I believe capital and cooperation to be the primary dialectic of cultural economy, at the root of the hegemony of hierarchical collaborative theatre. I identify the relationship between Marxist theory and Alain Badiou’s (2005) disruption of the status quo via ‘truth’, as well as and Baz Kershaw’s (2011) essential components for PAR, premised on dialectical paradoxes. I discuss Dialectical Collaborative Theatre (DCT), the original research, rehearsal and performance pedagogy I developed in response to prevailing collaborative practice. While ideology and ethics are integral to DCT, the focus of this article is the pedagogy born out of the dialectical interplay between praxis and truth. I am currently exploring the ideology of DCT in another forthcoming and parallel article, "Dialectical Collaborative Theatre: Ideology, Ethics and the Practice of Equality."