Gotowa bibliografia na temat „Collage (Choreographic work : Cunningham)”

Collage has been central to Cunningham's work from the very beginning in the 1950s. Unlike Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, which exemplifies a hunger for wholeness, collage appeals to an age that has come to distrust claims of closure, “unity,” and fixed boundaries.

Where is expression in Cunningham's choreography? Are the moving bodies on stage expressive? If so, what are they expressing and how does such expression occur? Several of the finest theorists of dance—among them, Susan Leigh Foster, Mark Franko, and Dee Reynolds—have already approached the question of expressivity in the work of Merce Cunningham. Acknowledging the formalism and astringency of his choreography, they nonetheless insist that expression does indeed take place. Foster locates expression in the “affective significance” as opposed to the “emotional experience” of movement (1986, 38); Franko finds it in an “energy source … more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” (1995, 80); and Reynolds identifies expression in the dancing subject's sensorimotor “faculties” as they are deployed “fully in the present” (2007, 169). Cunningham himself has defined expression in dance as an intrinsic and inevitable quality of movement, indicating that his search to capture, isolate, and frame this quality is central to his choreographic process. As a critical theorist (rather than a dance historian), I am interested in expression as a more general, or cross-media, category and therefore find the efforts by Cunningham and his critics to define expression differently, to free it from its subservience to the psyche, refreshing, unconventional, and suggestive. I have become increasingly convinced that Cunningham's practical and theoretical interventions can illuminate more traditional literary and philosophical discourses on the aesthetics of expression and that they have particular resonance when juxtaposed with the approach to expression developed by Theodor Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory of 1970. Similar to Cunningham, Adorno complicates the category of “expression” by shifting its location from subjectivity, understood primarily as a psychic phenomenon, to embodiment, understood as a function of locomotion and sensual existence (in Franko's words, “something more fundamental than emotion, while just as differentiated” [1995, 80]).

With its emphasis on the socially constructed and mobile nature of ‘space’, Henri Lefebvre's theory of spatial production presents rich possibilities for a sociocultural analysis of choreography. In this article Arabella Stanger uses an examination of social space and spatial aesthetics as a basis upon which to develop a socio-aesthetics of dance – an approach in which the societal contexts and the aesthetic forms of choreography are understood to be fundamentally interrelated. Borrowing from Lefebvre's The Production of Space (1974) and Maria Shevtsova's sociology of the theatre and performance, Stanger establishes the theoretical parameters and methodological steps of such an approach, and locates a short illustrative example in the socio-spatial formations of Aurora's Act III variation from Marius Petipa's The Sleeping Beauty (1890). Ultimately extending a bridge between formalist and contextualist strands of dance studies, the article argues for the use of a particular concept of space in understanding choreographic practice as social practice. Arabella Stanger is Lecturer in Dance at the University of Roehampton. Having trained in classical ballet, she completed her MA and PhD studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has published on the work of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and William Forsythe.

In Samuel Beckett's play Footfalls, a woman called ‘May’ walks back and forth. In this essay, I suggest that the play's physical plainness may be its most difficult aspect: Footfalls is a prime example of how Beckett's later plays are more like enigmas than riddles, frustrating us without an eventual solution. As we try to describe and interpret May's motions, we're continually repelled, and denied the critical certainty we might want. But that desire may be the wrong one to have; instead, I would venture that the play's careful choreography is both the thing that's expressive, and the thing being expressed. Focusing on this choreographic metaphor, and drawing on dance practitioners and theorists from Lucia Ruprecht to Merce Cunningham, I suggest that Footfalls is about itself, which is to say that it's about ‘about-ness’ – how we search for words to describe motions that seem resistant to paraphrase. In the late 1970s, Beckett was certainly interested in dance. This wasn't evident only in the case of Billie Whitelaw and Footfalls. Directing Come and Go (as Kommen und Gehen) in 1978, Beckett wanted the performers’ shoes to be ‘genre ballerine’; writing Quad in 1980, he specified that ‘some ballet training’ on the performers’ part was ‘desirable’. I caution against misreading these plays as dances – they are not – but suggest that corporeal discipline was something with which Beckett became fixated. And this wasn't only a matter of stagecraft, as we can see by reading the late poetic sequence mirlitonnades, written in French between 1976 and 1980 – the period in which Beckett finished both Footfalls and its French sibling Pas. These poems are tightly linked to the plays alongside which they were written; the link, in David Wheatley's phrase, can be seen in their ‘harnessing of speech to carefully choreographed movement’. The mirlitonnades place a repeated emphasis upon their rhythms, and the ways in which they intimate physical movement without literally enacting it. This is so because, as Eric Griffiths puts it, ‘the reader must inform writing with a sense of the writer it calls up – an ideal body, a plausible voice’. In Beckett's later work, I suggest, he was attentive to how the conjunction of body and voice appeared, as much as how it meant – and he wanted to augment the difficulties that this poses for his critics’ task.

The purpose of the article is to determine the influence of the “philosophy of the random” on the formation of unique creative methods of the tandem, which ran counter to the aesthetic views of modern choreography; to investigate the key aspects of the interaction of principles, mechanisms of dramaturgy, expressive means of music and choreographic art within the framework of an artistic synthetic phenomenon. The research methodology includes historical and analytical methods, methods of comparative and cultural analysis. The scientific novelty consists in the analysis of the transformation of the North American choreographic tradition of modernism in the joint creative projects of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Using the example of the experimental creative projects of J. Cage and M. Cunningham, the main signs of the interaction of musical and choreographic structures in the field of synthetic artistic practices are clarified. Conclusions. The peculiarities of creative communication of J. Cage and M. Cunningham were determined on the example of joint development and artistic embodiment of experimental aesthetic concepts. In the context of an active creative dialogue with the tradition of North American modern choreography the heredity of aesthetic ideas was revealed, which became the basis for the formation of the artistic principles of the Cage–Cunningham tandem. The value of the aleatoric method as a formative principle of the musical and choreographic whole in joint artistic actions of the aforementioned tandem was analysed. The influence of the “philosophy of the random” on the formation of unique creative methods of tandem, which were contrary to the aesthetic views of modern choreography, was determined. The artistic phenomenon that actualises research intentions and reflections becomes a unique result of intense creative interaction of such polar-organised personalities. The experimental aleatoric practices of J. Cage and M. Cunningham in the synthetic paradigm of musical and choreographic art became an artistic opposition to the strictly regulated concept of story ballet by M. Graham and the relentlessly deterministic system of the dodecaphonic technique of A. Schoenberg. In a broad cultural sense, this can be considered a unique symbiosis between the rational West and the intuitive East. Keywords: artistic culture of the 20th century; musical work of John Cage; choreography by Merce Cunningham; joint creative project; modern choreographic tradition; synthesis of arts; experiment.

It seems not insignificant that the cult film Donnie Darko is set in the final stages of the Bush-Dukakis election campaign, which had the twin effects of inaugurating the Bush presidential dynasty and making “liberal” an insurmountably derogatory term in American politics. Donnie’s gift of seeing into the future is, at least superficially, a reaction to his medication for “emotional problems”. But the count-down to his apocalyptic date with a giant bunny-rabbit also coincides with the demise of any remaining hope for a certain kind of progressive Left politics. With the options for escaping a conservative small town life fast disappearing, an impenetrable theory of time-travel appears to offer a plausible reprieve from Donnie’s destiny. As we learn very early in the movie, however, even time-travel cannot offer salvation: Donnie, like a particular idea of America, is doomed. Strangely representative of cultural studies’ theoretical preoccupations, Donnie’s character is unavoidably implicated in an omnipresent therapeutic culture while also demonstrating good taste in 80s music, an attraction to mischief and a fitful enthusiasm for saving the world. In the context of this editorial, the film acts as a useful retrospective archive of the moment when “affect” came to wide attention as the key site for politics in the United States. Donnie Darko documents the rise and spectacular fall of Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), a charismatic motivational speaker and incidental kiddy-porn ringleader who makes a fortune with his book, Attitudinal Beliefs. Cunningham’s converts find liberation by freeing themselves from their own fears, for according to his paradigm, there are only two features of the “energy spectrum”: fear and love. The trick to a successful life – and good grades – is to choose the “Right-eous” path of the latter (Gregg and Fuller). But as the film develops, the audience slowly comes to realise that no one will avoid the truly terrifying fate that is Grandma Death’s secret: everyone dies alone. Donnie Darko encapsulates the overwhelming nature of adolescent angst which gravitates between the “indifference of terror and boredom” and which Lawrence Grossberg has claimed to be “the most powerful and pervasive affective relations in everyday life” (184). Donnie and his peers aren’t just subject to the petty tyrannies of high-school; the film’s plot allegorises a much wider cultural shift. As Grossberg argued extensively throughout the 1990s, the strategy of new conservatives has been to conduct a political agenda at the level of affect, or what today we might recognise as “the battle for hearts and minds”. It succeeds by colonising the very mood, imagination and hope of a citizenry. When Karen Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) is fired as English teacher at Donnie’s school – the result of a moral values campaign against a prescribed textbook – she says of the students: “We are losing them to apathy. They are slipping away”. Karen conveys despair and anger at this prospect, only to be met with the headmaster’s rebuke: “I am sorry that you have failed”. Here the apparently naïve optimism of a brilliant teacher is subject to the same indignant script her students face: individualised torment for a structurally ingrained lack of hope. Grossberg has consistently urged that cultural studies intellectuals recognise scenarios like these as the perniciously mundane locations where the fight for the future is waged: When the very possibility of political struggle is being erased – not because the scene of politics (or the public sphere) has disappeared in some postmodern apocalypse, but because there is an active attempt to use popular discourses to restructure the possibilities of everyday life – the political intellectual has no choice but to enter into the struggle over affect in order to articulate new ways of caring. (23) This issue of M/C Journal reveals some of the many ways this objective continues to be thwarted in the current political climate and in contexts which veer to varying degrees from the mainstream political situation in the United States. In the lead article for the issue, Shane McGrath makes the point that the politics of compassion are far from straightforward in an era of “compassionate conservatism” but that they are noticeably straight (see also Berlant). One of the most important distinctions he asks us to make is to “recognise and affirm feelings of compassion while questioning the politics that seem to emanate from those feelings”. The essay that follows is a helpful explanation of the theoretical legacies behind “Feeling, Emotion and Affect”. Eric Shouse provides an introduction to the vocabulary that many writers for this issue share and in some cases challenge. “The importance of affect”, Shouse claims, is that “in many cases the message consciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than his or her non-conscious affective resonance with the source of the message”. This is precisely the difficulty of forming any rational model of political opposition to apparently personable leaders like Bush, or concertedly “ordinary” leaders like John Howard: a diverse population will often interpret a manifest message through a quite different set of unconscious criteria. Anne Aly and Mark Balnaves offer an example of this kind of affective resonance in their article, “The Atmosfear of Terror”. Chilling riots around Sydney’s southern beaches in the week of this issue’s production lend added pertinence to their reading which argues that attitudes towards Muslims in Australia are “less to do with the actual threat of a terrorist attack on Australian soil and more to do with….reprisal for the terrorist attacks” that have already occurred elsewhere. Describing a quite different and highly intimate experience of fear is Lessa Bonniface, Lelia Green and Maurice Swanson’s essay documenting their work developing HeartNET, a Website devoted to discussion amongst heart patients. This collaborative project is part of an Australian Research Council linkage grant and illustrates how cultural theory can be tested and extended in productive partnerships with the wider community. Megan Watkins’s eloquent essay on the affects of classroom practice shares a similar attention to corporeality in the way that it highlights the neglected bodily dimensions of learning and motivation, while Glen Fuller’s “The Getaway” offers a quite different example of the ways that our bodies can surprise us by betraying disciplines we may not have consciously registered. Two further essays by Beth Seaton and Margaret Hair have the specific purpose of drawing attention to affective relations otherwise suppressed in the landscapes around us, reflecting upon the ethics of acknowledging past and present trauma. The issue then embarks on a series of exciting new approaches to popular media, in Anna Gibbs’s article on the hypnotic properties of television, Leanne Downing’s introduction to the politics of “eater-tainment” accompanying block-buster films, and finally, Gregory Seigworth’s affirming reading of indie darling, Sufjan Stevens. In a fitting gesture given the imperatives Grossberg sets out, Seigworth considers the significance of Stevens’ live show in terms of an “affect of corn” that he submits as one humble exercise that might help to “redeem a future for the present”. In the amount of time since the issue’s conception “affect” has moved from being regarded as something that “cultural studies has always been crap at” (Noble) to “the new cutting edge” (Hemmings) while for some it has become “that word I never want to hear again” (Sofoulis). As Elspeth Probyn notes in the contribution that closes the issue, witnessing a cherished theoretical interest become fashionable can be bemusing and disabling – what I hope these essays demonstrate is that fashion need not relinquish usefulness. This issue of M/C Journal involved some tough editorial decisions due to a remarkably high number of submissions. I thank all of the writers who offered work for consideration as well as those who responded so enthusiastically to my invitation. Thanks also to the referees who gave their time and expertise and the correspondents whose patience was doubtlessly tested in the finishing stages. I am particularly indebted to Laura Marshall and Neysa Ellison-Stone for their excellent and speedy copy-editing. Finally, the stunning cover image for this M/C Journal is “Collage” by Jane Simon with stills from Undiegate, a Super-8 film by Marian Prickett and Jane Simon (Melbourne, 2002). Its rich texture, exciting juxtaposition and overriding implication of possibility couldn’t have been more fitting my hopes for this issue. References Berlant, Lauren. “Introduction: Compassion (and Withholding).” Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion. Ed. Lauren Berlant. Essays from the English Institute. London: New York, 2004. Donnie Darko. [motion picture] Directed by R. Kelly, 2001. Gregg, Melissa and Glen Fuller. “Where Is the Law in ‘Unlawful Combatant’? Resisting the Refrain of the Right-eous.” Cultural Studies Review 11.2 (2005): 147-59. Grossberg, Lawrence. Dancing in Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. Hemmings, Clare. “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn.” Cultural Studies 19.5 (2005): 548-67. Noble, Greg. “What Cultural Studies Is Crap At.” Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Newsletter October, 2004. Sofoulis, Zoe. Comment at Culture Fix: The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, University of Technology, Sydney, November 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gregg, Melissa. "Affect." M/C Journal 8.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gregg, M. (Dec. 2005) "Affect," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/01-editorial.php>.

Stochastic music, developed last century by Xenakis, has older avatars, like Mozart, who showed how to compose minuets by tossing dice, in a similar way that contemporary choreographer Cunningham took apart the structural elements of what was considered to be a cohesive choreographic work (including movement, sound, light, set and costume) and reconstructed them in random ways. We intend to explore an enactive and experiential analogue of stochastic music, in the realm of dance, where the poetry of a choreographic spatial/floor pattern is elicited by a mathematical stochastic process, to wit a random walk – a stochastic dance of sorts. Among many possible random walks, we consider two simple examples, embodied in the following scenarios, proposed to the students/dancers: - a frog, jumping randomly on a row of stones, choosing right and left as if tossing a coin, - a person walking randomly on a square grid, starting a given node, and choosing each time randomly, equally likely N, S, E or W, and walking non-stop along the corresponding edge, up to the next node, and so on.When the dancers encounter these situations, quite natural questions arise for the choreographer, like: Where will the walker/dancer be after a while? Several ideas for a choreography emerge, which are more complex than just having one or more dancers perform the random walk, and which surprisingly turn our random process into a deterministic one!For instance, for the first random walk, 16 dancers start at the same node of a discrete line on the stage, and execute, each one, a different path of the 16 possible 4 – jump paths the frog can follow. They would need to agree first on how to carry this out. Interestingly, they may proceed without a Magister Ludi handing out scripts to every dancer. After arriving to their end node/position, they could try to retrace their steps, to come back all to the starting node.Analogously for the grid random walk, where we may have now 16 dancers enacting the 16 possible 2-edge paths of the walker. The dancers could also enter the stage (the grid or some other geometric pattern to walk around), one by one, sequentially, describing different random paths, or deterministic intertwined paths, in the spirit of Beckett’s Quadrat. Also, the dancers could choose their direction ad libitum, after some spinning, each time, on a grid-free stage, but keeping the same step length, as in statistician Pearson’s model for a mosquito random flight.We are interested in various possible spin-offs of these choreographies, which intertwine dance and mathematical cognition: For instance, when the dancers choose each one a different path, they will notice that their final distribution on the nodes is uneven (interesting shapes emerge). In this way, just by moving, choreographer and dancers can find a quantitative answer to the impossible question: where will the walker/dancer be after a while? Indeed, the percentage of dancers ending up at each node gives the probability of the random walker landing there.