Ruprecht - gestural theory - epic theatre

interruption of an action - gist of epic theatre

break with aesthetics of theatre

theatre of illusion and empathy

theory of theatrical gesture as a new paradigm of arrest

defamiliarizing theatrical intervention into everyday gestural regimes, bringing them to a halt and deconstructing them in order to reveal their ideological implications

history of theatrical gesture

universal language of the soul - 18th century

involuntary physiological response - or unconscious manifestation of psychic depth of 19th century naturalism

brecht and Benjamin did not share a common believe in the political power of theatre

Benjamin's theory of gesture

von Laban

Mary Wigman

dance itself a gesture

they broke of with the tradition of dance d'ecole (WHY THE NAME?) - sequences of gestural pantomime alternate with sequences of pure dancing;

new gestural dance wasn't giving access to personal emotions as the 18th century model of dramatic gesture

avoided the meta-generic comparison of dance and theatrical gesture - WOULD HAVE COMPLICATED IT FURTHER?

IT instituted split between EMOTIONS AND EXPRESSION - it performed GESTURAL ABSTRACTION - reflective and productive of UNIVERSAL LAWS OF MOVEMENT (nomothetic) and modes of being, experiencing and communicating

gesture linked to FLOW OF MOVEMENT

vitalist understanding of life based on the belief in transhistorical continuities between human and cosmic energy, between the “gestures” of the world and those of the dancer.

GESTURES - inscriptions and manipulations of the bodies that provide a comment on conditions of society by disrupting and subjecting to cri- tique the essentializing aspects of transhistorical and vitalist flow

CORRESPONDANCE OF ENERGIES

HETEROGENUOUS APPRAOCHES TO GESTURE

THEATRE AND DANCE rest upon a multifaceted gestural imaginary that arises in the early twentieth century across artistic practices,and aesthetic and scientific discourses

who theorises gesture nowadays

everyday gestural conduct and then there is arrest and flow that determine its aesthetics

think what that actually means in terms of work

EDGES OF NEW GESTURAL IMAGINATION

vibration

VIBRATION

The new gestural aesthetics is promised to be revitalised by destabilisation fo vibration

what divides Benjamin's arrest based and dancer's flow based approaches to gesture

how can we have such different approaches to gesture

Benjamin's What is an epic theatre? 1 and 2

vitalist's paradigm, although mystical, is also reactionary

MEDIA OF TRANSMISSION BETWEEN AUDIENCE AND PERFORMANCE

LABAN

vibration

resonance in the fields of acoustics, psych-physiology and esotericism

response to gestural that is closer to Benjamin's INNERVATION

Due to their propensity to accommodate both left-wing and proto-fascist instrumentalization of bodily experience, early twentieth-century theories of vibratory transmission remain politically ambivalent

laBAN embraced the ambiguity to promote his new philosophy of dance

Benjamin modified his belief in collective innervation as a response to the ambiguity fo the theory

20th century theories of vibratory transmission - SCIENCE

INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF BODILY EXPERIENCE BY DIFFERENT IDEOLOGIES

HER CONTRIBUTION IS TO SAY: TENSION BETWEEN MOVEMENT AND ARREST FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF GESTURE - IMPORTANT IN DANCE

Lepecki's contribution - say dance's project in modernity was to define vibration as restless stillness and how to move along in this restless stillness

frame this with Benjamin's unique engagement with TENSION

RESTLESS STILLNESS IS NOT DANCE'S UNIQUE PROJECT - LINDA DALRYMPLE HENDERSON

VIBRATORY MDOERNISM, BECAUSE OF DANCE'S EMBODIED ASPECT - IT BECAME THE EPICENTRE....

impregnation of stillness with motion is the consequence of the time's desire to present the body's gestural potential and not the body's capacity of ideal geometrical alignment

an element to be hushed up or a gestural idiom of Mary Wigman

formalised quality of vibration - turned into an action mode

happens to a dancer or the dancer makes it happen

agency

addressing the classical imaginary

through Lacan

confrontation of fragmented body and visually constituted image of wholeness and perfection

each dance technique is an operational tool for creating such imaginary bodies that do not correspond to the anatomy

done through poetry

They are “wish- ful bodies that articulate the subject’s desire in symptomatic fashion,” projecting the subject onto a site where it does not belong, by way of images that do not match its reality

held postures in ballet - union with the ideal

modernist imaginary

not so wishful, alien bodies, that articulate the disturbing new spaces and rhythms of modernism

GATSBY - what were those images

the alienated effect of modern dance was familiar because of alienation of the individual in modernity

modernist body images - affectively charged emotive formulas

archaic and exoticism patterns of movement and corporeal contours

configurations of energy in space - gestalt im Raum in Mary Wigman

fueled not only by iconographic traditions, but even more so by principles of movement such as “folding-unfolding, rising-falling, pressing- pulling, bending-reaching, rotating and twisting, undulating and heaving, swinging, swaying,” and not least “vibrating . . . and shaking”

wigman's contribution - kinaesthetic imagination

“[m]ovement events that disrupt normative, habitual ways of using energy in move- ment and produce innovations in production, distribution, expenditure and retention of energy in the body”

was that Charleston?

systems theory predicting it's cessation

how can that still happen today? or why is it not important?

not yet canonical topic in the research of modernism - Benjamin's theory of vibratory theatrical gesture, Laban's and Wigman's gestural theory and practice

Benjamin developed his theory on gesture as interruption on the work on Brecht

gesture emerges from interruption

non static stillness

Benjamin's gestural theory

instead of character or a plot, gesture is the material of the theatre

producing gestures = arresting interventions into movements or actions

“strict, framelike closure of each element of an attitude, which, in its totality, is still in lively flow

gesture is representing the situation, and not developing an action

mother of dialectics

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situations are imprints of human gestures' actions and words, immanently dialectical behaviour is being revealed in a flash

dialectics at a standstill

GESTURE - mother of dialectics

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