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The Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs of Serbia "Kolo" was founded in 1948 in Belgrade, on the initiative of the Committee for Culture and Art of the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia. The task of the Ensemble was to artistically interpret and present the so-called folk artistic creativity, which predominantly encompassed various folklore creations of the rural population, on stage, in the country and abroad. Although seemingly simple and folk-oriented, the art of traditional dance choreography has clear ideological and politically important messages of the then state leadership embedded in it foundations, intended to be spread among the Yugoslavs, but also beyond the state borders. The ensemble was supposed to present a desirable and appropriate image of Yugoslavia in its performances. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the formation of the “Kolo” Ensemble and the process of constituting the art of traditional dance choreography, taking into account the socio-political and historical context of the Second Yugoslavia. In addition, the paper approaches the deconstruction of the intention of choreographers and artistic directors, in order to reveal the ideological messages embedded in the artistic expression. The basic assumption in this paper is that dance troupes and traditional dance choreographies are strongly connected to the ideology and cultural policy of the nation-state. In this regard, even when choreographers and artistic directors create programs without direct political-ideological objectives, their decisions always rely on the socio-political context and the dominant ideologies within the state. The theoretical framework of the work is based on contemporary anthropological discussions about the concepts crucial for the interpretation of the material, primarily referring to the concept of ideology, understood in the Althusserian sense, but also to the ideas of the combination of state ideology, cultural policy, and dance with the aim of presenting the dance troupe with a desirable image of the nation-state. The methodology of the work consists of a combination of two approaches: classical anthropological, qualitative and archival research. Qualitative research includes conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 dancers who worked in "Kolo" in different time contexts, while archival research included reviewing the documentation of the "Kolo" Ensemble, the Archives of Yugoslavia and the personal and family archives of the dancers.

Undoubtedly one of Kate Bush’s most famous songs, “Running Up That Hill” reflects the artist’s various facets, mostly emphasizing her strong taste for hybrid performances. The artistic interest of this piece lies as well in the musical form, the voice and the instruments involved as in its choreographic and dramatic aesthetics. The multiple cover versions of the song, either on stage or in videos, often take the form of highly imaginative and innovative rewritings that lay bare its original richness and potentialities. The present article explores the interartistic dimension of the original piece and of a number of cover versions, and investigates their poetic and political scope.

This paper aims to analyse the "Running up that Hill" video clip, from the Kate Bush album Hounds of Love, released in 1985. Summer 2022 witnessed what some people have called Kate’s Bush “big come back”. Actually, she had never left, as those who have been interested in her and her work from the beginning may know. However, the fact that "Running up that Hill" was a part of the Stranger Things original soundtrack did extend and renew the success of that track, particularly among the youngest generation. Maybe now more than ever, a political and aesthetic analysis of that hit and its video clip appears to be necessary. The original clip of "Running up that Hill" was put online on Youtube on January 15th, 2011, and it took almost eleven years for it to reach more than a hundred million views. The extract from the TV show where Kate Bush’s hit plays a major part was put online on May 30th, 2022 and has already gathered more than eighteen million views. Whithout adopting a reactionary perspective, we will try to demonstrate in that paper in what way the 1985 video clip is still relevant, especially in our fields of study, which are dance and feminist and queer studies. The aesthetic and political analysis of that hit and its video clip, whose depiction of straight romance has almost exclusively focused the attention of critics, will allow us to see in what way Kate Bush invites the viewer to resort to Hélène Cixous’s concept of écriture féminine, avoiding the pitfall of essentialistic feminity.

This paper focuses on a musical and choreographical analysis of the piece JARDIN DE SCULPTURES ÉPHÉMÈRES (2020) by Marie Chouinard, which was composed over a series of musical excerpts from composer Louis Dufort’s album, Into the Forest. After thoughts on the special circumstances during which the creation of JARDIN became a video streaming during the COVID-19 pandemic, an analysis of the work’s musical content is presented. The various elements of the choreography that define its structure are described through the succession of 84 ephemeral sculptures. First, the sculptures are classified in three main categories (pointy, round, and balanced) which divides JARDIN into seven sections. Moments of simultaneity, antagonistic positions, and arrangements of lines and angles emphasize key moments of the work, often corresponding with the musical material. Finally, the article concludes with a reflection on the analogies and isomorphisms between dance and music in this piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Santo Daime, an ayahuasca religion from the Brazilian Amazon, liturgically mobilizes a group dance called the bailado. Emerging in the 1930s from precarious circumstances instigated by rubber boom cycles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Santo Daime has proven resistant against global systems of epistemicide, the systematic killing off of knowledge forms (SANTOS, 2014). I argue the bailado is key to this resistance as corporeal self-knowledge choreographically positioning participants as both audience and performer. In this paper, teachings from Santo Daime hymns and eighteen years of participant observation are drawn upon to support this argument through choreographic analysis.

Io, Don Chisciotte by Fabrizio Monteverde: a choreographic adaptation of Cervantes' masterpiece. Object of this reflection is Io, Don Chisciotte, choreographed by Fabrizio Monteverde. The ballet is one of the most original contemporary terpsichorean versions of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, written by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. The choreographer exegete, thanks to the hermeneutic reworking of Cervantes’ themes, goes beyond the confines of the mere textual narration. He inscribes his own creation in the horizon outlined by the Spanish writer, who represents the overturned metaphysics, the tragic exemplarity, the all-encompassing sacredness, the achievable utopia, the relativizing truth. Monteverde is aware that the complex morality of Don Quixote must be re-functionalized through fruitful philological betrayals. He lets dialogue with Cervantes’ Weltanschauung the theoretical points of view -convergent, divergent, idiosyncratic- of the authors who have dedicated themselves to the critical examination of the masterpiece of the siglo de oro.

This paper belongs to current studies on intermediality that deal with the interchange between literature and other mediums, especially those concerning the interaction between the art of writing and the art of choreography. How can a text and gestures participate in creating a dynamic relationship that opens a dialogue between literature and choreography? This will be explained from an intermedial perspective, through the deep analysis of the staging of Ce que j'appelle oubli, a novel by Laurent Mauvignier, in a ballet by Angelin Preljocaj carrying the same title. In the beginning the article tries to clarify how the style and the rhythm of the novel can influence the awareness of the choreographer and consequently facilitate the transformation of the written text into a visual performance of movements and beat dance. Then, the article attempts to follow the steps of the transposition of the text with its components to the ballet stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of the essay is the relationship between dance and death, reflected from choreographic works in which we understand that dance expresses the existential condition of death in its inexorability, tragedy and poetry. In this thought, it is observed the relationship of death and life with temporality, a time created in which we can transform the body, life and death. In this perspective, we try to weave a network of meanings about this relationship, dialoguing with choreographic art and philosophy. This perception contributes to the understanding of art as an educational phenomenon by nuancing issues of existence, such as death.

Copyright of Carnets: Revue Electronique d'Etudes Françaises / Revista Electrónica de Estudos Franceses is the property of Associacao Portuguesa de Estudos Franceses (APEF) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This text analyzes Hacia (2019) as a critical choreographic device facing the problem of disenchantment of the world derived from the separation between nature and culture inherited from Modernity/coloniality. Hacia puts into practice two notions of Amerindian perspectivism: one that recognizes the relational agency of all entities in the world; and another which raises knowledge as a process of subjectivation that implies bodily, sensory and imaginative dimensions. This analysis proposes a dialogue between the areas of anthropology and contemporary performing arts creation in Brazil.

This article focuses on "Sólo pro tri"("A Solo for Three") (2007), directed by the Czech coreographer Petr Zuska, which merges texts and poems by three singer-songwriters from the 1960s and 70s with the techniques of contemporary dance. This analysis aims to throw light on the distinctive exchange between poetry, words, and the bodies of the dancers, within an ongoing dialogue between allusion and quotation.

Copyright of Topiques, Études Satoriennes is the property of Topiques, Études Satoriennes, Journal of the SATOR (Société d'Analyse la Topique Romanesque) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is dedicated to demonstrating that the historiography of dance in Brazil, framing and explaining the works of Ballet Stagium from the social context and subsidized by a dichotomous episteme, culminated in the abandonment of specific dance policies. The objective of the text is to analyze specific political tactics in artistic dance, employed by the company during the 1970s. Therefore, the investigation is dedicated to the works Quebradas do mundaréu and Kuarup ..., in order to restore to them their potential for politicized performance in the context in which they were produced, without being succumbed to the government policy, drawing on historical sources and guided by theories and debates existing in the field of dance studies, cultural studies and political philosophy.

This paper will focus on how the thinking process in a research thesis is structured and the stages it undergoes. It will describe the ways in which hypotheses are formulated and evolve according to the state of the art and fieldwork. This development is closely connected with the range of questions related to several choreographic projects of collective walks on the intersection of wandering, choreography and bodily and sensory-motor experiences. The aim is to show how the interrelationships between these elements are at the heart of the research method.

This essay examines Mamela Nyamza’s choreography and performance of Black Privilege at the South African National Arts Festival of 2018 in the wake of the #RhodesMustFall decolonial movement. Nyamza is an award-winning independent choreographer, performing and teaching internationally as well as at home. When she uses her own body to enact images and gestures of her own making, she crafts a counter-narrative to the exploited exhibited South African female body theorized by scholars such as Saidiya Hartman. Rather than try to perform a world without Black women’s objectification, Black Privilege makes it hyper-visible. I use Mishuauna Goeman’s theory of (re)mapping to explain how Nyamza carves a space for the recognition of both opulence and objectification simultaneously. Black Privilege exudes power through subtle yet potent poses and movements, re-membering the privilege and burden of Black womanhood as a spectacular non-spectacle. Nyamza’s choreographic and performative strategies induce an active form of witnessing that contributes to her ongoing process of becoming in the witness of others. Undermining tropes around the spectacle of Black flesh through re-membering and (re)mapping, Black Privilege contributes to the decolonization of performance in South Africa and worldwide.

Copyright of Culture & Dialogue is the property of Brill Academic Publishers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Can you really tell the dance from the dancer? W.B. Yeats asked this very question in one of his most famous poems: "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" In order to present some thoughts on the matter, the theme will here be proposed within the framework of the semiotic analysis of performance texts and approached from the point of view of the relationship which can be established between the notion of performance and the field of the arts of movement, in particular with respect to dance. A dance performance seduces the gaze of the observer-participant and has it set on the choreographic product. At the same time, the dancers' performance implies an interest mainly focused on what happens to the dancers during the process that leads their actions to the production of choreographic movement, a dancing activity from which results a choreographic piece. However, the arts of movement belong to the field which Pavis defined as the domain of 'presence' and of 'continual present', while Schechner referred to them as 'behavioral arts'. So, the product and the process of production are intimately linked since the actions and skills involved in their making generate the dance performance from the performance of the dancers. Performers are indeed individuals whose actions and practices are translated into a dance performance according to rules applicable specifically within a framework of shared behaviors and specific to the context of choreography. This is where the meaning of the term performance as applied to dancers merges and blends with that of performance as applied to a dance. Hence, again, the question: Can we truly part the dance (performance) from the (performer/) dancer?

As global art worlds e/merge and artists circulate with increasing intensity, discussions around authenticity are spinning new and compelling narratives. While moving among gatherings of live arts curators and in daily conversations with creative artists in North America and Europe the concept frequently resurfaces, often with urgency and in divergent forms. From the meditative practice of Authentic Movement to the integrity of a curatorial vision, why is this ethos so pervasive at this time and what does it mean to postmodern performers, live arts creators, curators and audiences? In this self-reflexive essay, grounded in fieldwork, lived experience, literature and interviews, I will investigate the variations on and meanings of this contemporary quest in art worlds to “be true to ones’ self.”

This article explores the potentiality of storytelling as a choreographic tool in Kat Valástur's work The Marginal Sculptures of Newtopia (2014-2016). Storytelling, in the path of Benjamin and Haraway, can be explored in deconstructing established linear meanings and narratives and ultimately in questioning political concepts anchored in the substratum of Western critical theory, which in turn condition discursive practices and knowledge production. Wandering in fictional historical and geographical timelines, choreographer Válastur proposes dystopian futures tangential to science fiction and "speculative fabulation" (Haraway, 2017) in the three choreographic worlds that constitute her trilogy The Marginal Sculptures of Newtopia. As a choreographic instrument, how does this contamination of storytelling translate into the discursiveness of gesture and movement? What is the choreographic potentiality in the destabilization of linear temporality that subverts material historical conditions, of the fictional coexistence of parallel realities and dimensions, and of the imagination of possible physicalities for dystopian futures?

The focus of this article is the individuation of choreographic knowledge in the context of the project Double Skin/Double Mind, developed by the research group Artistic Practice and Development at the Amsterdam School of the Arts around the joint work of choreographer and dancer Emio Greco and dramaturgist Pieter Scholten. The article exposes some problems associated with the conception and design of a series of multimedia objects, created with the intention of transmitting the choreographic knowledge of these artists through structures analogous to the organising concepts of the dances themselves. These concepts respond to principles of movement whose transmission occurs through transduction, both between bodies and between different media. Transduction is proposed here as an operation adequate to the thought of choreographic transmission, encompassing both the intensive and extensive expressions of dance and the abstract and concrete processes through which the associated knowledge emerges. The problems discussed here are concerned above all with the disparity between dance and choreographic writing as seen from the perspective of the difference between qualitative multiplicities and quantitative multiplicities. The research project Double Skin/Double Mind dealt with this set of problems regarding the transmission of choreographic knowledge in times of digital multimodality, not without having to deal with the diagrammatic and linguistic constraints necessary for the determination of a continuity of choreographic ideas through discontinuous bodies and media.

This work resumes some ideas proposed by the dance critic and scholar André Lepecki (2008), in order to reflect about the limits of a refusal of movement as a rupture with modernity and with a certain notion of choreography. For this purpose, a critical reading of the way dance history is conceived in this work is made, and then three nuances for the notion of movement are proposed, in order to point out that the conjunction between dance and movement is neither univocal nor have always the same political or conceptual implications.

Copyright of Signata is the property of Presses Universitaires de Liege and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The unfolding of the concept of dramaturgy and the problematics of contemporary choreography are, today, a vast and diverse field of research, bearing numerous disclosures that lead to their reciprocal implication. Apart from that, dance and music share significant complementary ties allowing for the consideration of a common compositional inquiry. Reflecting on the compositional processes of dance and music, this article cross-examines the collaboration between choreographers and composers, integrating the incidence of dramaturgy in the strategies of choreographic and musical composition.

Dance space and theatre space can be used as critical thinking spaces in the language and literature class, with substantial gains in student motivation and engagement. This claim was put to the test with a group of 38 graduate students who co-designed a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves (1931) using acting and dance-composition techniques. Woolf’s 77 480-word piece (225 pages) was reduced to 3,4% of its original length (2684 words, 7 pages). The experience was creative (reprocessing and essentializing rich textual input, designing scenes, tableaux and movement sequences); heuristic (investigating narrative technique, discovering elements of patterning and consistency below the surface of a complex and confusing narrative); socially cohesive (fostering mutual-support, developing collective forms of understanding, stage directing and acting); and immersive (stimulating all the senses, involving body and mind with few pauses and no opt out). Conditions were thus created for subjects to engage in verbal, visual and kinaesthetic acts of interpretation in all three senses of the word: cognitive (“understanding”), artistic (“performing”) and intersemiotic (“translating” into a different sign system). As this happened, students found themselves cast in the role of moving and speaking cognizers, staging bodily displays of meaning, and reframing Woolf’s written narrative as a series of “acts” and “scenes” to be performed - not just read. A form of semiotic appropriation took placethat resulted in a performative reassignment of meaning which not only “made sense” to movers and viewers alike, but struck everyone as being plastic, aesthetic, and compelling. This article provides textual and visual illustrations of the remarkable result achieved by the graduate students involved, under the professional guidance of Oliver Borowski (theatre) and Melissa Blanc (dance). It includes the script and visuals from the workshops held at Université Bordeaux Montaigne (France), and an evocation of the final public performance given at Teatro Civico (Vercelli, Italy) at the international student theatre festival organized by Università del Piemonte Orientale (TILLIT 2019, dir. Marco Pustianaz).

This paper calls into question the central tenets of the Dancer-Researcher-Performer (BPI) method taught at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil. The analysis problematizes the underlying assumption that students lack an awareness of their own Brazilianness, which they must find through BPI, and questions a choreographic methodology where students are coached to be possessed by the dance. The paper draws attention to the power imbalances inherent in BPI’s co-habitation experience, where students research marginal others who are understood as the source of authentic Brazilian culture. The paper invites BPI students and teachers to reconsider the ethics of this research methodology, and to consider the possibility of choreographic research that engages both mind and body critically and consciously.

What is art? Why does it matter? What does it tell us about ourselves? In this essay, I introduce and in some cases extend the basic account of these matters offered in Strange Tools (New York, Hill and Wang: 2016).

In Walk, Hands, Eyes (a city), choreographer Myriam Lefkowitz invites a spectator to walk in an urban environment, in silence and with eyes closed. This article looks at the spatial, imaginary, sensory and kinaesthetic dimensions of the artistic experience, to question the way sensory knowledge specific to contemporary dance leads people to wander in and consider a city differently.

The unfolding of the concept of dramaturgy and the problematics of contemporary choreography are, today, a vast and diverse field of research, bearing numerous disclosures that lead to their reciprocal implication. Apart from that, dance and music share significant complementary ties allowing for the consideration of a common compositional inquiry. Reflecting on the compositional processes of dance and music, this article cross-examines the collaboration between choreographers and composers, integrating the incidence of dramaturgy in the strategies of choreographic and musical composition.

Copyright of Synergies Espagne is the property of GERFLINT (Groupe d'Etudes et de Recherches pour le Francais Langue Internationale) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)