107 research outputs found
Shakespeare and Ballet
No full text(Nancy Isenberg)
The plentifulness of Shakespeare ballets performed in our times around the globe - works which have entered into the standard ballet repertoire and newly created ones - signals a tradition that dates back to the earliest days of ballet theater in the Seventeenth century. The intensity and tenacity of this tradition can be explained in part by certain common roots that the two stage genres share, and by the subsequent ease with which, over time, characteristics of the one could be adapted to the conventions of the other.
To date, research on Shakespeare and ballet has focused in large part on cataloguing Shakespeare ballets by date, place, choreographer, composer, ballet companies and leading dancers, and to describing plot adjustments. There is much work still to be done before we can fully grasp the complexity of the Shakespeare-ballet connection.
Investigation has been hampered by the ephemeral nature of ballet which does not always leave behind even a music score or set of choreographic annotations, both of which in any case require specialized deciphering skills to be comprehended. Furthermore, the perception of ballet as conservative, elitist, and strictly European or Western lessens its appeal as object of study in the current cultural context by comparison with other performative genres.
However, recent work in the field of dance studies on how the dancing body means culturally can now advance our understanding of the Shakespeare-ballet connection from a performative perspective, and help to cancel out some of the prejudices against ballet’s cultural usefulness. This article draws on research carried out by both Shakespeare and dance scholars working from shared critical perspectives such as those informed by stage conventions, politics, multiculturalism, gender and sexuality
Afterword: “A Space for Farther Travel”
No full textThis essay, which closes the volume Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare's Rome, Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities /ACUME 2, Volume 4, discusses the concept of ‘interfacing’, the keyword of the European Socrates/ETNPAcume 2 research program which gives cooperative, reciprocal agency to the categories of knowledge it links together. The essay describes a proposal for a web-based model for collaborative, work-in-progress interfacing, envisioned during a series of workshops and seminars implemented and conducted by Maria Del Sapio and involving members of the two Rome-based Acume2 research units. (“Constructions of Bodies in Renaissance Culture” coordinated by Maria Del Sapio and “Knowledge and Perception of Natural Phenomena” coordinated by Giovanni Antonini), including researchers in the humanities and natural sciences. The web-based model described in the essay sought to provide a digital environment where our widely differing work in progress, competences, experiences, and work and communicative styles could mingle and negotiate cooperation in such a way as to open up new perspectives on our objects of study, encourage the exploration of new possibilities regarding interdisciplinary research methodologies (procedures and end products), provide an open (interacting with the digital ‘universe’ outside our ‘environment’) and live (constantly evolving) resource centre, stimulate thinking about innovative interdisciplinary teaching and learning formats. The essay decribes and details the architecture of the envisioned webspace
Dancing with the Stars in Antony and Cleopatra
No full textQuesto saggio discute la scena della danza baccanale in Antony and Cleopatra. La esamina in relazione alle vedute rinascimentali riguardo alla danza cosmica. Il saggio illustra come, grazie a un legame pitagorico di numeri e di proporzioni, l'armonia delle sfere celesti veniva riprodotto nel microcosmo umano nelle danze di corte, le quali di conseguenza venivano autorizzate in quanto una pratica politica potente nel rinascimento.
La messa in scena della danza baccanale nel dramma di Shakespeare, tuttavia, come viene indicato nel saggio, nonostante tutto il suo significato cosmologico e nonostante l'identità elitaria di chi balla, questa danza è in forte contraddizione conil discorso political altamente influente del corpo che balla di quei tempi.
La coreografia in cerchio della danza baccanale è vista come una specie di antimasque, il quale, senza di seguito un masque di armonia restaurata, riflette la crisi che si stava approfondendo dell'autorità politica aristocratica in un mondo e universo in via di espansione.This essay discusses the Bacchanal dance scene in Antony and Cleopatra,
examining it in relation to Renaissance views on the Cosmic Dance. It illustrates how, thanks to a Pythagorean kinship of numbers and proportions, the harmony of the celestial spheres was reproduced in the human microcosm” in elite social dancing, thus authorizing it as a powerful political practice in the Renaissance. The staging of the Egyptian Bacchanal in Shakespeare’s play, however, as the essay points out, for all its potential cosmological significance and the elitist identity of its dancers is utterly at odds with the highly influential political discourse of dancing bodies at that time. The ‘dizzy’ circle choreography of the Bacchanal is considered as a sort of antimasque which, with no masque of harmony restored following it, reflects the deepening crisis in the authority of aristocratic political entitlement in an expanding world and universe
'That Shakespearian Rome! Work in Progress...' An experiment in intermedial criticism
No full textIl saggio tratta una sperimentazione di critica shakespeareana intermediale, presentata durante il convegno internazionale Shakespeare and Rome: Identity, Otherness, Empire (Università di Roma Tre, Rome, Italy, 2005). Il saggio descrive e discute i modi in cui il video interrogava, attraverso accorgimenti tecnici quali, per esempio, alternazione, sovrapposizione e sincronia, per combinare materiale provenienti da una vasta varietà di generi multimediali, la Roma di Shakespeare cinquecento anni dopo nei nostri tempi postmoderni e postcoloniali e multiculturali
Seduzioni episolari nell’età dei Luni. L’Equivoco e provocante carteggio amoroso di Giustiniana Wynne, Scrittrice Anglo-Veneziana (1737-1791)
No full textQuesto saggio presenta la Wynne e il carteggio che tenne in giovinezza con il patrizio veneziano, Andrea Memmo tra il 1758 e il 1760. Prende in esame questioni di reputazione in relazione al carteggio che si intreccia con una narrazione erotico di Casanova e con la successiva carriera letteraria dell’autrice. Le lettere, scritte durante una lunga assenza obbligata da Venezia passata nelle grandi capitali d’Europa, vengono analizzate quali strumento di seduzione a distanza, cronaca brillante del mondo materiale e sociale, voce di una donna illuminata con desideri di indipendenza e potere. Il saggio in fine mette in luce la complessa storia della trasmissione delle lettere dagli originali a diverse raccolte di copie manoscritte rinvenute nel novecento
Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare's Rome, Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities /ACUME 2
No full textAncient Rome has always been considered a compendium of City and World. In the Renaissance, an era of epistemic fractures, when the clash between the 'new science' (Copernicus, Galileo, Vesalius, Bacon, etcetera) and the authority of ancient texts produced the very notion of modernity, the extended and expanding geography of ancient Rome becomes, for Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, a privileged arena in which to question the nature of bodies and the place they hold in a changing order of the universe. Drawing on the rich scenario provided by Shakespeare's Rome, and adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the authors of this volume address the way in which the different bodies of the earthly and heavenly spheres are re-mapped in Shakespeare's time and in early modern European culture. More precisely, they investigate the way bodies are fashioned to suit or deconstruct a culturally articulated system of analogies between earth and heaven, microcosm and macrocosm. As a whole, this collection brings to the fore a wide range of issues connected to the Renaissance re-mapping of the world and the human. It should interest not only Shakespeare scholars but all those working on the interaction between sciences and humanities.Table of contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Introduction: Shakespeare’s Rome and Renaissance Anthropographie’
Maddalena Pennacchia, A Map of the Essays
Part I Human Bodies
Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Anatomy, Knowledge, and Conspiracy : in Shakespeare’s Arena with the Words of Cassius
Claudia Corti, The Iconic Body : Coriolanus and Renaissance Corporeality
Maurizio Calbi, States of Exception: Auto-immunity and the Body Politic in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Ute Berns, Performing Anatomy in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
Mariangela Tempera, Titus Andronicus: Staging the Mutilated Roman Body
Antonella Piazza, Volumnia, the Roman Patroness
Iolanda Plescia, “From me was Posthumus ript”: Cymbeline and the Extraordinary Birth
Barbara Antonucci, Blood in Language: the Galenic Paradigm of Humours in The Rape of Lucrece and Titus Andronicus
Paola Faini, Cleopatra’s Corporeal Language
Simona Corso, What Calphurnia knew. Julius Caesar and the Language of Dreams
Viola Papetti, Under the sign of Ovid. Motion and Instance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Michele Marrapodi, Mens sana in corpore sano: the Rhetoric of the Body in Shakespeare’sRoman and Late Plays
Alessandro Serpieri, Body and History in the Political Rhetoric of Julius Caesar
Part II Earthly and Heavenly Bodies
Manfred Pfister, “Rome and her rats”: Coriolanus and the Early Modern Crisis of Distinction between Man, Beast and Monster
John Gillies, “Mighty Space”: the Ordinate and Exorbitant in two Shakespeare Plays
Gilberta Golinelli, Floating Borders: (Dis)-locating Otherness in the Female Body, and the Question of Miscegenation in Titus Andronicus
Andrea Bellelli, Where do diseases come from? Reflections on Shakespeare’s “contagion of the south”
Giovanni Antonini and Gloria Grazia Rosa, Shakespeare and Mandragora
Maddalena Pennacchia, The Stones of Rome. Early Earth Sciences in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus
Gilberto Sacerdoti, Spontaneous Generation and New Astronomy in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra
Nancy Isenberg, Dancing with the Stars in Antony and Cleopatra
Nancy Isenberg, Afterword: “A Space for Farther Travel
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