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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