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Pantomime
This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of mod...
Empire of Ecstasy
Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars—nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of "modern identity." The modern body, radiating freedom and power, appeared to Weimar artists and intelligentsia to be the source of a transgressive energy, as well as the sign and manifestation of powerful, mysterious "inner" conditions. Toepfer shows how this view of the modern body sought to extend the aesthetic experience bey...
The School of Illusions
In 1969-1970, the unnamed narrator, a film student at UCLA, begins a homosexual affair with another student of film, Victor, a Jewish political activist engaged in the organization of demonstrations against the Vietnam War. They plunge into eerie, complex erotic pleasures. But the narrator continues his sexual relationship with a Jewish girl, Rachel, a philosophy student, and harbors amorous feeling toward another young woman, Laurie, a chemistry student. Victor, too, pursues an erotic relationship with a biology student, Tamara. The film students believe their bisexual orientation opens up new ways of seeing the world cinematically and politically. Key events from the narrator’s childhood...
The Senses in Performance
This ground-breaking anthology is the first to be dedicated to assessing critically the role of the human sensorium in performance. Senses in Performance presents a multifaceted approach to the methodological, theoretical, practical and historical challenges facing the scholar and the artist. This volume examines the subtle actions of the human senses including taste, touch, smell and vision in all sorts of performances in Western and non-Western traditions, from ritual to theatre, from dance to interactive architecture, from performance art to historical opera. With eighteen original essays brought together by an international ensemble of leading scholars and artists including Richard Schechner and Philip Zarrilli. This covers a variety of disciplinary fields from critical studies to performance studies, from food studies to ethnography from drama to architecture. Written in an accessible way this volume will appeal to scholars and non-scholars interested in Performance/Theatre Studies and Cultural Studies.
The Voice of Rapture
With Wilde's Salome (1893) as an exemplary text, this book examines the conditions under which speech «constructs» ecstatic experience. The author considers Wilde's text as a complex Symbolist «system» of relations between rhetorical devices and attitudes toward language. By identifying the components of the system, the book provides a theoretical model for understanding the power of language to «construct» specific emotional states. The dramatic nature of Wilde's play further indicates that, contrary to popular perception, ecstasy is not «beyond» language but in it. Rapture possesses a «voice», but this voice emanates from a communication system which is actually «outside» of the body which speaks it. Movement toward ecstasy is therefore not a release from system but a supreme manifestation of it.
The Living Line
Robin Veder's The Living Line is a radical reconceptualization of the development of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American modernism. The author illuminates connections among the histories of modern art, body cultures, and physiological aesthetics in early-twentieth-century American culture, fundamentally altering our perceptions about art and the physical, and the degree of cross-pollination in the arts. The Living Line shows that American producers and consumers of modernist visual art repeatedly characterized their aesthetic experience in terms of kinesthesia, the sense of bodily movement. They explored abstraction with kinesthetic sensibilities and used abstraction to ach...
Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body
Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body brings together cutting-edge scholarship examining the myriad ways that architects, urban planners, medical practitioners, and everyday people have applied modern ideas about health and the body to the spaces in which they live, work, and heal. The book’s contributors explore North American and European understandings of the relationship between physical movement, bodily health, technological innovation, medical concepts, natural environments, and architectural settings from the nineteenth century through the heyday of modernist architectural experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s and onward into the 1970s. Not only does the book focus on h...
Artificial Darkness
This ambitious study explores how important darkness--artificial darkness--was, as an actual technology, in producing not just photographs but visual novelties and experiments in cinema in the nineteenth century. The study plays out against a backdrop of urban history, where most scholars have focused on the growth of artificial light and the electrification of cities. Elcott’s study challenges that approach. In considering zones of darkness, it ranges from the sites of production (darkrooms, studios) to those of reception (theaters/cinemas/arcades) that shaped modern media and perceptions. He argues that, in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde was often less interested in the filmed i...
The Mythology of Dance
The lights dim and soon the theatre becomes dark. The audience conversations end with a few softly dissipating whispers, and the movie begins. Nina Sayers, a young ballerina, dances the prologue to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a ballet expressing a story drawn from Russian folk tales about a princess who has been turned into a White Swan and can only be turned back if a man swears eternal fidelity to her. However, this is not that ballet. This is the beginning of Black Swan, a controversial movie employing symbolism in a complex interweaving of dance and film to reveal the struggles and paradoxes of everything from a female rite-of-passage to questions about where artistic expression should de...
Theatre, Aristocracy, and Pornocracy
In this book about the secret pornographic theaters of pre-Revolutionary Paris, Karl Toepfer illuminates a much neglected topic with an imaginative study of speech, the body, and ecstasy in varying performance modes.
