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Choreographing Empathy
Abstract
The paper builds an argument about empathy, kinesthesia, choreography, and power as they were constituted in early eighteenth
century France. It examines the conditions under which one body could claim to know what another body was feeling, using two
sets of documents – philosophical examinations of perception and kinesthesia by Condillac and notations of dances published
by Feuillet. Reading these documents intertextually, I postulate a kind of corporeal episteme that grounds how the body is
constructed. And I endeavor to situate this body within the colonial and expansionist politics of its historical moment.
... La danza e la coreografia, nelle loro diverse connotazioni, possono essere considerate non soltanto come riflesso dei valori culturali, ma come produzione stessa di essi. Novack (1990), assieme ad altri autori come Martin (1996), Franko (2002 e DeFrantz (2004), ha fermamente combattuto l'idea secondo cui la coreografia operi solamente attraverso l'estetica, disconnessa dalle esperienze sociali e politiche (Foster, 2011). ...
... Nei primi anni del XX secolo Martin sosteneva la presenza di un forte rapporto tra il danzatore e lo spettatore e una basilare connessione tra movimento ed emozione. All'inizio del XXI secolo i neurofisiologi confermano tale intuizione e riconoscono un'intrinseca connessione tra il danzatore e lo spettatore, basata sulla scoperta dei neuroni specchio (Foster, 2011). Tali studi hanno dimostrato che a livello cerebrale vengono attivate le stesse zone sia che si tratti di osservare un'azione, sia che si tratti di compierla in prima persona. ...
... Non c'è modo di sapere se, ad esempio, il punteggio ottenuto dal gruppo sperimentale sia dovuto alla semplice aggiunta di un momento di apprendimento o alla natura degli strumenti utilizzati. Un ulteriore protocollo applicabile per tale studio avrebbe potuto prevedere, da un lato, un gruppo nel quale la danza venisse insegnata attraverso il movimento e il coinvolgimento diretto dei partecipanti, dall'altro, un secondo gruppo in cui l'insegnamento avvenisse solamente attraverso la visione di video (Foster, 2011). Quel che qui conta però, per il presente contributo è, in ogni caso, l'utilizzo dell'Arte (la danza ancora una volta) come fonte di indicatori di abilità interpretative trasversali e utili ai fini della raccolta dati. ...
The last two decades have seen a growing interest on the different ways of knowing in all the fields. Although some research has highlights the importance of this topic, there is still very little scientific understanding about this process. The first serious discussions and analyses of the construction of knowledge emerged during the 1900s. In Humanities field, questions have been raised about the use of traditional research paradigm considered unable for the understanding of these complex subjects.
In this perspective, this article provided an important opportunity to advance the understanding of new research paths that not only overturn the classical perspective of research, but also allow us to reformulate and reinvent strategies, tools, and forms of representations of research findings.
This article considers the implications of the approach of Arts-Based Research (ABR) and deeply of dance-based methods for educational research.
... By retelling her story through movement, text, and imagery, Okpokwasili navigates her perception of her identity and explored expressive ways of understanding herself in a greater cultural and social context. The embodiment of personally relevant social issues in autoethnographic performance expands self-awareness and empathetic capacity (Foster, 2011). ...
... Consistent with the evocative character of expressive learning activities, learners used expressive techniques as tools to harvest somatic knowledge and emotions regardless of their level of mastery of dance performance. This finding substantiates that SEA, like other arts-based and expressive activities, fosters reexamination and reconstruction of personal experience, knowing, and meaning (Foster, 2011;C. Hoggan et al., 2009;Lawrence, 2012aLawrence, , 2012bSnowber, 2018). ...
This retrospective case study investigated how learners in a transformative autoethnographic dance course engaged in and navigated self-reflexive identity work and corresponding learning outcomes. Data were drawn from 15 diverse undergraduate students enrolled in a course for credit at an urban community college. Findings indicated that learners used choreographic motifs to evoke emotional aspects of a biographic experience and to manage their emotional vulnerability. Learners differed in their self-disclosure, types of reflection, and degree of resolution in their dance narratives. Transformation of identity was found for one third of the class with evidence of change both from exploration of preconscious emotions and epistemic change in perspective.
... More specifically, the category of choreography has enabled the study of working practices as improvised, structured, contextualised, and embedded activities, highlighting the main actor staged: the body. Studies on choreography and on the analysis of choreographic style (Bagley, Cancienne, 2002;Duerden, Fisher, 2007; Eliot, 2007;Foster, 2011) highlighted the crucial features that this kind of analysis can reveal. Adshead et al. (1988) define a choreographic style as «the typical selection of materials by a choreographer, with regard to movement vocabulary, dynamic range, use of space, structuring devices and so on, in relation to thematic material». ...
... Following these considerations, in this study, dance and choreography (Foster, 2011) will be used as concepts to interpret teachers' work. ...
... Interrelations between kinesthesia and empathy have been investigated by quite a number of artistic and scientific researchers such as Foster (2005), Montero (2006), Bannissy and Ward (2007), Curtis (2012), and Lamm, Silani and Singer (2015). Due to its natural expression in motion, kinesthetics therefore has been explored as typical media aesthetics of film ("moving pictures") (Curtis 2012, Curtis 2010a, Curtis 2010b), dance and performance art (Cole andMontero 2007, Foster 2005), but also in art theory (Fingerhut 2011) and philosophy (Paterson 2012). ...
Kinesthesia as a unique sensory domain has been rediscovered by science and humanities in recent years, although its existence has been under investigation since as early as the 19th century. The exact definition of kinesthesia (the kinesthetic sense) still is controversial and at stake amongst scientists and scholars. Historically, the term kinesthesia derives from early studies about the physiological conditions of humans and animals moving their limbs and staying in balance. It has been called the "sense of locomotion" (Scaliger 1557), the "muscular sense" (Bell 1826), "kinesthesia" (Bastian 1880) and also often is called "proprioception" (Sherrington 1906), or vice versa, and then is described as the "sense of bodily position" (Paterson 2012).
In film and dance studies, where it has been rediscovered and discussed intensively in the context of the "performative turn" (Polan 1987) in arts and humanities, the "sense of movement" clearly plays an important role. Due to its natural expression in motion, kinesthetics have been explored as typical media aesthetics of film ("moving pictures") (Curtis 2012, Curtis 2010a, Curtis 2010b), dance and performance art (the art of body movement) (Cole and Montero 2007, Foster 2005), as well as in art theory (Fingerhut 2011) and philosophy (Paterson 2012). Many of these studies and discussions focus on the effects of movements by the human body (dance) or by audio-visual media (film, video, game art) on the user/spectator, few have so far analyzed the exact features and forms of media (”media aesthetics”) of these artworks in regard to their appearances.
Starting from research findings about the interrelations of kinesthetic media forms in 15 digital installations and their multimodal perception, the presentation will demonstrate how kinesthetic features in media aesthetics of digital artworks can be described in detail, and as such can allow for cross- and multimodal sensory experiences in the user/spectator.
We claim, that (artistic) media like e.g. video, image or sound not only provide sensory experiences within their primary sensory modality but each consist of multimodal sensory features which are „integrated“ by the kinesthetic sensory domain. This is true no matter if we observe dynamic or static artifacts. This assumption is supported by a number of neuroscience findings which say that perception per se is basically built on the physical and mental ability to move.
However, kinesthetic media aesthetics in an art installation often are not openly shown or presented as such (e.g. as a moving picture or as a rotating object) but typically are "hidden" in cross- or transmodal features of media, apparently addressing other sensory modalities than the kinesthetic sense. Such kinesthetic blind spots in vision, audio, smell, taste, touch, visceroception (the perception of internal organs), thermoception (the sensing of heat and cold), or nociception (sensing pain) can become visible/nameable when we approach them from a second order viewpoint. This is also true for the incorporation of semantic concepts like time and space, and the “sense of empathy" (Berthoz 2014). Thus, the connection between kinesthesia and empathy is a key point to be considered in the exploration of kinesthetic media features in digital artworks and environments.
Referring to Heinz von Foerster's statement that we can't see what we can't see, by the example of selected digital artworks the presentation will show how the transmodal integration through the kinesthetic sense happens by means of cross-modal media aesthetics and metaphorical forms expressing motion and movement in non-kinesthetic media.
... Tradução nossa) Noutras palavras, depois do advento da dança moderna, as práticas de criar dança começam a se distanciar de um regime de treinamento técnico especifico. (Foster, 2011) No começo do treino da dança moderna, os bailarinos procuravam incorporar técnicas, estilos e ideais de seus coreógrafos. (Bales, 2008) Recentemente, contudo, os bailarinos começaram a treinar diferentes formas e gêneros, ocorrendo assim, de certa forma, uma separação entre a dança e o treino. ...
Melanie Bales e Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, pesquisadoras da Universidade de Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Departamento de Dança), partem da premissa de que, na dança, o treino de práticas corporais não estaria apenas no lugar da construção de habilidades, mas sim no de invenção, descoberta e desenvolvimento da dança. O treino de práticas seria assim um lugar generativo de arte e produção de conhecimento. A partir da composição instantânea segundo a concepção do coreógrafo britânico Julyen Hamilton, este artigo propõe-se a discutir como o conceito de imaginação emerge e é trabalhado nas práticas corporais da dança. Para tanto, realizou-se uma etnografia de prática artística, em que o campo privilegiado foi o próprio estúdio e workshops realizados em circuitos berlinense de treinamento da dança contemporânea entre janeiro e junho de 2015. As considerações metodológicas foram feitas com base em uma pesquisa da autora e de seu aprendizado de práticas corporais da dança como locus de um devir-coreográfico, via um processo de imersão na prática propriamente dita.
... Following these considerations, in this study, dance and choreography (Foster, 2011) will be used as concepts to interpret teachers' work. ...
In recent years, educational research has focused on the different ways of acquiring and transmitting knowledge within educational contexts with special attention on practical-operative experience of teachers.
Questions such as what it could mean to be, to practice, and to learn as a professional become significant.
French and German research tradition on routines and action plans of teachers made a metaphorical reference to artistic concepts as performance, orchestration, etc.
This study takes place in the teachers’ education field and it is aimed to study teaching practice as choreography, as an artistic practice performed by teachers in the classroom.
The challenge is to understand how the Arts-Based Research approach, in its complexity, can help open up new areas of knowledge that will enable researchers to interpret teachers’ work.
... At the same time dance is entwined with social community because it starts from a common experience. In this sense, an analysis of dance as a performance leads researchers to focus on the ways through which bodies are used and shaped [2,11,12,20]. ...
Explores performances by Pasifika artists: Angela Tiatia, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila and Shigeyuki Kihara. Wynne-Jones offers a much-needed summary of Pacific bodies performing and creating interventions in museums and contemporary art gallery spaces in Aotearoa New Zealand. Focussing on the relations activated by such artworks, an examination of Louise Tu’u’s thesis of performance as a processual tool for drawing audiences into the dis-ease of social relations precedes Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonising methodologies and how these can be applied to choreographies and performance art practice. The chapter draws attention to Chloe Weaver’s argument that the relational space of the vā has resonances with Nicholas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. “Walking the wall and crossing the threshold” concludes with a discussion of whether performance artworks taking place in museums of art should be considered decolonising or counter-hegemonic.
Jordan Wolfson’s Colored Sculpture (2016) paired with Helen Rees Leahy’s theory of museum bodies is used to explore the subjection, self-regulation and conformity often required in contemporary art museums. The history and politics of the relations created between art museums and visitors is explored, beginning with early nineteenth-century examples before moving onto the modernist “white cube” and its more hybrid twenty-first century permutations. Wynne-Jones uses André Lepecki’s distinction between choreo-policing and choreo-politics to examine the tensions between conformity and artistic freedom in contemporary performance art. ‘Museum bodies: subjection, self-regulation, conformity and freedom’ concludes with conceptions of space from theorist Michel Foucault and choreographer Carol Brown that allow for openness and proliferation.
2020 was marked by prolific mobilization, with mass protests contrasting the now-normalized shelter-in-place policies of pandemic policy. Global participation for racial justice reached an historic scale and empathy emerged as the word du jour. Written during a moment of isolation and anticipation, this article articulates the unlikely intersection of (physical) rest and (political) unrest as a rise in the critical consciousness of the public (Said: 1983) alongside ‘modernity’s kinetic being’ (Lepecki: 2006). In contextualizing the current political moment as a collective experience of precarity that generated new activism, this article translates the development of critical consciousness from the realm of the discursive and literary to that of the embodied and performative. Yet how do we maintain collective repair without crossing the precipice of exhaustion so that this movement does not fade into a moment but rather remains a refrain repeated once no longer in vogue? To imagine a response, this article moves through critical theory and dance studies in a return to debates on kinesthetic empathy as a source of sustainable repair.
Depuis plusieurs années, la chorégraphie et la danse s’émancipent l’une de l’autre et une nouvelle conception de la chorégraphie comme « champ expansé » se développe. Il s’agit de penser la chorégraphie comme une pratique qui dépasse les frontières de l’art et de l’éducation pour s’intéresser à la société. Présentée comme une activité éminemment théorique et critique (Jenn Joy) elle devient une technologie (c’est-à-dire un entrelacement de possibilités pour activer les connaissances appropriées à une situation donnée) qui peut s’appliquer à différents champs et situations. Selon Mårten Spångberg, la chorégraphie est « l’opportunité d’activer des formes de navigation du monde » ; « une façon d’approcher et de conduire la vie » . Nous nous approprions cette notion de chorégraphie expansée pour nous intéresser à ce qu’elle peut apporter à nos façons de nous mettre en relation avec l’humain et le non-humain. La proposition de renouveler cette notion et d’en faire une pratique expansée répond à un nouveau paradigme qui amplifie et dépasse sa conception disciplinaire pour expérimenter d’autres façons de nous positionner dans le monde et de soutenir nos corps en lien avec un milieu. Ainsi, à partir du champ expansé de la chorégraphie, nous développons des stratégies relationnelles pour expérimenter un apprentissage par le corps et souscrivons à une ouverture artistique mais aussi à une ouverture de la discipline à d’autres pratiques. Cette thèse combine des pratiques de création et de recherche sur la chorégraphie à partir de la question : qu’est-ce qui nous soutient ? Sur la base d’une méthodologie heuristique située entre la pratique et la réflexion, nous avons conçu des dispositifs de recherche chorégraphiques pour écrire le corps en situation de création, que nous nommons les corpographies. Conçues avec une pluralité de corps, celles-ci explorent les questions de recherche tout en créant de nouveaux questionnements et de nouvelles pistes de réflexion. Finalement, nous présentons le processus de création de la pièce chorégraphique K( )SA, moelle épinière de cette recherche-création et incarnation singulière des questionnements de cette recherche.
The purpose of this study is to experience and reflect on the methodological and epistemological implications of a walking tour as a mode of presenting and disseminating marketing knowledge. We invite you to join us on a walking tour built around food, and shaped by the spatiotemporal dynamics of a Nordic city. By moving through the streets and green areas of the city, we show you how the walking tour opens up possibilities to elaborate and leverage the concept of experience through the non-representational sensitivities. During the tour, you will realise that despite the stories told, it is through embodiment, and entanglements with the materialities encountered in spaces that the tour narratives continuously evolve, co-creating knowledge and understanding of the city and the notion of experience. Finally, we will draw your attention to the walking tour as a way of presentation in relation to current academic epistemic cultures.
The field of integrated dance brings together dancers with and without disabilities to create a novel art form. In dancing together, participants engage in a process of "translation" to interpret and enact movement, a practice I term embodied translation. This practice involves distilling a movement to its kinesthetic and expressive core, then exploring potential manifestations of those elements through various uses of space, objects, and bodies. Performed among people whose means and range of movement vary widely, embodied translation necessitates the recognition of multiple pathways toward shared expression, engendering a collective of kinesthetic multiplic-ities. Based on fieldwork with projects of integrated dance in Israel and the United States, I examine participants' verbal, embodied, kinesthetic, and material means of translation, questioning whether translation can in fact produce commensurability among diverse bodies. [translation, disability, dance, embodied knowledge, anthropology of movement, nonhuman] RESUMEN El campo de la danza integrada reúne bailarines con y sin discapacidades, combinando cul-turas dispares en una sola forma de arte. Al danzar juntos, los participantes se envuelven en un proceso de "traducción" para interpretar y representar, una práctica que llamo traducción corporeizada. Esta práctica envuelve el destilar un movimiento a su centro cenestésico y expresivo, luego el explorar manifestaciones potenciales de esos elementos a través de varios usos del espacio, los objetos y los cuerpos. Interpretada entre personas cuyos medios y rango de movimiento varían ampliamente, la traducción corporeizada, nece-sita el reconocimiento de múltiples caminos hacia la expresión compartida, engendrando un colectivo de multiplicidades cenestésicas. Basada en trabajo de campo con proyectos de danza integrada en Israel y los Estados Unidos, examino los medios verbales, corporeizados, cenestésicos y materiales de traducción de los participantes, cuestionando si la traducción puede en efecto producir conmensurabilidad entre cuerpos diversos. [traducción, discapacidad, danza, conocimiento corporeizado, antropología del movimiento, no humano]
The aim of this chapter is to discuss a range of computer applications designed to enable people with disabilities to interact through music, dance, and the visual arts. A review of the main motion tracking algorithms and software environments is included as well as an overview of theoretical positions regarding the mapping of real time extracted motion features to sound, interactive music, and computer-generated or modified visual content. The chapter concludes with descriptions of how the concepts have been applied to research projects undertaken with different groups of young people with motor limitations and autism spectrum disorders.
When people with widely diverse bodily characteristics collaborate in dancing together, an exploration and communication of movement and embodied knowledge takes place through dialogue and shared practice. Engagement in these activities develops participants’ awareness of and appreciation for kinaesthetic complexities and diverse embodiments, promoting an understanding of bodily difference as contributing to, rather than detracting from, the realm of physical arts and society as a whole. Based on fieldwork conducted in Israel and the United States with integrated dance projects bringing together people with and without disabilities, this article offers an ethnographic analysis that continues the anthropological endeavour of revealing the ways kinaesthetic knowledge (awareness and knowledge of the movement and spatial orientation of one's body) is fostered. Introducing disability into movement theory, I offer an understanding of movement/stasis as a spectrum of ways of moving, looking at what happens when individuals who are different from one another engage in shared, critical reflection upon their movement practices. Élargir la conscience intersubjective : anthropologie de la diversité kinesthésique Résumé Quand des personnes présentant des caractéristiques physiques diverses collaborent pour danser ensemble, une exploration et une communication du mouvement et du savoir incorporé se produisent par le dialogue et la pratique partagée. La participation à ces activités développe la sensibilité à la complexité kinesthésique et l'appréciation des incorporations différentes, favorisant ainsi la compréhension de la différence physique et enrichissant le domaine des arts physiques et la société dans son ensemble au lieu d'en éloigner. Sur la base d'un travail de terrain mené en Israël et aux États‐Unis, dans des projets de danse intégrés réunissant des personnes sans handicap et handicapées, l'analyse ethnographique présentée dans cet article prolonge l’étude anthropologique des moyens par lesquels est favorisée la connaissance kinesthésique (conscience et connaissance du mouvement et de l'orientation dans l'espace de son corps). En introduisant le handicap dans la théorie du mouvement, l'autrice offre une compréhension du mouvement et de la stase comme un éventail de manières de bouger, et observe ce qui se passe quand des personnes différentes les unes des autres participent à une réflexion critique partagée sur leurs pratiques motrices.
Postphenomenology and posthermeneutics as initiated by Ihde have made important contributions to conceptualizing understanding human–technology relations. However, their focus on individual perception, artifacts, and static embodiment has its limitations when it comes to understanding the embodied use of technology as (1) involving bodily movement, (2) social, and (3) taking place within, and configuring, a temporal horizon. To account for these dimensions of experience, action, and existence with technology, this paper proposes to use a conceptual framework based on performance metaphors. Drawing on metaphors from three performance arts—dance, theatre, and music—and giving examples from social media and other technologies, it is shown that we can helpfully describe technology use and experience as performance involving movement, sociality, and temporality. Moreover, it is argued that these metaphors can also be used to reformulate the idea that in such uses and experiences, now understood as “technoperformances”, technology is not merely a tool but also takes on a stronger, often non-intended role: not so much as “mediator” but as choreographer, director, and conductor of what we experience and do. Performance metaphors thus allow us to recast the phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use as moving, social, and temporal—indeed historical—affair in which technologies take on the role of organizer and structurer of our performances, and in which humans are not necessarily the ones who are fully in control of the meanings, experiences, and actions that emerge from our engagement with the world, with technology, and with each other. This promises to give us a more comprehensive view of what it means to live with technology and how our lives are increasingly organized by technology—especially by smart technologies. Finally, it is argued that this has normative implications for an ethics and politics of technology, now understood as an ethics and politics of technoperformances.
In spring 2018 a digitally manipulated seascape flowed around London’s Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Sondra Perry’s installation Typhoon Coming On (2018) animates a part of J. M. W. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840), a painting depicting the Zong massacre of 1781 where the captain of a British ship threw 133 enslaved people overboard in pursuit of economic compensation through the ship’s insurance policy. As a maritime catastrophe that reveals anti-blackness and finance capital to be co-constitutive phenomena, the Zong massacre provides Perry with the means to contemplate the Atlantic as a site for the transformation of bodily wreckage into economic salvage under the commercial logic of racial capitalism. In this article I explore Perry’s remediation of Turner’s painting by thinking about the co-choreography of bodies and ocean in each of these seascapes. In her refusal to stage the bodily wreckage of the Middle Passage, Perry presents the transatlantic slave trade not as an exceptional event punctuating the history of seafaring but as the very foundation of capitalist modernity. Responding to concepts developed by Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Christina Sharpe, I consider the ways Perry critiques Turner’s depiction of the slave ship’s bodily wreckage and his attendant white abolitionist morality, and instead remediates the scene of the Zong massacre around the whispered presences of Black liberation.
What does it mean for an actor to empathize with the character she is playing? We review different theories of empathy and of acting. We then consider the notion of “twofoldness” (Wollheim), which has been used to characterize the observer or audience perspective on the relation between actor and character (Smith). This same kind of twofoldness or double attunement applies from the perspective of the actor herself who must, at certain points of preparation, distinguish between the character portrayed and her own portrayal effected in her craft. We argue that this concept helps us to understand how the actor can empathize with her character. For the actor who must study and rehearse her character, empathy may begin with higher-order (narrative or imaginative) processes that provide a contextualized understanding of the character. This understanding eventually integrates with more basic empathic processes in her actual performance.
In a post-Brexit (and perhaps even post-truth) context, the entire nation is going through an intense period of self-scrutiny, attempting to find a way forward for British culture despite a growing climate of divisive and destructive trends. As ever, verbatim theatre, spearheaded by Rufus Norris' National Theatre, has sought to provide some answers in its relentless examination of the state of Britain. However, since the renaissance of verbatim theatre in the mid-1990s, the political situation has worsened considerably and it may appear that the typical strategies of verbatim theatre have lost their efficacy, struggling to provide a much-needed alternative. In this article, I will assess some of verbatim theatre's latest developments in the 21st century through three main case studies, which are DV8's To Be Straight with You (2007), Catherine Grosvenor's Cherry Blossom (2008) and Alecky Blythe's Little Revolution (2014). My main argument is that, notwithstanding the claims to the contrary, verbatim theatre is far from being in decline and it has continued to fluctuate, transform and exceed its familiar parameters, urging us to rethink its general aesthetic coordinates beyond the project of documentary realism and that of a national 'shadow archive.' More specifically and drawing from a variety of recent examples including the aforementioned case studies, I will argue that verbatim theatre in this period has a post-postmodern proclivity to make new connections across the fragments and re-construct the social.
Until December 2016, the Bolivian government refused to declassify its military archives, which are believed to hold records of activities led during the consecutive dictatorships that lasted from 1964 to 1982. As these archives remained inaccessible, various Bolivian human rights organizations developed alternative tactics to give more visibility to this part of Bolivian history, and to induce Morales’s government into action. The film director Adriana Montenegro, the choreographer Wara Cajías, and the Asociación de Familiares Detenidos, Desaparecidos y Mártires por la Liberación Nacional de Bolivia (ASOFAMD) joined forces to develop one such alternative, and created the screendance Desaparecidos (2008). To evoke the embodied experience of the Bolivians that were tortured, assassinated and/or disappeared during the Hugo Banzer and Luis García Meza dictatorships, which took place between 1971 and 1982, Desaparecidos presents the body as the point of departure for the production of knowledge regarding the fates of the victims of the dictatorships. As a screendance though, it also experiments with the aesthetic principles of cinematographic language in order to enhance the premise of embodied experience as a system of knowledge production, and as a call to action for its viewers.
The Holocaust today resides between memory and postmemory. Initially, children of survivors and their contemporaries inherited a mediated past and bore full responsibility for disseminating their ancestors’ experiences. However, with the prevalence of the Holocaust metanarrative and its absolutist historicism, it was realised that when memory needs to cross generational boundaries, it needs to cross medial as well. The discourse was not enough; there was a need for broadening the narrative beyond the verbal using a powerful medium with the capacity to affect cognition and provoke emotions. This would be architecture, a storyteller by nature. In the 2000s, there was a noticeable boom in innovative Holocaust museums and memorials. Deconstructivist designs and symbolic forms constituted a new language that would meet the demands of local narratives, influence public opinion, and contribute to social change. This paper examines the potential of this transmediation and addresses critical issues-the importance of the experience, the role of empathy and intersubjectivity, the association of emotions with personal and symbolic experiences-and ethical challenges of the transmedia “migration” of a story. To accomplish this, it draws upon Daniel Libeskind, a Polish-born architect who has narrated different aspects of the Holocaust experience through his works.
How does the unit organisation enhance students’ artistic learning?
In the first section of this essay, I offer a brief overview of Hegel’s dozen or so mentions of dance in his Lectures on Aesthetics, focusing on the tension between Hegel’s denigration of dance as an “imperfect art” and his characterization of dance as a potential threat to the other arts. In the second section, I turn to an insightful essay from Hans-Christian Lucas on Hegel’s “Anthropology,” focusing on his argument that the Anthropology’s crucial final sections (importantly connected to “magic” and “animal magnetism”) threaten to undermine Hegel’s entire philosophy. And in the final section, I offer my own reading of the Anthropology, connecting the threads of my previous two sections. More specifically, I attempt to show that Hegel has in effect quarantined dance in what he terms “the dark regions” of madness in “The Feeling Soul.” Overall, I suggest that this quarantining is ultimately as problematic for Hegel as it has been for dance. Because without dance, complete with its associations with people disempowered in their embodiment (such as women and people of color), this crucial transitional section in the Anthropology remains burdened with a corporeal remainder that problematizes the entire system. Put simply, Hegel must – by his own logic – learn to dance gracefully with those he would rather shun.
A growing interest in the concept of practice within workplace settings has been seen in the last two decades in a variety of fields. Although some authors highlighted the importance of this type of research, there is still a poor scientific understanding of this process. The first serious discussion and analysis of the construction of knowledge emerged during the 1900s. In the field of humanities, questions have been asked regarding the use of traditional research paradigms in terms of its limitation of understanding complex subjects. In line with this perspective, the current article provides an opportunity to advance the understanding of new research paths. Specifically, after an overview on the traditional research paradigms, particular references are devoted to the Arts-Based Research (ABR) approach and to the use of arts within the research processes. Then, this contribution provides a deep exploration of dance-based methods for educational research. As a transdisciplinary approach, the ABR ...
Poetics of Contemporary Dance by LouppeLaurence. Translated by GardnerSally. 2010. Alton, UK: Dance Books. 265 pp. including notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth. - Volume 44 Issue 1 - Erin Brannigan
Research project carried out at the University of Sunderland. Academic mentor: Dr Maddalena Taras
Research project carried out at the University of Sunderland (UK) as Visiting Scholar. Mentor: Dr Maddalena Taras
In thinking through Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, with a particular focus on the sailing vessel as the heterotopic space par excellence, this article develops an idea of ‘the choreographic’ in order to illuminate the spacetime dialectics which mobilize certain strands of utopian thought. The choreographic is defined incipiently as a place in process and theorized as the making of a situation in which space and time negate one another. The article presents a three-part inquiry through which this idea of the choreographic is used to assess propositions about utopia come-to-earth. The first part of the discussion excavates the choreographic properties of David Harvey’s model for utopian thought and practice (2000). The second part extends that excavation to questions about the spatiotemporal nature of Foucault’s sailing vessel (1986). Finally, the discussion of spacetime oscillation at sea is used to evaluate the utopian character of a lived example: the Middle Passage slave ship. Here the materialist underpinnings of Harvey’s argument are used to extend Foucault’s ideas to (or locate them in) the context of a ship that carries utopia and dystopia entwined. Ultimately, a dialectics of negation is found to be innate in choreography and is uncovered in the concept of utopia itself.
This article examines an Applied Theatre project that was jointly launched by a black Baptist church and a reform synagogue in a US suburb to foster relationships among their members. The suburban community is quite segregated, so the emotional intimacy that develops between the members is striking. Equally significant, however, is the fact that the relationships that emerge do not outlast the programme itself. By investigating one encounter from the theatre project alongside participant interviews and other ethnographic observations from the community in which the project took place, this article argues that play theory can elucidate both the strengths and shortcomings of the project, and that Applied Theatre scholarship would benefit from greater attention to play theory.
The aim of this chapter is to discuss a range of computer applications designed to enable people with disabilities to interact through music, dance, and the visual arts. A review of the main motion tracking algorithms and software environments is included as well as an overview of theoretical positions regarding the mapping of real time extracted motion features to sound, interactive music, and computer generated or modified visual content. The chapter concludes with descriptions of how the concepts have been applied to research projects undertaken with different groups of young people with motor limitations and autism spectrum disorders.
This essay reads John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century gesture manuals Chironomia and Chirologia. Bulwer advances a theory of invention as an inherently gestural form. The frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. Bulwer’s gesture theory refuses the separation of action and invention from which this tendency derives. From this refusal, I argue for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission, and reception of persuasive claims.
The U.S. philanthropic discourse known as "creative placemaking" unites a historically unprecedented number of institutional investors in the instrumentalization of art toward civic, social, economic, and environmental goals. Since coining the term in 2011, the National Endowment for the Arts has supported 256 arts interventions in all fifty states with funds totaling more than $21 million. Not without its critics, "place-based" grant programs hail artists to collaborate on municipally driven, often six-figure budget initiatives that use culture as a backdrop for "comprehensive community cultural development." Compared to the characteristic shortsightedness of institutional approaches to arts philanthropy in the U.S., many "placemaking" residencies offer significantly expanded periods of cultural engagement between artists, community members, and institutional liaisons. While the discursive emphasis on "place" by institutional investors has incited much debate among policy makers and practitioners, less attention has been paid to the instrumentality of time and embodied interaction within these elongated arts residencies. These exceptional circumstances signal a crucial point of intervention for performance scholarship.In this essay, I study cooperative time spent over the course of one NEA-funded residency to shift foundational understandings about how artists and project participants challenge the mechanisms of capitalism through practical and direct cooperation with institutional agents. Drawing upon project documentation and interview testimony from a team of lead artists, administrators, and community participants, I highlight three temporal strategies through which the Project Willowbrook team failed to faithfully reproduce institutional norms guarding "creativity" and "place". By stalling time (reframing the neighborhood's present-day cultural textures and rhythms), spending time (cultivating conversations with residents about Willowbrook's vexed history of foiled planning), and sub-contracting time (rewriting county art contracts twelve times to account for changes), the team's iterative approach suggests the anti-choreographic possibility that collectively embodied solutions to institutional problems cannot be planned in advance.
Teresa Heiland in "One Foot Inside the Circle: Contemporary Dance of Los Angeles Steps Outside Postmodernism and into Neo-Modernism with a Twist: draws connections between the city of Los Angeles and the unique dance form of HyperDance, which has emerged from this metropolis. The puzzle of a major American city with an enormous entertainment industry, yet little reputation or institutional support for modern dance, serves as an entree into the connection between place and dance. She argues that the economic power of the Hollywood entertainment industry and its focus on spectacle, computer-aided special effects, intermixing of dance and movement styles, and a constant focus on innovation has served to create the unique place-based form of dance HyperDance, which is focused on pushing the human body to its physical limits and creating ways of moving that havFlue never been seen before. Heiland connects this hybrid dance form to Los Angeles' postmodern urban form and the culture of the city which revolves around newness and growth, asserting a dynamic connection between urban space and movement. Heiland draws on Bourdieu to argue that LA is a giant field out of which a postmodern pastiche of Hyperdance has emerged.
This study falls into two parts:- The synthesis, within the Greek archaic and classical context, of a few points, theoretical and anthropological, as regards: the radiating glance of light, and vision as touch; cognitive metaphors and aesthetic issues at stake in figurative imagery; kinesthetic and visual empathy as spectacular and poetic active reception; and the social and fictional pragmatics of Pindar’s poetry.- A study of Pindar’s fifth Nemean, chiefly: its aesthetic and ritualistic issues based upon the dialectics of praise and myth and the notion of paragone; and the alternate interplay of visual and kinesthetic notations. In this way, epinician poetry appears as being at best performative, emulating the plastic arts and marking in the first place the triumph of a living show over sculpture.
Communication is a basic human necessity which in all its various forms has one common goal: expressing and deciphering ideas. Historically, verbal language has been the primary tool in this field. Education in recent years has taken a move towards more global approaches to learning/teaching. Within this context, more innovative and inclusive methods of communication need to be created. Attention to the human body and its communicative properties, such as research on “body language” and “Kinesics” has not been sufficient. Many venues in this domain remain undiscovered and researched. I believe the audience–performer connection is one of them. This paper will focus on the aspects of audience–performer connection and communication venues from the audience's perspective. The primary focus is based on the results of a survey and interviews which took place after a performer–audience interactive (15 performances) tilted I Matter. The performance took place in May 2010 in Beirut, Lebanon. This study will investigate the audience–performer connections through the analysis of the recorded responses (both the survey and focus group interviews) of the audience members.
Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings November 2018
It is arguable, but it makes good sense nonetheless, to say that Etienne Bonnot de Condillac [1715–1780] was the first thinker to give systematic consideration to “the psycholinguistic question,” as that term is characteristically understood today. Perhaps “epistemolinguistic question” would be the more accurate designation. The question entailed is that of the influence or relationship between language (in particular or in general) and an individual’s mental development. It is a significantly different issue from that posed by so many students of universal or rational grammar in the previous century: the relationship between language, “fully grammatical,” and mind, “fully rational”—a formulation of the problem which focused the genesis neither of language nor of rationality. Nor is Condillac’s epistemolinguistic question entirely the same as the problem of the origin of language per se, one of the most popular topics of late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century speculation. Again, it is different from the examination of lögos as both reason and speech among the Stoics and earlier Greek philosophers. The epistemolinguistic issue was, to be sure, adumbrated in context by sundry empiricist philosophers: Hobbes and Locke, for example, assigned an appropriate place to language in the sequence of mental faculties and operations.
Through readings of works by Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley, David Marshall provides a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century preoccupation with theatricality and sympathy. Sympathy is seen not as an instance of sensibility or natural benevolence but rather as an aesthetic and epistemological problem that must be understood in relation to the problem of theatricality. Placing novels in the context of eighteenth-century writing about theater, fiction, and painting, Marshall argues that an unusual variety of authors and texts were concerned with the possibility of entering into someone else's thoughts and feelings. He shows how key eighteenth-century works reflect on the problem of how to move, touch, and secure the sympathy of readers and beholders in the realm of both "art" and "life." Marshall discusses the demands placed upon novels to achieve certain "effects," the ambivalence of writers and readers about those effects, and the ways in which these texts can be read as philosophical meditations on the differences and analogies between the experiences of reading a novel, watching a play, beholding a painting, and witnessing the spectacle of someone suffering. "The Surprising Effects of Sympathy" traces the interaction of sympathy and theater and the artistic and philosophical problems that these terms represent in dialogues about aesthetics, moral philosophy, epistemology, psychology, autobiography, the novel, and society.
Abbe´ Condillac, E. B.: 1746 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. reprinted Cambridge The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans
- A Chatterjea
- J Derrida
Chatterjea, A.: 2004, Butting Out, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, Conn. Abbe´ Condillac, E. B.: 1754, Treatise on the Sensations, trans. G. Carr, London: reprinted Favil Press, 1930. Abbe´ Condillac, E. B.: 1746, in Hans Aarsleff (ed.), Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. reprinted Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Derrida, J.: 1980, The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans. by J. P. Leavey, Jr., Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Du Bos, J.-B.: 1748, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting, and Music, 3 vols., trans. T. Nugent, reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1978.
The Theory of Moral SentimentsCondillac's Epistemolinguistic Question Psychology of Language and Thought: Essays on the Theory and History of Psycholin-guistics
- A Smith
- Lilly Wells
- J H Stam
Smith, A.: 1817, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Boston: Wells and Lilly. Stam, J. H.: 1980, ''Condillac's Epistemolinguistic Question'', in R. W. Rieber, (ed.), Psychology of Language and Thought: Essays on the Theory and History of Psycholin-guistics, New York: Plenum Press. pp. 77--90.
Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. reprinted Cambridge
- E B Abbé De Condillac
Choréographie ou l’art de décrire la danse, reprinted Forni
- R A Feuillet
From Natural Philosophy to Scientific Discourse”Holler
- W Anderson
Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, trans
- J Derrida
1817The Theory of Moral SentimentsWells and LillyBoston
- A Smith
Condillac’s Epistemolinguistic Question”Rieber, RW eds. Psychology of Language and Thought: Essays on the Theory and History of PsycholinguisticsPlenum PressNew York7780
- J H Stam
Geometric Spirit: The Abbé de
- I Knight
1699, La Rhétorique ou l’art de parler
- B Lamy
Feuillet’s Thinking,” Traces of Dance, trans
- J. -N Laurenti
La Rhétorique ou l’art de parler
- B Lamy