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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou
The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou
Mime Journal
Olga Taxidou analyzes the ambiguous concept for which Edward Gordon Craig is best known—the “übermarionette”—alongside Isadora Duncan’s discussions of the liberated dancer. Highlighting the emphasis on futurity in Craig’s and Duncan’s manifestos and theories, she contends that this pairing works to undo the binaries between Hellenism and modernism, and between mechanistic and vitalistic aesthetics. Emphasizing the impact of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories upon Duncan’s theory and practice, Taxidou locates Duncan within an intellectual vanguard that includes Jane Harrison and her fellow Cambridge Ritualists as well as major modernist poets.
Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt
Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt
Mime Journal
Holt focuses on Craig’s influential stage designs in relation to the performing body. Through costume design, Holt rethinks Craig’s relationship with the designs of the Ballets Russes, placing him in context with the experimentations of his contemporaries Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. Holt frames these designers’ historic opposition as a difference of opinion around the way that costumes can carry meaning. She argues that while all three designers used similar visual language and agreed that costumes should communicate with audiences, each artist used a different model for this communication – speech (Craig), music (Bakst) and writing (Picasso).
The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove
The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove
Mime Journal
Jennifer Buckley interviews dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lori Belilove on Isadora Duncan’s practice and legacy. Belilove argues for Duncan’s modernism, and emphasizes her impact upon Edward Gordon Craig’s developing aesthetic and his career. This edited transcription of their conversation takes its point of departure from Craig’s portfolio of six drawings of Duncan in action, Isadora Duncan: Sechs Bewegungsstudien, Insel Verlag, 1906. Belilove sees both Craig and Duncan as poised between late Victorianism and modernism, and she contends they shared a modernist impulse toward abstraction. Belilove also comments on her own practice as a performer and as a teacher passing …
A Rainbow Of Iranian Masculinities: Raqqas, A Type Of Iranian Male Image, Anthony Shay
A Rainbow Of Iranian Masculinities: Raqqas, A Type Of Iranian Male Image, Anthony Shay
Pomona Faculty Publications and Research
In this essay, I will explore the male dancer in the Iranian world, and how he came to occupy this abject position (dance, according to Zainab Stellar, being regarded by many conservative elements in Iranian society today as "the worst possible behavior of an undisciplined body in public, and symbol of all vice" (2011, 235)). Lotfollah “Lotfi” Mansouri, the renowned opera director and producer, recounted at a dinner that I attended (January 27, 2002 Peyvand Organization, San Jose), how one day as a student at UCLA, he entered Schonberg Music Hall and heard opera for the first time. He was …
Wrapped In Greek Robes Of Spirituality: The Historic Context For Isadora Duncan's Dance Performances, Anthony Shay
Wrapped In Greek Robes Of Spirituality: The Historic Context For Isadora Duncan's Dance Performances, Anthony Shay
Pomona Faculty Publications and Research
In this paper I want to address Craig and Duncan’s shared interest in ancient Greek art, which is the context within which Isadora Duncan developed her art, the various influences that inspired her choreography, and the historical time period that influenced the decisions that she made. I want to make several preliminary comments before proceeding to the main claim that I am making, which is that Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and other “barefoot” dancers were not the mothers or grandmothers or inventors of modern dance, as is repeated as if it were a religious tenet of faith in dance …
Encountering Greek American Soundscapes, Anthony Shay
Encountering Greek American Soundscapes, Anthony Shay
Pomona Faculty Publications and Research
For this chapter I will look at Greek American music making through the eyes of a non-Greek, my younger self, who enjoyed and sought out this musical tradition for over fifty years, primarily as a folk dance enthusiast. For the international recreational dancer of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Greek music has rich melodic lines and many different rhythmic patterns (5/8; 7/8; 9/8, etc.) that attracted many individuals of Anglo American background like me to learn these dances, especially in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when recreational and performance folk dance constituted a major leisure-time activity for hundreds of thousands …