Gestural Imaginaries

Gestural Imaginaries
Author: Lucia Ruprecht
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2019
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0190659386

Gestural Imaginaries offers a new interpretation of European modernist dance by addressing it as guiding medium in a vibrant field of gestural culture that ranged across art and philosophy.

Dante, Artist of Gesture

Dante, Artist of Gesture
Author: Heather Webb
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2022-09-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192692623

Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.

Gestures

Gestures
Author: Giovanni Maddalena
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2024-09-23
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110785846

Over the past few years, scientists and philosophers have discussed the concept of gesture as promising to overcome hyper-intellectualist conceptions of human beings. Its ascendancy reaffirmed the importance of the pragmatic, relational dimension in human experience and cognitive processes. Many questions arise when we focus on the cognitive role of gestures, especially in the new cultural landscape shaped by the digital revolution. Does the idea of gestures highlight the preeminence of bodily experiences? Does it lead to the thinning of the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals? Do gestures help us rethink the allegedly higher human capacities in an antireductionist vein? Do gestures involve reasoning? Are they purely external actions? Do they serve to communicate, or is all communication a form of gesture? What kinds of social relations are involved in the concept of gesture? According to a multidisciplinary orientation, the book inquiries into the possibilities and issues opened up by attending to a philosophy of gestures in philosophy, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and communication studies. Given the current centrality of gestures, the general aim of the book is to reconsider the meaning of "gestures" and try to answer old and new questions.

Gestures

Gestures
Author: Giovanni Maddalena, Fabio Ferrucci, Michela Bella, Matteo Santarelli
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2024-04-11
Genre:
ISBN: 3110785900

Rhythmical Subjects

Rhythmical Subjects
Author: Laura Marcus
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-11-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0192883909

Tracing a developing fascination with rhythm's significance, its patterns, and its measures, across philosophy, psychology, science, and the whole range of arts, Rhythmical Subjects shows how and why attention to rhythm came to serve as connective tissue between fields of inquiry at a time when modern disciplines were still in the process of formation or consolidation. The concentration on 'rhythm' and its cognates largely arose, Laura Marcus demonstrates, from the desire to reclaim or retain human and natural measures in the face of the coming of the machine and the speed of technological innovation. Rhythmical Subjects uncovers the disparate routes by which rhythm acquired its newfound ability to link ancient and modern forms of intellectual inquiry, and to fathom and re-invigorate temporal articulations of modern subjective life. Among the numerous intellectual and artistic developments set in a new light by this brilliantly wide-ranging book are: the long line of philosophical and theoretical writing on rhythm, from Nietzsche to Bergson and their twentieth-century interlocutors; psychological explorations of rhythm as the fundamental law of life, from Herbert Spencer and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elsie Fogarty; more experimental engagements with psychology's rhythms, from Wilhelm Wundt, Théodule Ribot, and Karl Groos to the aesthetic writings of Vernon Lee; the history of prosody; pioneering applications of rhythm studies to social and sexual reform, by Havelock Ellis, Marie Stopes, D. H. Lawrence, and Mary Austin (among others); Lebensreform movements and the contribution of Rudolf Steiner and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze; and numerous endeavours in artistic and critical innovation, from the small modernist magazines of Bloomsbury and Paris to art salons and dance studios across Britain, Continental Europe, and America.

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad
Author: Debra Romanick Baldwin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2024-07-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040047084

The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad attests to the global significance and enduring importance of Conrad’s works, reception, and legacy. This volume brings together an international roster of scholars who consider his works in relation to biography, narrative, politics, women’s studies, comparative literature, and other forms of art. They offer approaches as diverse as re-examining Conrad’s sea voyages using newly available digital materials, analyzing his archipelagic narrative techniques, applying Chinese philosophy to Lord Jim, interrogating gendered epistemology in the neglected story “The Tale,” considering Conrad alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, Graham Greene, Virginia Woolf, or Orhan Pamuk, or alongside sound, gesture, opera, graphic novels, or contemporary events. An invaluable resource for students and scholars of Conrad and twentieth-century literature, this groundbreaking collection shows how Conrad’s works – their artistry, vision, and ideas – continue to challenge, perplex, and delight.

Dancing with the Modernist City

Dancing with the Modernist City
Author: Wesley Lim
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2024-07-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0472904566

As the 20th century dawned, authors, artists, and filmmakers flocked to cities like Paris and Berlin for a chance to experience a bustling urban life and engage with other artists and intellectuals. Among them were German-speaking authors and filmmakers such as Harry Graf Kessler, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Endell, Alfred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler, Segundo de Chomón, and the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky. In their writing and artistic work from that period, they depicted the perpetual influx of stimuli caused by urban life—including hordes of pedestrians, bustling traffic, and a barrage of advertisements—as well as how these encounters repeatedly paralleled their experiences of watching early twentieth-century dance performances by Loïe Fuller, Ruth St. Denis, and Vaslav Nijinsky. The convergence these writers and filmmakers saw between the unexpected encounters during their urban strolls and experimental dance performances led to writings that interwove the two motifs. Drawing on cultural, literary, dance, performance, and queer studies, Dancing with the Modernist City analyzes an array of material from 1896 to 1914—essays, novels, short stories, poetry, newspaper articles, photographs, posters, drawings, and early film. It argues that these writers and artists created a genre called the metropolitan dance text, which depicts dancing figures not on a traditional stage, but with the streets, advertising pillars, theaters, cafes, squares, and even hospitals of an urban setting. Breaking away from the historically male, heteronormative view, this posthumanist mode of writing highlights the visual and episodic unexpectedness of urban encounters. These literary depictions question traditional conceptualizations of space and performance by making the protagonist and the reader feel like they embody the dancer and the movement. In doing so, they upset the conventional depictions of performance and urban spaces in ways paralleling modern dance.

Marking Modern Movement

Marking Modern Movement
Author: Susan Funkenstein
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2020-10-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0472054619

Imagine yourself in Weimar Germany: you are visually inundated with depictions of dance. Perusing a women’s magazine, you find photograph after photograph of leggy revue starlets, clad in sequins and feathers, coquettishly smiling at you. When you attend an art exhibition, you encounter Otto Dix’s six-foot-tall triptych Metropolis, featuring Charleston dancers in the latest luxurious fashions, or Emil Nolde’s watercolors of Mary Wigman, with their luminous blues and purples evoking her choreographies’ mystery and expressivity. Invited to the Bauhaus, you participate in the Metallic Festival, and witness the school’s transformation into a humorous, shiny, technological total work of art; you costume yourself by strapping a metal plate to your head, admire your reflection in the tin balls hanging from the ceiling, and dance the Bauhaus’ signature step in which you vigorously hop and stomp late into the night. Yet behind the razzle dazzle of these depictions and experiences was one far more complex involving issues of gender and the body during a tumultuous period in history, Germany’s first democracy (1918-1933). Rather than mere titillation, the images copiously illustrated and analyzed in Marking Modern Movement illuminate how visual artists and dancers befriended one another and collaborated together. In many ways because of these bonds, artists and dancers forged a new path in which images revealed artists’ deep understanding of dance, their dynamic engagement with popular culture, and out of that, a possibility of representing women dancers as cultural authorities to be respected. Through six case studies, Marking Modern Movement explores how and why these complex dynamics occurred in ways specific to their historical moment. Extensively illustrated and with color plates, Marking Modern Movement is a clearly written book accessible to general readers and undergraduates. Coming at a time of a growing number of major art museums showcasing large-scale exhibitions on images of dance, the audience exists for a substantial general-public interest in this topic. Conversing across German studies, art history, dance studies, gender studies, and popular culture studies, Marking Modern Movement is intended to engage readers coming from a wide range of perspectives and interests.

Energy and Forces as Aesthetic Interventions

Energy and Forces as Aesthetic Interventions
Author: Sabine Huschka
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2019-07-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 3839447038

This volume collects academic as well as artistic explorations highlighting historical and contemporary approaches to the ›energetic‹ in its aesthetic and political potential. Energetic processes cross dance, performance art and installations. In contemporary dance and performance art, energetic processes are no longer mere conditions of form but appear as distinct aesthetic interventions. They transform the body, evoke specific states and push towards intensities. International contributors (i.e. Gerald Siegmund, Susan Leigh Foster, Lucia Ruprecht) unfold thorough investigations, elucidating maneuvers of mobilization, activation, initiation, regulation, navigation and containment of forces as well as different potentials and promises associated with the ›energetic‹.

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar

The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar
Author: Mark Franko
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-06-19
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0197503349

Ukrainian dancer and choreographer Serge Lifar (1905-86) is recognized both as the modernizer of French ballet in the twentieth century and as the keeper of the flame of the classical tradition upon which the glory of French ballet was founded. Having migrated to France from Russia in 1923 to join Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Lifar was appointed star dancer and ballet director at the Paris Opéra in 1930. Despite being rather unpopular with the French press at the start of his appointment, Lifar came to dominate the Parisian dance scene-through his publications as well as his dancing and choreography-until the end of the Second World War, reaching the height of his fame under the German occupation of Paris (1940-44). Rumors of his collaborationism having remained inconclusive throughout the postwar era, Lifar retired in 1958. This book not only reassesses Lifar's career, both aesthetically and politically, but also provides a broader reevaluation of the situation of dance-specifically balletic neoclassicism-in the first half of the twentieth century. The Fascist Turn in the Dance of Serge Lifar is the first book not only to discuss the resistance to Lifar in the French press at the start of his much-mythologized career, but also the first to present substantial evidence of Lifar's collaborationism and relate it to his artistic profile during the preceding decade. In examining the political significance of the critical discussion of Lifar's body and technique, author Mark Franko provides the ground upon which to understand the narcissistic and heroic images of Lifar in the 1930s as prefiguring the role he would play in the occupation. Through extensive archival research into unpublished documents of the era, police reports, the transcript of his postwar trial and rarely cited newspaper columns Lifar wrote, Franko reconstructs the dancer's political activities, political convictions, and political ambitions during the Occupation.