Search

A close reading of Yvonne Rainer’s archival papers reveals new insights into the postmodern iconoclast. Revivifying Rainer’s early choreographic practice and verbalembodied explorations, Rainer’s own notes and journals illuminate and challenge reductive interpretations of a writing dance artist’s work over time.

This chapter, written by a former New York City Ballet dancer turned choreographer, critically examines the influence of George Balanchine’s Apollo on women’s authorship. Much has been written about the grip of patriarchal culture on ballet culture, as male leaders continue to dominate female muses and outmoded representations of gender persist. Balanchine famously granted his ballerinas interpretive range, while limiting their ability to choreograph. “Ballet is woman,” he declared, but women do not make the ballets. This chapter shifts the critical lens to the ways that a repertory, specifically an iconic ballet, can infiltrate a company’s consciousness—in this case, through a male god of classical Greek antiquity, reimagined through Igor Stravinsky’s score and Balanchine’s choreography, spanning nine decades of interpretation. Drawing on the project Incarnations, and a collaboration with Yvonne Rainer, the chapter argues for more complex choreographic strategies in contemporary work, as one way to disrupt and dismantle the inherited male creator/female muse paradigm embedded within neoclassical ballet.

SummaryHuman antibody responses are established by the generation of combinatorial sequence diversity in antibody variable domains, followed by iterative rounds of mutation and selection via T cell recognition of antigen peptides presented on MHC-II. Here, we report that MHC-II peptide epitope deletion from B cell receptors (BCRs) correlates with antibody development in vivo. Large-scale antibody sequence analysis and experimental validation of peptide binding revealed that MHC-II epitope removal from BCRs is linked to genetic signatures of T cell help, and donor-specific antibody repertoire modeling demonstrated that somatic hypermutation selectively targets the personalized MHC-II epitopes in antibody variable regions. Mining of class-switched sequences and serum proteomic data revealed that MHC-II epitope deletion is associated with antibody class switching and long-term secretion into serum. These data suggest that the MHC-II peptide epitope content of a BCR is an important determinant of antibody maturation that shapes the composition and durability of humoral immunity.HighlightsAntibody somatic hypermutation selectively removes MHC-II peptide epitopes from B cell receptors.Antibodies with lower MHC-II epitope content show evidence of greater T cell help, including class-switching.MHC-II peptide epitope removal from a BCR is linked to long-term antibody secretion in serum.MHC-II genotype provides a personalized selection pressure on human antibody development.

This paper employs fictional techniques to convey the competing discourses of parenting and ‘serious’ climbing in relation to time and risk as they are experienced by heterosexual couples with at least one child and a history of commitment to traditional climbing. The resultant story is constructed from data produced by topical life-history interviews with seven white-British, middle-class couples and is interrupted, but not overlaid, by a late-modern and Foucauldian analytic thread through which we posit that the parents must negotiate a number of discourses of modernity in their pursuit of an authentic identity. The story, however, is intended more as dais for sociological dialogue, to allow the situated reader to inhabit the lifeworld and respond to its imagery. The story replicates the parents’ leisure time and space on a typical weekend and shows the contradictory and gendered nature of the discourses experienced by these climbers.

Bodycast: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand, written by Suzanne Bocanegra, directed by Paul Lazar, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Fishman Space, Brooklyn, NY, December 3–7, 2013. Levees des conflits extended and Flip Book, choreographed by Boris Charmatz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, October 25–27 and November 1–3, 2013. Night Stand, choreographed and performed by Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton, Dia: Chelsea, New York, NY, October 10–12 and 17–19, 2013. Exit/Exist, choreographed and performed by Gregory Maqoma, Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts, Brooklyn, NY, November 1–2, 2013. Desh, directed, choreographed, and performed by Akram Khan, Rose Theater, New York, NY, November 6–7, 2013.

In this article, Emily Coates proposes the concept of “intercultural kinesis” to describe the transnational collaborations; temporary, embodied onstage communities; and surprising juxtapositions of cultural heritages present in three productions brought to Yale University by the World Performance Project: Dean Moss and Sungmyung Chun's Nameless forest, Maria Jerez's The Case of the Spectator, and the Rude Mechs' The Method Gun.

Souleymane Badolo is speaking to us. Mid-way through a solo he performed at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre this past June, Solo, as he is known among friends, walked to the front of the stage and addressed the audience. “Banichait!” he repeated, hands beckoning urgently for us to follow. He retreated slowly as he spoke, drawing viewers deeper into the atmosphere he had created through sound design, music, movement, and language. Clearly not the roar of the Big Apple, the urban noises of sputtering motorbikes and children playing evoked his home city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Elongated arm gestures gave way to footwork that remained close to the ground, casual yet precise, supported by quiet, rhythmic clicking. While Badolo projects a spectrum of qualities, glibness is not one of them. Instead, he insists, almost admonishes, grounding his message in his sturdy physicality—closely cut hair, square shoulders and hips, the body of a pugilist. Still speaking, he backed up to sit on a metal chair. A flow of words in Gurunsi, his native language, ensued. We could not understand what he was saying, but strained to hear it all the same.

This paper is a confessional tale, which summarizes the author's doctoral research journey into parents who rock climb. The historical moments in qualitative research are used to frame an evolving interpretive approach, showing the relationship between theoretical and philosophical thought, and the empirical process. The paper uses personal reflections to relive the author's journey, from choosing a topic through to the representation of data. In doing this the author shows how she came across the use of ethnographic fiction, which she found to be a useful and creative approach to writing up data. The author concludes that using postmodern forms of representation in outdoor education research would provide engaging and emotive recollections of both personal and collective narratives.

This article uses a Gramscian perspective to explore the subculture of snowboarding, suggesting that cultural power is both resisted and reproduced. It examines the impact of commercialization on a snowboarding subculture from a participant perspective, gained from semi-structured interviews with boarders and skiers at a resort in British Columbia, Canada. The paper discusses new ways that snowboarders differentiate themselves from wider sporting cultures, in addition to how they do not outrightly reject the ideologies of mainstream sport but instead attempt to involve themselves more in the snowboarding industry. Through linking themselves with traditionally non-snowboarding institutions and creating alternatives to them, snowboarders become actively involved in the organization of snowboarding.

In this article, Emily Coates discusses the work of three choreographers—Opiyo Okach, Yasmeen Godder, and Yvonne Rainer—whose work was shown at Yale University's Festival of International Dance in 2008. She examines their work from both global and local perspectives, suggesting various ways in which gesture, choreography, and dance knowledge circulates by physical exchange among dancers performing internationally. She describes these choreographers' work as joining tradition with innovation toward an integrated, globalized world.

This publication compiled by Joan Ormrod and Belinda Wheaton is the result of a conference on adventure sports held at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, supported by the Leisure Studies Assoc...

The authors of this article are members of Yale’s World Performance Project (WPP) creative team. We write together as we make dance-theatre work together—collectively, collaboratively, and experimentally. We seek to change the way in which performance scholarship is created, published, and evaluated. To that end, we are moving beyond the single-author model of traditional humanistic scholarship. We are adopting instead the multiple-author style that is typical of the sciences, whereby all those who participate in the project sign the article and share the credit as well as the labor of producing it. We lay no claim to the specialized empirical methods of scientists, but we want to learn from their social practices of collaborative experimentation, discussion, and publication.