Download or read book Conscious Dancer Winter 2010 9 written by and published by Conscious Dancer. This book was released on with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Conscious Dancer Spring 2010 10 written by and published by Conscious Dancer. This book was released on with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Learning How to Fall written by T Nikki Cesare Schotzko and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with Richard Drew’s controversial photograph of a man falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, Learning How to Fall investigates the changing relationship between world events and their subsequent documentation, asking: Does the mediatization of the event overwhelm the fact of the event itself? How does the mode by which information is disseminated alter the way in which we perceive such information? How does this impact upon our memory of an event? T. Nikki Cesare Schotzko posits contemporary art and performance as not only a stylized re-envisioning of daily life but, inversely, as a viable means by which one might experience and process real-world political and social events. This approach combines two concurrent and contradictory trends in aesthetics, narrative, and dramaturgy: the dramatization of real-world events so as to broaden the commercial appeal of those events in both mainstream and alternative media, and the establishment of a more holistic relationship between politically and aesthetically motivated modes of disseminating and processing information. By presenting engaging and diverse case studies from both the art world and popular culture – including Aliza Shvarts’s censored senior thesis at Yale University, Kerry Skarbakka’s provocative photographs of falling, Didier Morelli’s crawl through Toronto, and Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom – Learning How to Fall creates a new understanding of the relationship between the event and its documentation, where even the truth of an event might be called into question.

Download or read book One Grand Noise written by Jerrilyn McGregory and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2021-07-29 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many, December 26 is more than the day after Christmas. Boxing Day is one of the world’s most celebrated cultural holidays. As a legacy of British colonialism, Boxing Day is observed throughout Africa and parts of the African diaspora, but, unlike Trinidadian Carnival and Mardi Gras, fewer know of Bermuda’s Gombey dancers, Bahamian Junkanoo, Dangriga’s Jankunú and Charikanari, St. Croix’s Crucian Christmas Festival, and St. Kitts’s Sugar Mas. One Grand Noise: Boxing Day in the Anglicized Caribbean World delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the use of spectacular vernacular to metaphorically dramatize such tropes as “one grand noise,” “foreday morning,” and from “back o’ town.” In cultural solidarity and an obvious critique of Western values and norms, revelers engage in celebratory sounds, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and dancing with abandon along thoroughfares usually deemed anathema to them. Folklorist Jerrilyn McGregory demonstrates how the cultural producers in various island locations ritualize Boxing Day as a part of their struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in accordance with time and space. Based on ethnographic study undertaken by McGregory, One Grand Noise explores Boxing Day as part of a creolization process from slavery into the twenty-first century. McGregory traces the holiday from its Egyptian origins to today and includes chapters on the Gombey dancers of Bermuda, the evolution of Junkanoo/Jankunú in The Bahamas and Belize, and J'ouvert traditions in St. Croix and St. Kitts. Through her exploration of the holiday, McGregory negotiates the ways in which Boxing Day has expanded from small communal traditions into a common history of colonialism that keeps alive a collective spirit of resistance.

Download or read book Artificial General Intelligence written by Julian Togelius and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to make AI capable of general intelligence, and what such technology would mean for society. Artificial intelligence surrounds us. More and more of the systems and services you interact with every day are based on AI technology. Although some very recent AI systems are generalists to a degree, most AI is narrowly specific; that is, it can only do a single thing, in a single context. For example, your spellchecker can’t do mathematics, and the world's best chess-playing program can’t play Tetris. Human intelligence is different. We can solve a variety of tasks, including those we have not seen before. In Artificial General Intelligence, Julian Togelius explores technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence and asks what general AI would mean for human civilization. Togelius starts by giving examples of narrow AI that have superhuman performance in some way. Interestingly, there have been AI systems that are superhuman in some sense for more than half a century. He then discusses what it would mean to have general intelligence, by looking at definitions from psychology, ethology, and computer science. Next, he explores the two main families of technical approaches to developing more general artificial intelligence: foundation models through self-supervised learning, and open-ended learning in virtual environments. The final chapters of the book investigate potential artificial general intelligence beyond the strictly technical aspects. The questions discussed here investigate whether such general AI would be conscious, whether it would pose a risk to humanity, and how it might alter society.

Download or read book Geographies of Us written by Sondra Fraleigh and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-13 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages is the first edited collection in the field of ecosomatics. With a combination of essays and practice pages that provide a variety of scholarly, creative, and experience-based approaches for readers, the book brings together both established and emergent scholars and artists from many diverse backgrounds and covers work rooted in a dozen countries. The essays engage an array of crucial methodologies and critical/theoretical perspectives, including practice-based research in the arts, especially in performance and dance studies, critical theory, ecocriticism, Indigenous knowledges, material feminist critique, quantum field theory, and new phenomenologies. Practice pages are shorter chapters that provide readers a chance to engage creatively with the ideas presented across the collection. This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective that brings together work in performance as research, phenomenology, and dance/movement; this is one of its significant contributions to the area of ecosomatics. The book will be of interest to anyone curious about matters of embodiment, ecology, and the environment, especially artists and students of dance, performance, and somatic movement education who want to learn about ecosomatics and environmental activists who want to learn more about integrating creativity, the arts, and movement into their work.

Download or read book Dance and American Art written by Sharyn R. Udall and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-06-19 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From ballet to burlesque, from the frontier jig to the jitterbug, Americans have always loved watching dance, whether in grand ballrooms, on Mississippi riverboats, or in the streets. Dance and American Art is an innovative look at the elusive, evocative nature of dance and the American visual artists who captured it through their paintings, sculpture, photography, and prints from the early nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. The scores of artists discussed include many icons of American art: Winslow Homer, George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Edward Steichen, David Smith, and others. As a subject for visual artists, dance has given new meaning to America’s perennial myths, cherished identities, and most powerful dreams. Their portrayals of dance and dancers, from the anonymous to the famous—Anna Pavlova, Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Josephine Baker, Martha Graham—have testified to the enduring importance of spatial organization, physical pattern, and rhythmic motion in creating aesthetic form. Through extensive research, sparkling prose, and beautiful color reproductions, art historian Sharyn R. Udall draws attention to the ways that artists’ portrayals of dance have defined the visual character of the modern world and have embodied culturally specific ideas about order and meaning, about the human body, and about the diverse fusions that comprise American culture.

Download or read book A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice written by Nancy Topf and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to embodied movement through the work of a dance education pioneer In this introduction to the work of somatic dance education pioneer Nancy Topf (1942–1998), readers are ushered on a journey to explore the movement of the body through a close awareness of anatomical form and function. Making available the full text of Topf’s The Anatomy of Center for the first time in print, this guide helps professionals, teachers, and students of all levels integrate embodied, somatic practices within contexts of dance, physical education and therapy, health, and mental well-being. Hetty King, a movement educator certified in the Topf Technique®, explains how the ideas in this work grew out of Topf’s involvement in developing Anatomical Release Technique—an important concept in contemporary dance—and the influence of earlier innovators Barbara Clark and Mabel Elsworth Todd, founder of the approach to movement known as “ideokinesis.” Featuring lessons written as a dialogue between teacher, student, and elements of the body, Topf’s material is accompanied by twenty-one activities that allow readers to use the book as a self-guided manual. A Guide to a Somatic Movement Practice is a widely applicable entry point into the tradition of experiential anatomy and its mindful centering of the living, breathing body.

Download or read book Bob Dylan In America written by Sean Wilentz and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-02-15 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliantly written and groundbreaking book about Dylan's music – now the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 – and its musical, political and cultural roots in early 20th-century America Growing up in Greenwich Village in the 1960s Sean Wilentz discovered the music of Bob Dylan as a young teenager. Almost half a century later, now a distinguished professor of American history, he revisits Dylan's work with the critical skills of a scholar and the passion of a fan. Drawing partly on his work as the current historian-in-residence on Dylan's official website, Sean Wilentz provides a unique blend of biography, memoir and analysis in a book which, much like its subject, shifts gears and changes shape as the occasion demands.

Download or read book The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training written by Doran George and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its beginnings as an alternative and dissident form of dance training in the 1960s, Somatics emerged at the end of the twentieth century as one of the most popular and widespread regimens used to educate dancers. It is now found in dance curricula worldwide, helping to shape the look and sensibilities of both dancers and choreographers and thereby influencing much of the dance we see onstage worldwide. One of the first books to examine Somatics in detail and to analyse how and what it teaches in the dance studio, The Natural Body in Somatics Dance Training considers how dancers discover and assimilate new ways of moving and also larger cultural values associated with those movements. The book traces the history of Somatics, and it also details how Somatics developed in different locales, engaging with local politics and dance histories so as to develop a distinctive pedagogy that nonetheless shared fundamental concepts with other national and regional contexts. In so doing it shows how dance training can inculcate an embodied politics by guiding and shaping the experience of bodily sensation, constructing forms of reflexive evaluation of bodily action, and summoning bodies into relationship with one another. Throughout, the author focuses on the concept of the natural body and the importance of a natural way of moving as central to the claims that Somatics makes concerning its efficacy and legitimacy.

Download or read book Popular Dance and Music in Modern Egypt written by Sherifa Zuhur and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration into the history, aesthetics, social reality, regulation, and transformation of dance and dance music in Egypt. It covers Oriental dance, known as belly dance or danse du ventre, regional or group-specific dances and rituals, sha'bi (lower-class urban music and dance style), mulid (drawing on Sufi tradition and saints' day festivals) and mahraganat (youth-created, primarily electronic music with lively rhythms and biting lyrics). The chapters discuss genres and sub-genres and their evolution, the demeanor of dancers, trends old and new, and social and political criticism that use the imagery of dance or a dancer. Also considered are the globalization of Egyptian dance, the replication or fantasies of raqs sharqi outside of Egypt, as well as the dance as a hobby, competitive dance form, and focus of international dance festivals.

Download or read book Composing while Dancing written by Melinda Buckwalter and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-12-16 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Composing while Dancing: An Improviser’s Companion examines the world of improvisational dance and the varied approaches to this art form. By introducing the improvisational strategies of twenty-six top contemporary artists of movement improvisation, Melinda Buckwalter offers a practical primer to the dance form. Each chapter focuses on an important aspect of improvisation including spatial relations, the eyes, and the dancing image. Included are sample practices from the artists profiled, exercises for further research, and a glossary of terms. Buckwalter gathers history, methods, interviews, and biographies in one book to showcase the many facets of improvisational dance and create an invaluable reference for dancers and dance educators.

Download or read book Theatres of Immanence written by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-10-10 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance is the first monograph to provide an in-depth study of the implications of Deleuze's philosophy for theatre and performance. Drawing from Goat Island, Butoh, Artaud and Kaprow, as well from Deleuze, Bergson and Laruelle, the book conceives performance as a way of thinking immanence.

Download or read book Introducing the Women s Hebrew Bible written by Susanne Scholz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-10 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the Women's Hebrew Bible is an up-to-date feminist introduction to the historical, socio-political, and academic developments of feminist biblical scholarship. In the second edition of this popular text Susanne Scholz offers new insights into the diverse field of feminist studies on the Hebrew Bible. Scholz provides a new introductory survey of the history of feminism more broadly, giving context to its rise in biblical studies, before looking at the history and issues as they relate specifically to feminist readings and readers of the Hebrew Bible. Scholz then presents the life and work of several influential feminist scholars of the Bible, outlining their career paths and the characteristics of their work. The volume also outlines how to relate the Bible to sexual violence and feminist postcolonial demands. Two new chapters further delineate recent developments in feminist biblical studies. One chapter addresses the relationship between feminist exegesis and queer theory as well as masculinity studies. Another chapter problematizes the gender discourse as it has emerged in the Christian Right's approaches to the Old Testament.

Download or read book Moving Modernism written by Nell Andrew and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of modern dance and the early history of cinema ran concurrent with the European avant-garde's development of pictorial abstraction in the first decades of the 20th century. However, many assume that modernist abstraction resulted from a century of natural, autonomous evolution to painting styles and tastes. In Moving Modernism, author Nell Andrew challenges this assumption. By examining dance and film created during this period, she argues that performative modes of art created the link between bodily movement and movement depicted in modernist paintings. In a seeming paradox, dance and film - durational arts, involving real bodies in space-participated in the development of abstract art. With archival material collected in North America and Europe, Moving Modernism resurfaces lost performances, identifies working methods, and establishes the circles of aesthetic influence and reception for avant-garde dance pioneers and experimental film makers from the turn of the century to the interwar period. Reexamining the motivation that fueled the emergence of abstraction, Andrew claims that painters sought meaning not only in the material and formal picture but also in temporal and sensorial experience. Andrew looks at major figures and intellectual movements including Loïe Fuller and Symbolism; Valentine de Saint-Point and the Cubo-Futurist and neo-Symbolist movements; and early cinematic abstraction from Edison and the Lumières to Hans Richter and Marcel Duchamp. Close examinations of each figure show that theatrical display, embodied self-projection, and kinesthetic desire are not necessarily in opposition to pictorial abstraction; in fact, they expand our understanding of the urges that created modern art.

Download or read book Dance in Chains written by Padraic Kenney and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States around the world imprison people for their beliefs or politically-motivated actions. Oppositional movements of all stripes celebrate their comrades behind bars. Yet they are more than symbols of repression and human rights. Dance in Chains examines the experiences of political prisoners themselves in order to understand who they are, what they do, and why it matters. This is the first book to trace the history of modern political imprisonment from its origins in the mid-nineteenth century. The letters, diaries, and memoirs of political prisoners, as well as the records of regime policies, relate the contest in the prison cell to political conflicts between regime and opposition. Padraic Kenney draws on examples from regimes ranging from communist and fascist to colonial and democratic, including Ireland, the United Kingdom, Poland, and South Africa. They include the Fenian Brotherhood, imprisoned in England and Ireland in the 1860s, and their successors during the Irish War of Independence and the Northern Ireland Troubles; Afrikaaners suspected of treason during the Boer War; socialists fighting for Polish freedom in the Russian Empire, and then Communists denouncing "bourgeois" rule in newly-independent Poland; the opponents of apartheid South Africa and stalinist Poland; and those imprisoned by the United States in Guantanamo Bay detention camp today. Some prisons are well-known; in others, inmates suffered in obscurity. Through self-organization, education, and actions ranging from solitary non-cooperation to mass hunger strikes, these prisoners transform their incarceration and counter states' efforts to control them. While considering the international movements that have sought to publicize the plight of political prisoners, Dance in Chains examines the actions of the prisoners themselves to find universal answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of their imprisonment.

Download or read book Hermes Pan written by John Franceschina and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-08 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography. In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment. Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.