Reflecting Senses

Reflecting Senses
Author: Walter Pape
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2011-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110889447

Envisioning Dance on Film and Video

Envisioning Dance on Film and Video
Author: Judy Mitoma
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2013-10-18
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135376514

Virtually everyone working in dance today uses electronic media technology. Envisioning Dance on Film and Video chronicles this 100-year history and gives readers new insight on how dance creatively exploits the art and craft of film and video. In fifty-three essays, choreographers, filmmakers, critics and collaborating artists explore all aspects of the process of rendering a three-dimensional art form in two-dimensional electronic media. Many of these essays are illustrated by ninety-three photographs and a two-hour DVD (40 video excerpts). A project of UCLA – Center for Intercultural Performance, made possible through The Pew Charitable Trusts (www.wac.ucla.edu/cip).

Performing Femininity

Performing Femininity
Author: Alexandra Kolb
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2009
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783039113514

This is the first book to analyse the cultural representations of female identity that were created by the interaction between choreography and literary writing in German modernism. It explores the connections between dance, literature and gender discourses with a focus on a key period of the Austro-German dance scene: the years between 1900 and 1933. Drawing on influential feminist and gender theories, this book evaluates the choreographies of leading artists such as Grete Wiesenthal, Mary Wigman, Valeska Gert, Anita Berber, and the sensational 'dream' dancer Madeleine Guipet. In response to growing criticism of ballet, German modern dance reflected and helped shape a reassessment of images of the female, embracing both essentialist and constructionist models of femininity. It also triggered a range of literary responses from dance artists themselves and from contemporary authors - some high-profile, others less well known. This interdisciplinary work offers analyses and part-translations of texts by Alfred Döblin, Frank Wedekind and Carl Sternheim, amongst others, which have to date received little attention in Anglo-American cultural studies due to their unavailability in English.

Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music

Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music
Author: Paul Bertagnolli
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 487
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040104762

Edward MacDowell’s European Piano Music is a critical study of the piano music that MacDowell composed during his European sojourn (1876–1888), steeped in reception history and with a special emphasis of programmaticism. The book expands current knowledge of MacDowell’s childhood in four of the chapters based on his previously uninvestigated sheet music collection, thereby achieving a better balance among the stages of MacDowell’s life than is evident in most books of the life-and-works variety. Prolific contemporaneous music criticism, meticulously preserved in MacDowell’s scrapbooks, is likewise undervalued in the MacDowell literature, but it furnishes penetrating observations about the expressive and programmatic content of numerous compositions, especially as it was revealed to critics when MacDowell performed his own works. Lastly, the book offers explanations for why MacDowell immersed himself in European culture for decades and then, at a crucial juncture in his career, embraced diverse American heritages and worked toward a conception of a pluralistic music that was American “in a creative sense.” The book’s content and methodology would appeal most directly to specialists within the broad fields of musicology and music theory, particularly within American art music and its composers; nineteenth-century music; program music; reception history; and piano literature.

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners
Author: Franc Chamberlain
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 575
Release: 2020-08-16
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000038858

The Routledge Companion to Performance Practitioners collects the outstanding biographical and production overviews of key theatre practitioners first featured in the popular Routledge Performance Practitioners series of guidebooks. Each of the chapters is written by an expert on a particular figure, from Stanislavsky and Brecht to Laban and Decroux, and places their work in its social and historical context. Summaries and analyses of their key productions indicate how each practitioner's theoretical approaches to performance and the performer were manifested in practice. All 22 practitioners from the original series are represented, with this volume covering those born before the end of the First World War. This is the definitive first step for students, scholars and practitioners hoping to acquaint themselves with the leading names in performance, or deepen their knowledge of these seminal figures.

Mary Wigman

Mary Wigman
Author: Mary Anne Santos Newhall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2017-12-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1351331809

This book considers dancer, teacher, and choreographer Mary Wigman, a leading innovator in Expressionist dance whose radical explorations of movement and dance theory are credited with expanding the scope of dance as a theatrical art. Now reissued, this book combines: a full account of Wigman’s life and work an analysis of her key ideas detailed discussion of her aesthetic theories, including the use of space as an "invisible partner" and the transcendent nature of performance a commentary on her key works, including Hexentanz and The Seven Dances of Life an extensive collection of practical exercises designed to provide an understanding of Wigman’s choreographic principles and her uniquely immersive approach to dance. As a first step towards critical understanding, and as an initial exploration before going on to further, primary research, Routledge Performance Practitioners are unbeatable value for today’s student.

Satanic Feminism

Satanic Feminism
Author: Per Faxneld
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2017-08-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190664487

According to the Bible, Eve was the first to heed Satan's advice to eat the forbidden fruit and thus responsible for all of humanity's subsequent miseries. The notion of woman as the Devil's accomplice is prominent throughout Christian history and has been used to legitimize the subordination of wives and daughters. In the nineteenth century, rebellious females performed counter-readings of this misogynist tradition. Lucifer was reconceptualized as a feminist liberator of womankind, and Eve became a heroine. In these reimaginings, Satan is an ally in the struggle against a tyrannical patriarchy supported by God the Father and his male priests. Per Faxneld shows how this Satanic feminism was expressed in a wide variety of nineteenth-century literary texts, autobiographies, pamphlets, newspaper articles, paintings, sculptures, and even artifacts of consumer culture like jewelry. He details how colorful figures like the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, gender-bending Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky, author Aino Kallas, actress Sarah Bernhardt, anti-clerical witch enthusiast Matilda Joslyn Gage, decadent marchioness Luisa Casati, and the Luciferian lesbian poetess Renée Vivien embraced these reimaginings. By exploring the connections between esotericism, literature, art and the political realm, Satanic Feminism sheds new light on neglected aspects of the intellectual history of feminism, Satanism, and revisionary mythmaking.

The Cinema Coven

The Cinema Coven
Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2024-11-07
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1476653968

Witches and witchcraft are potent metaphors for feminine power, with a history that predates the advent of cinema. The figure of the witch represents a particularly fraught, contested kind of gendered power, and has long inspired filmmakers to explore themes of race, class, trauma, motherhood, grief, and identity. This book examines the relationship between women, witchcraft, and filmmaking, exploring types of storytelling and the central themes in these movies. Such films span the globe and have starred prominent figures like Madonna, Bette Midler, Bjork, and Nicole Kidman, as well as lesser-known women behind the scenes. Some of these filmmakers have premiered their works at major film festivals, while others have produced content for television and video releases. While notable in their diversity, these movies share one crucial thing: they were all created by women in an industry broadly dominated by men.