1,721,192 research outputs found
Hybrid Bodies in Transit: The ‘Third Language’ of Contemporary Kathak
Full text linkInspired by the third space theory of Homi Bhabha, this essay explores the postcolonial condition of a Theatre-Dance in transit: ‘Contemporary Kathak’. Travelling between contemporary Western dance techniques and Kathak, a South Asian classical dance form, the Anglo-Indian dancer Akram Khan has developed an innovative movement language. Contemporary Kathak may be seen as a ‘third language’, a hybrid language, which displays a variety of responses to the encounter between different cultures and histories. Khan’s transition between dance forms, cultures, and histories has produced ‘dances of interruptions’, mirroring and in-corporating cultural hybridity and postcolonial identity. The concept of ‘confusion’ developed by this dancer recalls the metaphoric tear produced in classical Indian languages as they overlap and enter into a syncretic conjunction with contemporary Western languages. The dislocative nature of Khan’s performances echoes some of the ‘confused’ Indian poetic voices which combine English and Indian mother-tongues to reflect the in-between condition of their hybrid bodies. The intention behind this paper is to use the privileged cultural space of Theatre-Dance in order to interrogate the body languages of postcolonial identities and the cultural implications of the process of transition in India today
Speaking with...Nelisiwe Xaba. Re-Dancing a Body, Re-Imagining a Continent
Full text linkIn July 2010, Annalisa Piccirillo met the South African dancer and choreographer Nelisiwe Xaba at the 4th edition of Teatro Civile Festival in Monte Sant’Angelo (Foggia), where she was presenting one of her recent productions, The Venus, in its first Italian performance. The production combined two solo pieces inspired by the figure of Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”. Piccirillo sees Xaba’s work as a choreographic and historical re-vision of the dark “body-continent”. Her conversation with Xaba includes reflections on the connection between the female dancing body and the African continent as a single entity, concealed, fixed and essentialized on the Eurocentric stage by the colonial gaze. In the provocative and political act of re-dancing the Venus’s body, Xaba’s artistic and personal experience intersects with and participates in the performative act of re-imagining Africa
'Ricor-danze': L’archiviazione ‘sospesa’ di Isabel Rocamora
Full text linkIn questo saggio, il «mal d’archivio» consiste nella pulsione di «conservazione» e di «distruzione» che governa la memoria della danza – la «ricordanza» – del corpo «sospeso»: una tecnica/poetica che ospita/rifiuta la forza di gravità. Consultando i più noti depositi della memoria coreutica occidentale, nella forma di «patri-archivio» e di «matri-archivio», si rintracciano le immagini – phantasmata – che hanno trasformato la memorabilità della sospensione sul/nel corpo danzante, esso stesso archivio vivente. La scrittura si fa femminile, altra, aprendo l’«archivio del futuro» dell’artista anglo-spagnola Isabel Rocamora, la cui coreografia dell’antigravità realizza il «ricordo della danza» (Memory Release) e, insieme, la «danza della memoria» (Horizon of Exile). Le performance di Rocamora sono devote a un’archiviazione «sospesa» grazie alla tecnica in cui si espongono, e per l’immaterialità spaziale, digitale e «spettrale», in cui esse si fruiscono. L’esilio, danzato e ricordato, dai corpi-archivio di Rocamora, sembra voler richiamare la memoria all’oggi, e a quel «male» della rimozione
Visions of Performance in Exile: The Book, the Exhibition, and the Digital Archive
Full text linkThis article adopts the trope of exile in order to investigate the visual and spatial displacement experienced by the artwork of certain female artists when, in the passage from one technology to the next, disappear and re-appear technically and poetically, ‘surviving’ in new critical forms of reception and understanding. The photographs that Emily Jacir collected in Where We Come From (2001-2003) re-appear on the pages of the ‘book’ devoted to Seeking Palestine (2012); Shilpa Gupta’s digital installation I Have Many Dreams (2008) travels from Mumbai to Europe where it reaches the art exhibition DigitaLife-2012 held in Rome; Latifa Laâbissi’s choreography Loredreamsong (2011) transforms the ephemerality of its live event into its virtual documentation within the digital archive of re.act.feminism # 2 (2008-2013). The ‘book’, the ‘exhibition’ and the ‘digital archive’ become the new ‘homelands’, the new contexts of ‘survival’, of the artists’ originary performances. The Palestinian photographer Jacir, the Indian artist Gupta, and the Arab choreographer Laâbissi come from various geographical, political and cultural spaces, displaying, in their uses of languages and technologies, a critical art which proves the ability of women to survive beyond the difficulties of their ‘exiled’ existences by hoping, dreaming and resisting creatively
EMBODYNG OTHERNESS: NELISIWE XABA'S FREMDE TANZE
No full text‘Outside’, in the foyer of the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, where the audience is informally gathered awaiting for the show, Nelisiwe Xaba makes her appearance. Solemnly walking to the notes of the Aida, dressed in a blond wig, the South African dancer marches carrying around her neck a large circular tray, worn like a collar, upon which have been placed small desserts in the form of black human characters. The caricature mimed by this body-installation is fervid, the reference goes to the Cake walk: the dance organized and conducted by the slave servants to mock the mannerism of their aristocratic masters. The ‘foreignness’ of the piece is already set up, as well as Xaba’s intention of playing on and challenging European audience expectation and modes of vision. With a firm gaze, she ‘looks back’, and invites the audience to join her into the theatre venue
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