Journal articles on the topic 'Dance magazine'

Este estudio pretende identificar los principales elementos relativos a la creación coreográfica en el contexto español así como su evolución entre 1989 y 2009, a partir de los datos de la revista «Por la danza». Dicha revista de danza se constituye como un testigo privilegiado del desarrollo de la danza contemporánea en España en estas dos últimas décadas. Se analiza el lugar de la revista «Por la danza» en relación con las demás publicaciones que abordan la danza de forma más o menos específica y se revisan los 79 ejemplares publicados por la revista desde el punto de vista de las referencias relativas a la danza contemporánea: compañías, espacios de creación y festivales u otros eventos. Este estudio, a pesar del sesgo local de la revista que privilegia el entorno de Madrid, nos permite identificar un amplio conjunto de compañías españolas de danza y clasificarlas en función del grado de reconocimiento o consolidación y también del periodo de visibilidad. Se puede vislumbrar, además, la progresiva diversificación de los espacios y localidades de representación con el acercamiento a las artes plásticas y el incremento de eventos específicos de danza contemporánea y de nuevas artes fronterizas donde se acomoda la danza.Palabra clave: danza contemporánea, revista, creación, coreografía.Abstract: The aim of this study is to identify the main elements related to the choreographic creation in Spain as well as its evolution between 1989 and 2009, according to the information from the magazine «Por la danza». This magazine has been a privileged witness of the development of the contemporary dance in Spain in the two last decades. The study analyses the magazine’s position with regards to other dance-related publications and revises their 79 issues from a contemporary dance point of view: companies, spaces of creation and festivals or other events. Although the study refers to a Madrid local dance magazine, a variety of Spanish dance companies has been included, as well as a detailed classification according to their recognition or consolidation degree and visibility period. The study also reflects the progressive increase of the number of performance spaces and locations where audience might approach to the plastic arts and specific contemporary dance events or frontier arts.Key words: contemporary dance, magazine, creation, choreography.

Abstract During their residence in Vienna, the editors of this magazine visited a part of the ImpulsTanz festival in order to map international trends in contemporary dance. They established that, following an increase in the production of contemporary dance, interest in theory (the Maska magazine being an important part of this scene for several years now) experienced a decrease. They divided the production into three categories: A Dance of Great Names (mentioning Ivo Dimchev with Selfie Concert, Jonathan Burrows with Rewriting, a piece by Wim Vandekeybus/Ultima Vez Go Figure Out Yourself and a classic by DD Dorvillier/Human Future Dance Corps: No Change, or »Freedom Is a Psycho-kinetic Skill«), the position of the viewer and the hermeticisms of the current contemporary dance (analysing Anna Juren's 42, a solo performance by Dani Michel Cutlass Spring and Compass by Simone Augherlony, Petra Hrašćanec and Saša Božić) and new formalisms and contemporary repetition (Tatiana Chizhikova and Roman Kutnov: Time to Time and Ellen Furey and Malik Nashad Sharpe: SOFTLAMP.Autonomies).

Olga's Notes is a script for a movie. This project tells a story composed of various collected notes, written mainly while reading Al-Hilal magazine (an Egyptian publication from the 1960s), thinking about the disciplined body, labor, and nation-state building through dance.

I accepted his invitation; but having once begun to dance, he would on no account be prevailed on to cease. At last I grew uneasy. I fixed my eyes upon him with anxiety; it seemed to me as if his eyes grew dimmer and dimmer, his cheeks paler and more wasted, his lips shrivelled and skinny, his teeth grinned out, white and ghastly, and at last he stared upon me with bony and eyeless sockets.—“The Dance of Death,” Blackwood's Magazine It is ill dancing with a heavy heart.—George Eliot, Mill on the Floss

At the first National Dance Congress and Festival, which was held in New York in May 1936, Edna Ocko, the dance editor ofNew Theatre Magazine, told the assembled delegates, “One cannot minimize the importance of an artist's social point of view, for it is he who, bringing his ideas before vast audiences, can organize and direct social thought” (25). Noting that young, politically aware choreographers had already embraced the political potential of dance, Ocko listed several topical social themes recently explored in choreography, including the need for “Negro and white unity”—an assertion championed by other speakers and formally adopted in the final session of the gathering when the delegates passed the following resolution: “Whereas the Negro People in America have been subject to segregation and suppression which has limited their development in the field of creative dance, be it resolved that the Dance Congress encourage and sponsor the work of the Negro People in the creative fields” (Ocko 1936, 27 and “Resolutions” 1936, 94).

Being in an anniversary year (90 years since the National Ethnographic Park was founded that bears the name of its founder: Romulus Vuia) and we consider that a good way to render homage to the Romanian ethnographer's personality is to make some observations on a short study from his youth, published by Romulus Vuia in Dacoromania Magazine in 1922, a study entitled ”The Origin of the Călușari folk dance”. Therefore the lines below try to point out some of the important, relevant and sustainable aspects from Vuia's study, a study that I place among the ethnology studies of the dance that marked the perception of an archaic Romanian ceremonial practice: Căluș.

In 2008 Science Magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna, Austria. Calls for submission to the second, third, and fourth annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries and featuring scientists based in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the UK. These contests have drawn significant media attention. While much of the commentary has focused on the novelty of dancing scientists and the function of dance as an effective distraction for overworked researchers, this article takes seriously the relationship between movement and scientific inquiry and draws on ethnographic research among structural biologists to examine the ways that practitioners use their bodies to animate biological phenomena. It documents how practitioners transform their bodies into animating media and how they conduct body experiments to test their hypotheses. This ‘body-work’ helps them to figure out how molecules move and interact, and simultaneously offers a medium through which they can communicate the nuanced details of their findings among students and colleagues. This article explores the affective and kinaesthetic dexterities scientists acquire through their training, and it takes a close look at how this body-work is tacitly enabled and constrained through particular pedagogical techniques and differential relations of gender and power. This article argues that the Dance Your PhD contests, as well as other performative modalities, can expand and extend what it is possible for scientific researchers to see, say, imagine and feel.

ON OCTOBER 1, 2007, RN magazine published my article “David’s Story” about a patient of mine who was born prematurely 30 years ago. When David was just a day or two old, he was almost pronounced dead, but a bold and dedicated respiratory therapist asked if she could try to help him. And help him she did! David was kept alive at an outlying hospital until he could be admitted to our tertiary NICU, which at the time of David’s birth was full. Three days later, our unit at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Florida, had room to take David. At the end of that RN article, I wrote, “Maybe I’ll even get to dance at his wedding.”

The focus of this article is the transformation of ragtime dancing into modern social dance by hundreds of teachers, writers and performers working in an emerging dance industry, rooted in New York City. Based on dance manuals and magazines of the period, I argue that dance professionals worked collectively to create new products (i.e. dances) that could more easily be mass-produced and marketed. Importantly, they called their efforts a ‘refinement’ of ragtime and justified their work through discourses of artistry and morality. Upon closer examination, however, the changes they made to the dances indicate that artistry and morality were actually achieved by removing the black associations of ragtime dancing and instead, using modern social dance to construct an idealized white racial identity.

On 22 August 1897, theAmerican Woman's Home Journalpublished seven photographs of “The Cake Walk as It Is Done by Genuine Negroes” in which “Williams and Walker Show How the Real Thing Is Done before the Journal Camera.” In this series, the African American stars Bert Williams, George Walker, Belle Davis, and Stella Wiley perform their popular cake walk act with situational humor in medias res before an unknown photographer in a nondescript space. Among the seven selected poses, one intriguing photograph in the lower right-hand corner depicts the encircled dancers gazing down upon an empty space in the center. The subject of their gaze becomes apparent when comparing the magazine images with the seven “Post Cards” Franz Huld published as part of his “Cake Walk/Negro Dance” series around 1901. Although the performers’ poses are the same, the postcard includes extra space between Wiley and Walker to feature a young girl of mixed racial heritage bending forward while hiking the back of her dress with her smiling face proudly held high (Fig. 1). If standing upright, she appears to be less than four feet tall and perhaps five to nine years of age. Given the obscure date and location of her photo shoot, her birth year could range anywhere from the mid-1880s to the early 1890s. Like Thomas F. DeFrantz, an African American dance theorist who gazes upon two 1920s photographs of other dancing girls, my gaze leads me to wonder about her identity, how she met and socialized with these four dancers, and whether she pursued a theatrical career.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles audiences saw Soviet defectors Mikhail Baryshnikov, Alexander Godunov, Natalia Makarova, and Rudolf Nureyev in the prime of their careers at the Hollywood Bowl, The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and the Greek Theater. Dance photographer Donald Dale Bradburn, a local Southern California dancer describes his behind-the-scenes access to these dancers in this interview. Perfectly positioned as Dance Magazine’s Southern California correspondent, Bradburn offers a candid appraisal of the Southern California appeal for such high-power Russian artists as well as their impact on the arts of Los Angeles. An intimate view of Russian dancers practicing their craft on Los Angeles stages, Bradburn’s interview is illustrated by fourteen of his photographs, published for the first time in this issue of Experiment.

Head tossed back wearing a mile-wide grin, ecstatic arms stretched to the sky, jutting knees counterbalancing a substantial backside—the Jazz Age had no symbol more potent than the moving black body (Figure 1). Nearly always an illustration, and in many cases a caricature, these images depicted anonymous black movers rather than recognizable individuals. Yet, looking beyond this superficial representation, it was actually visibly white dance professionals who primarily marketed jazz steps to the American public as teachers and choreographers. A quick glance through the pages of the nascentDance Magazineof the 1920s reveals numerous jass dance routines with names such as “High Yaller,” “Pickin’ Cotton,” “The Savannah Stomp,” and the “Hula-Charleston,” each represented by a specific white Broadway performer (Fig. 2). Standing just behind each dancer, however, is a dark dancing figure that remains nameless and faceless.

The Ballroom scene is an underground subculture created by African Americans and Latinos and gives emphasize in issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation within the heterogeneous society. The members of this subculture live in an organized social structure based on the acceptance and the celebration of sexual and gender expression. Balls are competitions where transgender people are involved, performing different kinds of dances. Balls provide to the queer community a cozy place to build their sense of self in their hidden world without the limitations imposed by society on gender and sexual expression. Balls are a combination of fashion, competition, and dance. “Voguing” is the characteristic dance of Balls and it is an extremely stylized dance form. Vogue magazine’s model poses to inspire it, and it uses the arms and legs with dramatic, rapid and feminine edgy ways. “Voguing” includes catwalk, dance, spins and other risky styles of movement. The “Voguing” has the major role in Ballrooms that contain fashion catwalk and competitions, where African and Latinos gays and transgender participate in a competition, imitating fashion models in the catwalk with gestures and poses to win an award. The panel of the critics, in a Ball, judges them from the movements of their dance, attitudes, costumes and the ingenuity in all of these areas. Today there are three basic types of Voguing: a) the Old Way, b) The New Way and, c) The Vogue Femme.

Ballet faced formidable obstacles in establishing itself as a “home-grown” transplant at mid-century. Scholars have emphasized choreographic efforts to cultivate a nationally identifiable style during the period, focusing primarily on the emergence of Balanchine and neo-classicism. Yet the role of dancers in the Americanization of ballet largely has not been probed. This article examines the part that Maria Tallchief, daughter of a “full-blooded” Osage Indian father and Scotch-Irish mother, and the first American ballerina to reach prima status, played in changing public perceptions of ballet in the mid-twentieth century. Between 1952 and 1954, national magazines such asDancemagazine,Holiday, andNewsweekfeatured images of Tallchief on their covers, lending visual credibility to claims that ballet, which many at the time considered a “foreign” dance form, had come of age in the U.S. I argue that iconographic portrayals of Tallchief's face, legs, and feet, which illustrated the dancer's physical assimilation of Balanchine's approach to dance technique, along with narratives of her personal story, advanced an account of ballet's Americanization that placed the dancer, as much as if not more than Balanchine, at center stage. I then illuminate how Tallchief's exemplification of self-discipline and initiative bolstered nostalgic arguments about the successful “citizenship” of white ethnic immigrants, while also promoting arguments about the viability of Indian assimilation during the tribal termination era. When seen in the contemporaneous contexts of ballet's Americanization and societal debates over Native American citizenship, Tallchief's story is seen to complicate the meanings of “assimilation” and “citizenship” in postwar America.

This work examines the pedagogy of dance and entrepreneurship in the society. In other words, it seeks to engender dynamic essence between theory and practice, dance scholar and choreographer, and their impact on students/dancers with respect to teaching dance as a career for profit making against art for art sake. The teaching approaches provide for managing dance establishments as well as the art and act of dancing. In doing this, we adopted the managerial system of the Footprints Arts Ambassadors in Lagos, Nigeria as a prototype. We apply some fundamental tools of entrepreneurship that determine efficiency and effectiveness of a particular approach to business to empower the trainees. In the deductive method, we carefully derived some assertions and information that would later become helpful for this study through the structured one-on-one interview held with the director of Footprints Arts Ambassadors. In analytical method, we did cursory analysis of dance pedagogy and entrepreneurial study as well as review related literatures, magazines and journals. We identified some pedagogical yardsticks and entrepreneurial approaches which have been used in successfully managing the fledging dance company. We also discovered some considerable factors to establishing a successful arts entrepreneurial company in Nigeria.We found that economic and social trend, as well as some personal entrepreneurial attributesplay key role in an entrepreneur’s approach to arts and theatre management. Therefore, we conclude that, whatever approach, style or operation mode a dance/theatre entrepreneur chooses; his aim should be for the success and development of both individuals and company. Thus, we recommend that dance scholars and practitioners update their teaching approach to making dance pedagogy a viable and self-reliant endeavour, rather than being a tool for entertainment, body therapy and cultural propagation alone.This will undoubtedlyposition dance on the same pedestrian with other art forms globally making wave in the entertainment industrytoday. Keywords: Dance pedagogy, Entrepreneurship, Trainees, Footprints Arts Ambassadors, Management

City branding is a strategy used by a city to build and communicate city’s strong positioning regionally and globally through tourism promotion. City branding of Surabaya is a form of Surabaya marketing communication tool in tourism, following the era where cities today rely on branding for packaging and promoting tourism in the city. Sparkling Surabaya promotional activities are carried out in various forms summarized in promotion and cooperation. Promotional material in the form of brochures, books, calendars, posters, pamphlets, stickers, photos, videos, maps, souvenirs, and free magazines can be found at the Tourist Information Center (TIC), hotels, and various other places that are easily accessible to the tourists. One of marketing communications tools of city branding arised nowadays is a cultural event, such as Sparkling Surabaya dance that expresses the city of Surabaya through motion as language of symbols. This study aims to determine the city branding strategy in an effort to promote tourism through the Sparkling dance culture event in Surabaya. The research method uses a qualitative approach with interviews and documentation as data collection techniques. The results of the research are useful for scientific development in the field of communication, especially for city government and the tourism industry in practical terms. Keywords: City Branding, Sparkling Surabaya Dance, Tourism Communication.

Since 1993, popular music magazines in the USA such as Rolling Stone have reported the outbreak of an alternative music ‘revolution’, as bands such as Green Day (who trace their musical roots to late-1970s punk groups such as the Sex Pistols) achieve large-scale popular success. In September 1994 the Boston Globe newspaper devoted significant coverage to the free Green Day concert in Boston that was cancelled midway through as the crowd of 70,000 (comprised mostly of teenagers) threatened to overwhelm the security guards. The news media have focused their attention on the dancing known as ‘slamdancing’, or ‘moshing’, which is associated with this newly popular music. Slamdancing and moshing are two different, albeit similar, styles of dance in which participants (mostly men) violently hurl their bodies at one another in a dance area called a ‘pit’. The media attention paid to this music and its associated violent audience-behaviour paint them as emerging threats to public safety. On 10 September 1994, the Globe reported that ‘there have been severe injuries in mosh pits, where fans act out the hostile lyrics of groups such as Green Day’.

Problem statement. Among Kharkiv composers, one of the significant places is occupied by Igor Kovach (1924–2003), a representative of the Kharkiv School of composers and Ukrainian musical culture of the 20th century. His works include music and stage, orchestra, concert, song, choral and literary-musical compositions, music for theatre performances, music for films and TV films. The creative legacy of Igor Kostyantynovych Kovach has a close connection with the children’s audience; it includes both instrumental music for young performers and theatrical music, where children from performers become listener, among them the fairy-tale ballets “The Northern Tale” and “Bambi”. The children’s music by I. K. Kovach did not receive proper consideration except for short newspaper essays and magazine notes, M. Bevz’s (2007) article devoted to children’s piano music. Thus, the problem of holistic study of children’s stage music by Igor Kovach still remains open. Objectives. The present article is devoted to the identification of musicalthematic, timbre-texture, genre-stylistic features, with the help of which the multifaceted figurative world of the ballet “Bambi” is embodied. The aim and the tasks of this research – to reveal the specifics of the figurative world of the fairytale ballet “Bambi” and to identify the musical means by which it is embodied. The role of the orchestra is established, the means of thematic characteristics of the characters are traced, and the peculiarities of the musical language stipulated by the requirements of the chosen genre are noted. Methodology. To achieve the aim we have used special scientific methods: genre, stylistic, intonation-dramaturgical and compositional ones. The presentation of the main material. The music for the fairy-tale ballet “Bambi” belongs to two authors: Igor Kovach and his son Yuri. The new features inherent in the sound palette are manifested in the instrumentation, where along with the usual composition of a modern symphony orchestra there are saxophones, rhythm- and bass-guitars, drums, which due to their timbres bring a sharp taste of emotional and behavioural looseness. Introducing the qualities of non-academic tradition into the academic orchestra, the authors, on the one hand, use them according to their origin, on the other – turn them into an organic part of the symphonic score. By making a “concession” to pop music, simplifying harmonious language, freeing it from the extreme manifestations of expanded tonality, bringing it closer, on the one hand, to classical-romantic, on the other – to jazz, Igor Kovach showed his inherent sense of modernity, “address quality” of creativity. Conclusions. Thus, the fabulous multifaceted world of “Bambi” is revealed in the ballet owing to the bright thinking and language of the composer. The action of the ballet takes place against the background of bright genre sketches, which are as if immersed in the very density of life. This impression arises due to the dynamics of rhythms, colourful orchestration, and a variety of styles, addressed to the sound world of today. Generalized intonations of academic art organically coexist with the turns of song quality of different origins, dance quality, march quality, jazz improvisations, which was facilitated by the co-authorship with Yuri Kovach.

The Great Depression (1929–35) seriously affected the world economy but it was also a catalyst of the development of political awareness among the Malays. In conjunction with the growth of political awareness there was the rise of consumerism, which also was accelerated by the Great Depression. People were taught to appreciate a new way of life centring around luxury goods that became cheaper and reportedly within the reach of everyone, if one only tried. The machines of this heightened consumerism were commercials that were disseminated through the rapidly expanding mass media, mainly financed by these advertisements. The huge boom in entertainment businesses and publishing houses defied the logic that the downturn would have a negative impact on the entertainment and popular culture industries. Rather the contrary occurred. The number of magazines, journals and newspapers published in this period increased dramatically, and theatre and dance companies met with great success in their performances in the towns and on tours throughout the region.

How to read Danne-Virke - some hermeneutic ReflectionsBy Kim Arne PedersenIn this paper a new interpretation is put on Grundtvig’s philosophical ideas as represented in the magazine Danne-Virke (D) 1816-1819. Arguments are adduced against the generally accepted understanding of these ideas represented by William Michelsen’s interpretation of Grundtvig’s philosophy as an alternative to Kant’s transcendental idealism and the Absolute Idealism, completely different from these philosophical traditions. According to William Michelsen, Grundtvig stresses the common experience of time as being independent of man and emphasizes the empirical theory of knowledge and the ordinary non-scientific language. Thereby, Grundtvig opposes Kant’s transcendental understanding of time and the ego-orientated speculation of the Absolute Idealism. Grundtvig therefore understands human knowledge as limited by time and space. Grundtvig separates knowledge and faith and claims that the only possible human understanding of God has to be symbolic, because man is created in the image of God. William Michelsen stresses, that Grundtvig never accepts a scientific knowledge of God or proofs of the existence of God.The alternative interpretation in this paper uses a terminological method in reading Grundtvig’s /^-articles, examining the historical roots of his philosophical expressions. Although Grundtvig argues against scientific language, he combines pre-critical Wolffian descriptions of God’s aseite with the Absolute Idealism’s theories of the transcendental ego, founding time and space (cosmos) in God’s self-consciousness and founding the human knowledge in the principle of contradiction, understood as an expression of God’s Trinitarian self-consciousness or ego. Grundtvig is convinced that the limited human consciousness can only be explained by the consciousness of God, and he understands this idea as a variation of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. In this way, Grundtvig gives the human empirical knowledge a speculative foundation in God’s self-consciousness and uses this foundation in his attack on Kant’s transcendental understanding of time. Finally, this paper demonstrates that Grundtvig’s separation of knowledge and faith is not absolute. Faith involves a dimension of knowledge, and this knowledge has to develop from faith.

Impelled to seek relief from a “peccant chest” (L233) at the seaside, Christina Rossetti travelled to Hastings in December 1864, taking a carefully wrapped bundle of unfinished manuscript poetry with her. Throughout the winter until the following March, a series of letters to Cheyne Walk kept her brother Dante Gabriel abreast not only of her gradual recovery, but also of her efforts to complete her second book of poetry, two years after she had made a successful debut with Goblin Market. Shortly after her arrival, Rossetti reported that she was struggling to finish “The Prince's Progress,” the long narrative poem that was to lend its title to the new volume: [M]y Alchemist still shivers in the blank of mere possibility: but I have so far overcome my feelings and disregarded my nerves as to unloose the Prince, so that string wrapping paper may no longer bar his “progress.” Also I have computed pages of the altogether-unexceptionable, and find that they exceed 120: this cheers though not inebriates. Amongst your ousted I recognize sundry of my own favourites, which perhaps I may adroitly re-insert when publishing day comes round. . . . Meanwhile I have sent 3 (I hope) pot-boilers to Mac's Mag. (L233) In the past few decades, Rossetti's lifelong effort to see what critics have variously called “the divine spiritual essence of material beauty” (Harrison 56), the “moral and spiritual significance in physical signs” (Arseneau 279), and “the spiritual in the sensuous, the numinous in the material” (Kooistra, Illustration 38) has become a mainstay of Rossetti scholarship. This excerpt from her correspondence, in contrast, reveals her equally profound preoccupation with the materiality and economics of writing. Issues of textual ownership, authorial control, and literary marketability confronted Rossetti in the 1860s as her financial situation forced her to balance book publication with regular contributions to the periodical press, notably Macmillan's Magazine, the magazine owned by Rossetti's publisher Macmillan and Co., which carried more of her poetry than any other British periodical in the nineteenth century. These issues extended beyond Rossetti's personal dealings with Macmillan, however, shaping the material and interpretive consumption of her work throughout her career. This arc may be seen in the publication and adaptation history of one of her most popular poems, “A Birthday,” from its first appearance in Macmillan's Magazine in 1861 until her death. Over time, the poem underwent various types of mediation: reprints in gift books and poetry anthologies, musical adaptation, vocal performance, and quotations in fictional works. Finally, her reaction to the three parodies of her poems published in an 1888 comic magazine – particularly to “An Unexpected Pleasure,” the parody of “A Birthday” – demonstrate her perspective on the increased commodity value of the original poem.

De sa création en 1913 à sa fusion avec Vogue en 1936, le magazine américain Vanity Fair a pour vocation de parler de l’art contemporain européen et américain par de courts articles de vulgarisation, des photographies et des caricatures. Plusieurs domaines artistiques sont couverts : musique, danse, opéra, littérature, peinture, sculpture, arts graphiques, cinéma, photographie et mode. La France constitue tout à la fois le rêve, l’attraction et le modèle des Américains : elle reste omniprésente jusqu’au milieu des années 1920, puis cède la place aux artistes américains. Vanity Fair reflète plus particulièrement la vie culturelle à New York et à Paris, même si ses ambitions sont plus largement ouvertes sur l’Europe et les États-Unis. Dans la rubrique intitulée « Hall of Fame », il n’est pas rare de trouver un Français parmi les cinq ou six personnalités du mois. La France est présente davantage pour ses arts plastiques et sa littérature. Le domaine musical, plus réduit, illustre cependant plusieurs facettes : les Ballets russes de Diaghilev, les ballets de Serge Lifar, les ballets de Monte-Carlo, les nouvelles danses populaires (tango, matchiche), l’introduction du jazz, la chanson populaire, les lieux de divertissements. Quant à la musique savante, le Groupe des Six, Erik Satie et Jean Cocteau occupent une place de choix au début des années 1920, avec plusieurs de leurs articles publiés en français. Dans les pages de Vanity Fair, des critiques musicaux américains comme Virgil Thomson et Carl Van Vechten incitent les compositeurs à se débarrasser de l’influence européenne. John Alden Carpenter ouvre la voie avec The Birthday of the Infanta (1917) et Krazy Kat (1922), mais c’est Rhapsody in Blue de Gershwin (1924) qui donne le coup d’envoi à une musique américaine qui ne copie plus la musique européenne. À partir de là, la firme de piano Steinway livre une publicité différente dans chaque numéro qui illustre, par un peintre américain, une oeuvre musicale américaine.

This essay outlines the case for a new, scholarly edition of Beckett's critical writings, one that would be complete and with critical annotation. For the most part these texts (critical writings, tributes, in memoria and epigraphs) have been published in a range of places. As well as in the magazines, newspapers, books and special-issue publications in which pieces originally appeared, a number were collected in Disjecta (Calder 1983 & Grove 1984). This volume, however, is not exhaustive; it misses out a number of important texts (not least Proust) and contains some textual inaccuracies. Furthermore, Beckett's critical writings are currently not available from the UK publishers Faber and the Grove Press Centenary Edition of Beckett's works, the fourth volume of which contains a section entitled ‘Criticism’, presents only three works of criticism by Beckett (Proust, ‘Dante … Bruno . Vico . . Joyce’ and ‘Three Dialogues’). In this essay, we give a brief (and far from exhaustive) overview of the publication history of Beckett's non-fiction prose texts, before outlining some of the editorial challenges they pose. Although Beckett tended to be dismissive of these works, they form an integral part of his canon.

Grundtvig’s conception of Nature.By Kim Arne Pedersen.In this paper Grundtvig’s view on non-human nature and natural science is examined with the contemporary Danish discussion about theology and natural sciences (Viggo Mortensen) as a starting-point. It is argued against the use of Grundtvig’s ideas as a model for a dialogue between these fields of scholarship.Earlier researchers’ (C. I. Scharling) denial of Grundtvig having a view on nature is rejected, and Kaj Thaning’s conception of the autonomy of natural sciences in Nordens Mythologi 1832 is modified.Grundtvig’s conception of nature is defined as rooted in the Western European theological tradition’s Neo-platonic oriented cosmological interpretation of Genesis. Grundtvig takes up the understanding of natural objects as images of the invisible, spiritual world, but he shows his awareness of the rational, scientific interpretation of this tradition.The article points out 4 phases in Grundtvig’s elaboration of his view on nature after 1810, connected with the years after Kort Begreb af Verdens Krønike 1812, the magazine Danne-Virke 1816-1819, the years after Nordens Mythologi 1832 and the period from 1855 to 1860-1865. In the first phase Grundtvig rejects the independence of natural sciences as a tool of Antichrist in the final battle of the near future. In Danne-Virke nature is understood as a tool used in man’s symbolic knowledge of God. The main tool is man’s knowledge of himself because of his exceptional position inside creation as a creature with self-consciousness and language, and therefore the natural sciences are subordinated research on the history of man. Grundtvig’s thesis of femininity as representing nature and man’s body as a microcosm both in a rational, scientific and in a symbolic way is connected with this leading idea. In the years after Nordens Mythologi Grundtvig gives nature and natural sciences a much more independent position, but at the same time he stresses nature’s connection with man because of the state of man’s body as a microcosm. Grundtvig also attacks the Copernican picture of the universe.In the years after 1855 Grundtvig’s attitude towards natural science is sharpened. Apocalyptic motives return, and now Antichrist is connected with the rejection of God’s omnipotence and man’s exceptional position inside creation. As an alternative to the natural sciences Grundtvig emphasizes the interpretation of nature as a symbolic image of God.

The poetry of Vasily Filippov is difficult to interpret due to the peculiarities of constructing a lyrical plot and lyrical position, and proximity to outsider art. A detailed interpretation of the poet’s three poems from the 1980s shows how external impressions (visiting the Hermitage, reading the news, reading samizdat) are transformed into an understanding of the structure of new culture. Filippov shows a special interest in the matter of reality, in how the material side of events is arranged, which allows him to build the plot as a hidden dialogue and even a dispute about the ways of developing lyric poetry. The article proves that in one of the considered poems, the plot of a visit to the Hermitage and a meeting with another poet allowed to conceptualize technique and technology in art in a new way. In another poem, the story of the vandal destruction of Rembrandt’s «Danae» was transformed into an eschatological concept of St. Petersburg’s destiny for world culture. In the third poem, the experience of reading a typewritten magazine turns into the fact that even the use of this manuscript testifies to the chosenness of the poet. Thus, Filippov’s poetry was the poetry of metamorphosis, in which individual impressions from the surrounding world were interpreted as bodily signs of the poet’s mission, they were read as the necessary suffering of works of art as culture-framed body suffering, so that only the poet, as a participant in the metaphysical element, can save the material world. Such an ecological understanding of the mission of literature was actual in the 1980s, but in Filippov’s works it was dialogical not declarative.

On the evening of 14 July 2013, while living in Istanbul, I walked down Kumbaracı Yokuşu away from the sounds of protest to the city's contemporary art museum. As part of the Istanbul Jazz Festival lineup, the Istanbul Modern screened director Batu Akyol's documentary Türkiye'de Caz (Jazz in Turkey), which gathers interviews with Turkish jazz musicians intimate with the country's jazz scene from the 1940s onward. The emergence of a jazz ecology of musician-composers, entrepreneurs, jazz promoters, and collectors runs in tandem with the history of the Turkish Republic, beginning in the years leading up to and including World War I and gaining momentum in the 1930s and 1940s. The documentary does not present a hermetically sealed nationalist understanding of Turkish jazz, but rather affirms a vibrant celebration of the music. To date, Istanbul's arts organizations host international jazz summer festivals and yearlong jazz programs. There are jazz clubs, radio programs, and magazines that highlight international and local events. Turkish university music departments offer jazz studies and formal performance opportunities for musicians. But there are also informal venues, such as the streets, cafes, and bookstores. While out late in Istanbul when I lived there, I would frequently listen to a lone street musician stationed outside of Narmanlı Han playing “My Funny Valentine” on his trumpet. On more recent trips, I have come across a jazz band playing Dixieland tunes along İstiklal Avenue. This is all to say that Istanbul is a city where one can listen to jazz standards, Dixieland, bebop, cool, and fusion as well as take lindy hop dance lessons from a local group. Although Akyol's documentary uncovers a jazz soundtrack dating to the 1930s that is composed of personal stories of local musicians becoming jazzers, the post-Armistice period (1918–23) remains mute, mired in what I consider to be a standard version of the city's origin story of jazz. I want to consider the case of jazz in post-Armistice Istanbul to think about how master narratives erase some sounds and privilege others.

The very meaning of “culture” has gone through so many transformations over the last sixty years that it is necessary to take stock of developments in this field of cultural history before suggesting—with an eye to the promises and perils of earlier practices—what new possibilities might exist for the future of the field. The post-1945 period witnessed a powerful impulse to understand culture as something more pervasive than just literature and the arts—and as something more socially and politically reverberant than the shibboleth of “art for art's sake.” In 1957, at the very beginning of the modern practice of cultural history, Richard Hoggart'sThe Uses of Literacyfound the high and low hierarchies embedded in it. It focused on working-class culture (e.g., glossy magazines, films, “penny dreadfuls”), and on how reading was changing under the impact of mass media. By 1976, Raymond Williams needed to draw attention to the complexity of the wordculture, so extended had its purview become over the previous two decades. Linda Nochlin asked why they were no great women artists, and T. J. Clark, using a Marxist framework, sought to understand aesthetic modernism by interrogating the historic circumstances that had led to the breakdown of the academic system.The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt, came out in 1989. Its “models” for cultural history were the work of Michel Foucault, Clifford Geertz, Natalie Zemon Davis, E. P. Thompson, Hayden White, and Dominick LaCapra, and its “new approaches” came from Mary Ryan, Roger Chartier, Thomas Laqueur, and Randolph Starn. These scholars were legislators of discourse and narrative, of popular and working-class culture, of gender, epistemes, and thick description. With many other tendencies, often defined by their focus on theoretical explication and elaboration, these approaches had the effect of deterring scholars from reengaging with the traditional interests—even theraison d'etre—of cultural history, namely, art, architecture, theater, dance, music, and literature. This turning-away also affected the very composition of humanities and interpretive social science departments, which added many new subjects of study but, inevitably perhaps, let others wither away.

The article deals with literary and artistic life at the Kremenets Ukrainian Gymnasium named after Ivan Steshenko. On the basis of archival materials the teaching staff of the educational institution, which functioned in the territory of the Second Rzeczpospolita, was studied. The author notes that the main component of state formation in the years of the Ukrainian People's Republic was the formation and development of Ukrainian national education and culture. The first step in implementing the national school reform was the creation of conditions for the introduction of the Ukrainian language in high school and the opening of new Ukrainian gymnasia. Numerous documents stored in the State Archives of the Ternopil region (351, «Private Ukrainian Gymnasium of Joint Training in Kremenets»), reveal the activity of the educational institution and confirm its prominent role in the educational life of the Ukrainian population of Kremenets. The researcher emphasizes the pedagogical skills of the teaching staff of the Kremenets Ukrainian Gymnasium, and the understanding of the important role of education in the process of preserving national dignity and spirituality contributed to the formation of students' professional and intellectual development. In its activity, the Ukrainian gymnasium has repeatedly faced difficulties: lack of funding, lack of premises adapted properly to educational needs, lack of appropriate material and technical base, but it became the center of high culture and education. The content of the first issue of the handwritten literary and artistic magazine "Youth" was analyzed, on the basis of the memoirs of the student of the gymnasium and the editor of the almanac U. Samchuk, the names of the members of the literary circle were established. The main aspects of the cultural-artistic collaboration of the teaching staff and the students' collectives of the gymnasium with Prosvita Society are revealed. The musical activity of high school students was traced and the programs of concert performances were explored. Based on the memories of former students of the gymnasium, the repertoire of the theater circle under the direction of G. Berezovsky was considered, and the study of high school students at the School of National Dances V. Avramenko was analyzed. The names of well-known writers and public figures who studied in the Ukrainian gymnasium were established.

Community centres have been institutions acting like driving forces in the cultural life of villages. They were based on direct collaboration with intellectuals in each village: the priest, the teacher, the notary, the doctor. The cultural life of community centres was diverse and included various fields of activity aiming at multiple aspects in the life of each community. Generally, such activities were oriented towards solving economic issues, without limitation to them. It should be mentioned here the concern for public health, the control of epidemics, the rearing and education of children, the moral and intellectual development thereof.The community centre organizes various cultural activities where explanations are given to community, including people of all ages, about our historic past, thepresent time finding of paths and the future time for whose wellbeing they should a harmonious development. Starting from such points of interest, this work covers aspects of the community cultural life at Grăjdana, where the community centre established in 1934 played a major role in the development thereof, due to its achievements marking the period 1934-1940. A particularly significant contribution in the cultural becoming and development of the Grăjdana community was brought by the parish priest together with the village intellectuals. Thanks to their love for the people, they managed to invigorate the community in a short time by involving the villagers in various activities of spiritual, scientific, moral, artistic and recreational nature. According to the minutes executed on 3 July 1934, the initiative of creating a community centre was wholeheartedly approved, with the knowledge that it would be useful for the community. The following took part in the creation of the Grăjdana community centre: the priest Constantin Bunea, the teachers Ion Marinescu, Caliopia M. Rădulescu, Elisabeta Bunea and the notary Mihail Rădulescu. In addition to the creation of the centre, the people found out that the centre library was enhanced with all the parish library brochures and magazines that were made available, with new subscriptions for magazines, and that a people pharmacy was established. In time, the people would attend the meetings by categories of age and measures would be continuously taken so as to fulfil the articles of the Rules for the Functioning of Community Centres.In addition to the promotion of culture, the manager of “Regele Carol II“ Community Centre of Grăjdana together with active members bore in mind charitytoo, raising funds for building a monument dedicated to the heroes killed in the Great War, for helping orphans and the injured, for maintaining school canteens, for helping the locals get trained in the agricultural field. The good functioning of the Grăjdana Community Centre was successful also due to the collaboration with “Principele Carol“ Cultural Royal Foundation which approved and upheld the proposals submitted by the centre management, providing books, magazines, medicines, awards in cash and in kind, diplomas and decorations to encourage and select the cultural work. In addition to the local management continuous work and capacity, the envisaged goals were achieved also due to the kindness of distinguished persons, most of whom the Centre declared Honorary Members. One of them was Colonel I. Săndulescu, who made a number of donations, such as 8 plows and plowshares needed by the community. On the celebration of the Heroes’ Day, Regele Carol II Community Centre of Grăjdana conducted a number of activities with the participation of: widows, orphans, the war disabled, the Decorați (The War Decorated) and Foști Luptători (Former Fighters) associations, members of the centre council, commune authorities, schools led by teachers, premilitaries and villagers. The Grăjdana Church performed the Divine Liturgy praying in memorial of heroes. At the Heroes’ Monument blessings were delivered by the representatives of: the church, the mayor’s office, the forest range, war disabled and others. For its fruitful activity, in addition to the thanks received from various institutions such as the Ministry for Endowment of the Army, the Red Cross Society, Principele Carol Cultural Royal Foundation, the community centre of Grăjdana was awarded a prize in 1940 and called Model Community Centre together with other 50 community centres from throughout Greater Romania. The Centre managers were also rewarded with the Centenarul Regelui Carol I (Charles I Centenary) medal. In 1940, the Community Centre of Grăjdana achieved the following: fundraising for raising two school buildings, for opening three school canteens for the disadvantaged pupils, a people pharmacy store providing medicines to people at cost prices. At the Centre consulting room 261 vaccines were delivered against tuberculosis for children, as well as medical consultations free of charge. Poor families were helped with food supplies. The library was endowed with new books and magazines, a nursery of fruit trees, locust trees and grafted fruit trees and selected seeds was created. The Centre made donations to the army amounting to Lei 1882 and delivered courses on hygiene, religion, morality, household. Under the Community Centre patronage the following developed: Hora tinerilor (The Youth Round-Dance), Foștii luptători (Former Fighters) Association, Asociația Decoraților de războiu (The Association of the War Decorated), Post-Militari (Post-Militaries) Association, Crucea Roșie (Red Cross) Society. Although no solid material basis was available in the beginning, as the community was quite poor, the means that were employed allowed the development of love and respect for the historic past, keeping authenticity and the perpetuation of traditions.

On Grundtvig's View of ManBy William MichelsenIn this paper, read to the Annual Conference of the Grundtvig Society in January 1988, an answer is offered to the question: Did Grundtvig’s view of man remain unchanged from 1817 to his death? The answer is in the affirmative. The line of argument of the paper issues from Grundtvig’s essay “On Man in the World”, printed in the magazine “Danne-Virke” II, 1817, abstracting from it nine tenets, about which Grundtvig’s view remained the same, even after 1832, when he changed his attitude to the prevailing philosophy and theory of knowledge of the age, as far as he drew a distinction between faith and knowledge. As early as 1817 man is viewed both from a Christian and a non-Christian point of view. By virtue of his sensory organs man stands in a direct relationship with animals, and his historical development is a continuation of his separation from the animal kingdom. Nonetheless, man is created in God’s image, which means, that he is intended to develop towards increasing likeness with his Maker. And the archetypal likeness to God remains in man in spite of the Fall, which is confirmed both by the life of the individual and by history. As God is Truth, the Fall means a deviation from Truth provoked by Untruth, through which man is undone. Truth and Untruth are seen as spiritual verities to be found behind the physical reality of immediate perception and consequently behind life and death.What does Grundtvig mean by the word “spirit”? The essay offers two different answers to the question that are not in disagreement. In one place he says that the spirit consists of “mixed ideas perceived by the senses, but with a spiritual character,” that is they are exclusively manifest in the form of images. Elsewhere he holds that the Spirit is a living, forceful and active idea, which is solely perceived by consciousness, and consciousness is a product of man’s external and internal senses: feeling, vision and hearing. With the external senses we perceive the physical world and the physical part of ourselves. With the internal senses we become aware of the spiritual side to ourselves, our fellow-men and the world, in which we live.That man and the world were created, is to Grundtvig no matter of belief, but quite simply a question of recognition of reality: No man did create himself and even less the world in which we live. This epistemological realism is Grundtvig’s main proposition, which became clear to him in 1813 (as evidenced by the lecture ms. “On the Human Condition”). - Conversely the Fall presupposes the belief that man was created to become like God, and is consequently not his own master but under his Maker. That man should be able to work his own salvation when he has deviated from his divine purpose, is to Grundtvig quite plainly an impossibility.The only way in which man may be saved from complete annihilation is to Grundtvig by faith in the only human being who did not stray from his destiny to become like God. To choose this faith is to choose Truth rather than Untruth as one’s ideal, in one’s actions as well as in one’s external and internal perception of the world and oneself. But the heart of the matter is that man sees himself as an imperfect image of his Maker, a creature still far from having been fully developed.According to Grundtvig this view of man is only to be attained and developed through historical scholarship. There is no short-cut to this goal as for instance by way of a mystical experience, or what his contemporaries called a pure vision of Nature or an intellectual vision, even though this may be experienced in a fleeting moment. In this case one is deluded by illusions (“brilliant shades”). To make reason a starting-point for a view of man is also an error, since both the historical development and the development of the individual begin with feeling and ideation or imagination. The road to knowledge and understanding of man must, according to Grundtvig, be entirely different from the one followed sofar. It is understandable that Grundtvig holding such views was debarred from a university post, as they differed so much from contemporary thought. The definitive formulation of his view of man is, indeed, not to be found in the Danne-Virke of 1817, but in his introduction to “Mythology of the North” from 1832 where it is presented as the opposite of what his own day and posterity imagined a Christian view of man to be: “a divine experiment” with the aim of demonstrating how it was feasible for spirit and flesh to interpenetrate, in the process being clarified in a mutual consciousness, which Grundtvig called “divine”, because it is the superhuman Maker who intends to make an image of himself, but that “will require a thousand generations yet. ” According to Grundtvig, the main error of the view of man was that it made our descendants true copies of ourselves, consequently bringing evolution to a standstill.

Purpose The following paper details a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky, Associate Editor of Industrial Robot Journal, to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to the market while overseeing a company. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The interviewee is Dr William “Red” Whittaker, Fredkin Research Professor of Robotics, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU); CEO of Astrobotic Technology; and President of Workhorse Technologies. Dr Whittaker provides answers to questions regarding the pioneering experiences of some of his technological wonders in land, sea, air, underwater, underground and space. Findings As a child, Dr Whittaker built things and made them work and dreamed about space and robots. He has since then turned his dreams, and those of the world, into realities. Dr Whittaker’s formal education includes a BS degree in civil engineering from Princeton and MS and PhD degrees in civil engineering from CMU. In response to designing a robot to cleanup radioactive material at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant, Dr Whittaker established the Field Robotics Center (FRC) in 1983. He is also the founder of the National Robotics Engineering Center, an operating unit within CMU’s Robotics Institute (RI), the world’s largest robotics research and development organization. Dr Whittaker has developed more than 60 robots, breaking new ground in autonomous vehicles, field robotics, space exploration, mining and agriculture. Dr Whittaker’s research addresses computer architectures for robots, modeling and planning for non-repetitive tasks, complex problems of objective sensing in random and dynamic environments and integration of complete robot systems. His current focus is Astrobotic Technology, a CMU spin-off firm that is developing space robotics technology to support planetary missions. Dr Whittaker is competing for the US$20m Google Lunar XPRIZE for privately landing a robot on the Moon. Originality/value Dr Whittaker coined the term “field robotics” to describe his research that centers on robots in unconstrained, uncontrived settings, typically outdoors and in the full range of operational and environmental conditions: robotics in the “natural” world. The Field Robotics Center has been one of the most successful initiatives within the entire robotics industry. As the Father of Field Robotics, Dr Whittaker has pioneered locomotion technologies, navigation and route-planning methods and advanced sensing systems. He has directed over US$100m worth of research programs and spearheaded several world-class robotic explorations and operations with significant outreach, education and technology commercializations. His ground vehicles have driven thousands of autonomous miles. Dr Whittaker won DARPA’s US$2m Urban Challenge. His Humvees finished second and third in the 2005 DARPA’s Grand race Challenge desert race. Other robot projects have included: Dante II, a walking robot that explored an active volcano; Nomad, which searched for meteorites in Antarctica; and Tugbot, which surveyed a 1,800-acre area of Nevada for buried hazards. Dr Whittaker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and served on the National Academy of Sciences Space Studies Board. Dr Whittaker received the Alan Newell Medal for Research Excellence. He received Carnegie Mellon’s Teare Award for Teaching Excellence. He received the Joseph Engelberger Award for Outstanding Achievement in Robotics, the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s inaugural Feigenbaum Prize for his contributions to machine intelligence, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Simon Ramo Medal, the American Society of Civil Engineers Columbia Medal, the Antarctic Service Medal and the American Spirit Honor Medal. Science Digest named Dr Whittaker one of the top 100 US innovators for his work in robotics. He has been recognized by Aviation Week & Space Technology and Design News magazines for outstanding achievement. Fortune named him a “Hero of US Manufacturing”. Dr Whittaker has advised 26 PhD students, has 16 patents and has authored over 200 publications. Dr Whittaker’s vision is to drive nanobiologics technology to fulfillment and create nanorobotic agents for enterprise on Earth and beyond (Figure 1).

ABSTRACT In order to analyze the relationships between dance and education from a perspective not limited to teaching the artistic practice, this study examined articles on dance published in the cultural magazine Bravo! (1997 to 2013). From the categorization of three major themes - classical ballet and its disciplinary content; ethnic and popular aspects of Brazilian contemporary dance; and the building of an audience for dance - an analysis of the material verified the emergence of a pedagogical bias in the magazine’s discourse, expressed in a proliferation of imperatives aimed at educating the dance audience.

"This article deals with the translation of V.Brusov’s five poems from the literary cycle “Dance of Death” in the book “The Dreams of the Mankind”, translated into English by Alex Cigale. Judging by the subtitle the author created them according to the motives of the German artist Hans Golbane J.’s paintings “The images of Death”. The translation first appeared in “Danse Macabre International” magazine. Of course, Brusov is a very distinctive poet but these translations fully reflect all the power of the poet’s intention."

In the third edition of post(s), none of the texts is necessarily what it seems, as post(s) is neither a magazine specialized in music, dance, literature ethnographic methods nor art. But the themes that we present in this edition touch on those and other areas, finding loopholes to generate radically current interdisciplinary reflections. These are texts that look beyond disciplinary frames, that explore without taking steps in worlds already constituted; rather they aim to compose new relationships and build senses where disciplines can intertwine and articulate other interpretative possibilities. The following text provides a brief introduction to this edition.

Many years ago when Somatics magazine was young, it occurred to me that it would be valuable to collect and publish research article references in Somatics magazine that were relevant to the different somatics disciplines to encourage the development of the field. There were next to no studies devoted to Somatics itself, but there were many studies devoted to the elements of somatic practices. Somatics is a multidisciplinary field. It builds on the research findings from many fields, such as anatomy, physiology, neurophysiology, psychology, dance, biomechanics, and education. The references are selected to be suggestive to the interested researcher and practitioner for their purposes and of the many possible research avenues that are yet to be explored. I have collected these research references for more than four decades. I worked originally with Psychological Abstracts, then PsychInfo, and finally, PubMed. Over that time there has been more research done on the somatic disciplines themselves. The greatest amount of research has been done on yoga (the oldest and largest of the somatic disciplines) and yoga therapy. These studies are examples of the research that can be done with the other somatics disciplines as well. We are in an era that appreciates evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence. This is evidence. These research articles are selected according to the following criteria: The article combines both body and mind either in its research design or theoretical perspective; the research design incorporates convergent measures—that is, it includes physiological, behavioral, and psychological measures; subjective and objective measures; and the research focuses on the whole organism (human) from a somatic perspective—that is, the effect of a body therapy on a psychological state. Topics addressed include biofeedback, body psychotherapy, consciousness states, electrophysiology, kinesiology, mind and body, motor processes, neural basis of motor control, neuroscience, posture and emotion, psychophysiology, and yoga/yoga therapy.

This essay reviews Dane S. Claussen's book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Media: Magazines & Higher Education (2004). In response to widespread concern about the state of intellectualism in the United States since George W. Bush's election as President of the United States, Claussen seeks to answer whether or not magazine coverage of higher education has contributed or reflected anti-intellectualism. Clausson’s research is noteworthy despite two significant weaknesses: the book’s disjunctive formal structure and questionable methodology.

Prior to the introduction of websites and social media, professional dance criticism circulated through print publications: newspapers, magazines, and journals. This article examines the current proliferation of screens as platforms for criticism and how they—mobile devices, laptops, televisions, and computers—shift the frameworks that writers and readerships use to engage with dance. I use the concept of a choreographic apparatus to show how digital technologies generate symbiotic relationships between online contexts and contemporary performance. By focusing on three sites—thINKingDANCE, On the Boards TV, and Amara Tabor-Smith’s House/Full of Black Women—I analyze how these platforms challenge widespread assumptions about the disappearance of dance critics.

In accordancevwith the Regulationvof the Minister ofvNational Education Number 62 of 2014 concerning Extracurricular, it states that the development of the potentialvof students asvreferred to invthe goals ofvnational educationvcan bevrealized through extracurricular activities. Extracurricular deals with student interests outside of their formal fields. As in SMADA Lamongan, there are several extracurricular activities including; recitation of the Koran, PMR, pencak silat, flag raising troops, scholarly romance magazines, creative working groups, cooperatives, choirs, theater, drum bands, dance, information technology etc. This clearly has an impact on the students who follow. Extracurricular deals with student interests outside of their formal fields. As in SMADA Lamongan, there are several extracurricular activities including; recitation of the Koran, PMR, pencak silat, flag raising troops, scholarly romance magazines, creative working groups, cooperatives, choirs, theater, drum bands, dance, information technology etc. This clearly has an impact on the students who follow. For this reason, extracurricular activities are also needed in improving the competence of graduates which includesvthree dimensions, namely the attitude dimension, the dimension ofvknowledge and the dimension of skills. Students cannot apply the knowledge they have acquired in class to their daily lives.

In Finnish popular music, the adoption of electronic musical instruments, such as synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers, samplers, computers and musical software progressed slowly and was a complicated process until the early 1990s. Compared with Swedish, German and British pop and rock the electronic instruments remained longer in the margins of rock and pop rock. Regardless of the breakthrough of synths and drum machines in certain styles, such as progressive rock, funk and disco, synth pop and hip hop, the majority of Finnish bands and artists shunned synthesizers until the mid-1980s. Only after the waves of hip hop, house, techno and euro dance in the late 1980s and early 1990s, synthesizers were widely accepted as ‘normal’ and equal rock instruments. In this article, I focus on the adoption of music technology among Finnish rock and pop musicians of the 1970s and 1980s. I have interviewed three electronic musicians from three different generations. Esa Kotilainen (b. 1946), Pekka Tolonen (b.1957) and Tommi Lindell (b.1966) have all witnessed several turns in the emergence of electronic musical instruments. They have also experienced various changes in lieu the accessibility and acceptability of synthesizers. In Finland, they are known as the early adopters and intensive users of the musical electronics. In the first section of the article I ask, when and how electronic musical instruments became more popular in Finland and how they were adopted and used in progressive rock, new wave, synth pop, goth rock and mainstream pop. I also frame an overview on the adoption of synthesizers in Finnish pop and rock. The section also parallels the developments with Finnish schlager and disco, where synthesizers were intensively used by a handful of composers and producers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this section, I primarily utilized published interviews and magazine articles supplemented with a small selection of musical release reviews and synthesizer advertisements. The next three sections follow my observations and conclusions which primarily stem from the interviews with three above-mentioned musicians. I also utilize some additional interviews with other musicians. I inquired how the interviewees encountered electronic instruments, how they have used their instruments and how the early adoption of synthesizers has contributed to their understanding of sound and music. Furthermore, we discussed on the impact of the electronic instruments on their musicianship, career and the regeneration of their professional image. Regarding the ‘synthesizer turns’ in the history of Finnish pop and rock I invited the interviewees to recall the response displayed by their fellow musicians, producers and the audience. In the concluding section, I sum up my observations. One of them is that in Finland electronic musical instruments seem to gain in popularity in jumps which coincide not only with international pop trends but also with some major technological developments and the waves of marketing. This is not unexpected by any means, but it makes an interesting case in Finland. While the more advanced and more affordable synthesizers of the period 1980–83 marked the final breakthrough of electronic instruments in Western pop and rock, in Finland only a couple of tens of musicians adopted synthesizers as their primary instruments. Furthermore, in Finland only a handful of fully or almost fully electronic bands emerged in the early 1980s. All of them remained short-lived. Only some of the most popular teeny pop bands of the early and mid-1980s adopted synthesizers as their main keyboards. The accelerated marketing cycles of synthesizers provoked suspicion among some Finnish musicians; synthesizers could be left aside as novelty gimmicks and earmarks of a momentary trend. One reason for denouncing the ‘synths’ in the 1980s mainstream rock may have been the developing ‘Suomi-rock’ (Finnish rock), a down-to-earth, nationally and locally rooted style which got a heavy dose of influence from Finnish folk and the long tradition of Finnish schlager. One extra reason for a rocker in keeping off synthesizers was the extensive use of electronic musical instruments in Finnish light pop and schlager in the early 1980s. However, in the late 1980s it became audible that synthesizers had survived and welcomed in the margins of rock, pop and especially within the emerging new styles of electronic dance music.

This is a magazine that plays with the push/pull characteristics of the Web. We're writing, investigating, analysing, critiquing the meeting of media and culture. These are large concepts: we're working through the various refractive powers that media forms have on culture. Perceiving through a particular medium mediates the way in which we conceptualise the world; the approach we take to the transnational, nation, state, city, suburb, neighbourhood, etc. We are, of course, aware that any particular medium does not overdetermine actions in some transparent McLuhanesque way; rather we're working through the cultural power of media forms to conceptualise and to organise (or disorganise) our world-views. Naturally, we're operating from a place and space within these debates about the organisation of culture. This journal is arising from an institution within an institution, and thus is informed by certain approaches. It is an initiative of the Media and Cultural Studies Centre, a research unit in the Department of English at the University of Queensland, Australia. Although who writes for the journal may change, it is starting from a history of cultural studies, a postgraduate subject entitled "New Media Culture", and students and staff who are genuinely interested in embarking upon critical analyses of media and culture. You'll notice patterns in the writing, then, that indicate these origins to the cognoscenti. Each issue is organised around a theme. The first issue's theme is particularly appropriate for a birthing process, and the move from the apparent simplicity of beginnings to the complexity of sustaining life. We're looking at the concept of "New", and we're approaching it from a variety of angles and avenues. Most of the essays are short interventions. One essay for each issue will engage with the concept for a little bit longer. A couple of warning notes may be necessary for your first read. The journal has a slash in the title, which may be just another graphic pirouette, or it may be some awkward bow to the Internet aesthetic of cursors and schizophrenia. Without grounding its meaning (the dance of meaning is important to us) the slash "/" is to highlight that this is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic. It is attempting to engage with the 'popular', and integrate the work of 'scholarship' in media and cultural studies into our critical work. We take seriously the need to move ideas outward, so that our cultural debates may have some resonance with wider political and cultural interests. Also, in the interests of pulling, we want response and replies. Each issue will be followed in some way by a responding issue that integrates the variety of interventions received. Jump in. Yes, we have provided a pattern, but feel free to respond to our pattern. You can even respond by submitting for future issues. Of course, you can decide not to respond to us; but if you find something useful acknowledge us and provide links to our work -- we'll provide the same courtesy for what intrigues us. It is the courtesy of the gift of information, which through a slash becomes a form of knowledge. It's tempting to conclude with something that derives from the pure pop of television: "Engage" -- but we wouldn't do that. You make the links. Citation reference for this article MLA style: P. David Marshall. "Introduction to M/C." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.1 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php>. Chicago style: P. David Marshall, "Introduction to M/C," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 1 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: P. David Marshall. (1998) Introduction to M/C. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9807/intro.php> ([your date of access]).

All critics declare not only their judgment of the work but also their claim to the right to talk about it and judge it. In short, they take part in a struggle for the monopoly of legitimate discourse about the work of art, and consequently in the production of the value of the work of art. (Pierre Bourdieu 36). As it becomes blindingly obvious that ‘cultural production’, including the cinema, now underpins an economy every bit as brutal in its nascent state as the Industrial Revolution was for its victims 200 years ago, both critique and cinephilia seem faded and useless to me. (Meaghan Morris 700). The music’s loud, the lights are low. I’m at a party and somebody’s shouting at me. “How many films do you see every week?” “Do you really get in for free?” “So what should I see next Saturday night?” These are the questions that shape the small talk of my life. After seven years of reviewing movies you’d think I’d have ready answers and sparkling rehearsed tip-offs to scatter at the slightest quiver of interest. And yet I feel anxious when I’m asked to predict some stranger’s enjoyment – their 15-odd bucks worth of dark velvet pleasure. Who am I to say what they’ll enjoy? Who am I to judge what’s worthwhile? As editor of the film pages of The Big Issue magazine (Australian edition), I make such value judgments every day, sifting through hundreds of press releases, invitations and interview offers. I choose just three films and three DVDs to be reviewed each fortnight, and one film to form the subject of a feature article or interview. The film pages are a very small part of an independent magazine that exists to provide an income for the homeless and long-term unemployed people who sell it on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth. And no, homeless people don’t go to the movies very often but our relatively educated and affluent city-dwelling readers do. The letters page of the magazine suggests that readers’ favourite pages are the Vendor Portraits – the extraordinary and sobering photographs and life stories of the people who are out there on the streets selling the magazine. Yet the editorial policy is to maintain a certain lightness of touch amidst the serious business. Thus, the entertainment pages (music, books, film, TV and humour) have no specific social justice agenda. But if there’s a new Australian film out there that deals with the topic of homelessness, it seems imperative to at least consider the story. Rather than offering in-depth analysis of particular films and the ways I go about judging them, the following diary excerpts instead offer a sketch of the practical process of editorial decision-making. Why review this film and not that one? Why interview this actor or that film director? And how do these choices fit within the broad goals of a social justice publication? Created randomly, from a quick scan of the last twelve months, the diary is a scribbled attempt to justify, or in Bourdieu’s terms, “legitimate” the critical role I play, and to try and explain how that role can never be fully defined by an aesthetic that is divorced from social and political realities. August 2004 My editor calls me and asks if I’ve seen Tom White, the new low-budget Australian film by Alkinos Tsilimidos. I have, and I hated it. Starring Colin Friels, the film follows the journey of a middle-aged middle-class man who walks out of his life and onto the streets. It’s a grimy, frustrating film, supported by only the barest bones of narrative. I was bored and infuriated by the central character, and I know it’s the kind of under-developed story that’s keeping Australian audiences away from our own films. And yet … it’s a local film that actually dares to tackle issues of homelessness and mental illness, and it’s a story that presents a truth about homelessness that’s borne out by many of our vendors: that any one of us could, except by the grace of God or luck, find ourselves sleeping rough. My editor wants me to interview Colin Friels, who will appear on the cover of the magazine. I don’t want to touch the film, and I prefer interviewing people whose work genuinely interests and excites me. But there are other factors to be considered. The film’s exhibitor, Palace Films, is offering to hold charity screenings for our benefit, and they are regular advertising supporters of The Big Issue. My editor, a passionate and informed film lover himself, understands the quandary. We are in no way beholden to Palace, he assures me, and we can tread the fine line with this film, using it to highlight the important issues at hand, without necessarily recommending the film to audiences. It’s tricky and uncomfortable; a simple example of the way in which political and aesthetic values do not always dance so gracefully together. Nevertheless, I find a way to write the story without dishonesty. September 2004 There’s no denying the pleasure of writing (or reading) a scathing film review that leaves you in stitches of laughter over the dismembered corpse of a bad movie. But when space is limited, I’d rather choose the best three films every fortnight for review and recommendation. In an ideal world I’d attend every preview and take my pick. They’d be an excitingly diverse mix. Say, one provocative documentary (maybe Mike Moore or Errol Morris), one big-budget event movie (from the likes of Scorsese or Tarantino), and one local or art-house gem. In the real world, it’s a scramble for deadlines. Time is short and some of the best films only screen in one or two states, making it impossible for us to cover them for our national audience. Nevertheless, we do our best to keep the mix as interesting and timely as possible. For our second edition this month I review the brilliant documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), while I send other reviewers to rate Spielberg’s The Terminal (only one and a half stars out of five), and Cate Shortland’s captivating debut Australian feature Somersault (four stars). For the DVD review page we look at a boxed set of The Adventures of Tintin, together with the strange sombre drama House of Sand and Fog (Vadim Perelman), and the gripping documentary One Day in September (Kevin MacDonald) about the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games. As editor, I try to match up films with the writers who’ll best appreciate them. With a 200-word limit we know that we’re humble ‘reviewers’ rather than lofty ‘critics’, and that we can only offer the briefest subjective response to a work. Yet the goal remains to be entertaining and fair, and to try and evaluate films on their own terms. Is this particular movie an original and effective example of the schlocky teen horror thriller? If so, let’s give it the thumbs up. Is this ‘worthy’ anti-globalisation documentary just a boring preachy sermon with bad hand-held camera work? Then we say so. For our film feature article this edition, I write up an interview with Italian director Luigi Falorni, whose simple little film The Weeping Camel has been reducing audiences to tears. It’s a strange quiet film, a ‘narrative documentary’ set in the Gobi desert, about a mother camel that refuses to give milk to her newborn baby. There’s nothing political or radical about it. It’s just beautiful and interesting and odd. And that’s enough to make it worthy of attention. November 2004 When we choose to do a ‘celebrity’ cover, we find pretty people with serious minds and interesting causes. This month two gorgeous film stars, Natalie Portman and Gael Garcia Bernal find their way onto our covers. Portman’s promoting the quirky coming of age film, Garden State (Zach Braff), but the story we run focuses mainly on her status as ambassador for the Foundation of International Community Assistance (FINCA), which offers loans to deprived women to help them start their own businesses. Gabriel Garcia Bernal, the Mexican star of Walter Salle’s The Motorcycle Diaries appears on our cover and talks about his role as the young Che Guevara, the ultimate idealist and symbol of rebellion. We hope this appeals to those radicals who are prepared to stop in the street, speak to a homeless person, and shell out four dollars for an independent magazine – and also to all those shallow people who want to see more pictures of the hot-eyed Latin lad. April 2005 Three Dollars is Robert Connelly’s adaptation of Elliot Perlman’s best-selling novel about economic rationalism and its effect on an average Australian family. I loved the book, and the film isn’t bad either, despite some unevenness in the script and performances. I interview Frances O’Connor, who plays opposite David Wenham as his depressed underemployed wife. O’Connor makes a beautiful cover-girl, and talks about the seemingly universal experience of depression. We run the interview alongside one with Connelly, who knows just how to pitch his film to an audience interested in homelessness. He gives great quotes about John Howard’s heartless Australia, and the way we’ve become an economy rather than a society. It’s almost too easy. In the reviews section of the magazine we pan two other Australian films, Paul Cox’s Human Touch, and the Jimeoin comedy-vehicle The Extra. I’d rather ignore bad Australian films and focus on good films from elsewhere, or big-budget stinkers that need to be brought down a peg. But I’d lined up reviews for these local ones, expecting them to be good, and so we run with the negativity. Some films are practically critic-proof, but small niche films, like most Australian titles, aren’t among these Teflon giants. As Joel Pearlman, Managing Director of Roadshow Films has said, “There are certain types of films that are somewhat critic-proof. They’ve either got a built-in audience, are part of a successful franchise, like The Matrix or Bond films, or have a popular star. It’s films without the multimillion-dollar ad campaigns and the big names where critics are far more influential” ( Pearlman in Bolles 19). Sometimes I’m glad that I’m just a small fish in the film critic pond, and that my bad reviews can’t really destroy someone’s livelihood. It’s well known that a caning from reviewers like David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz (ABC, At the Movies), or the Melbourne Age’s Jim Schembri can practically destroy the prospects of a small local film, and I’m not sure I have the bravery or conviction of the value of my own tastes to bear such responsibility. Admittedly, that’s just gutless tender-heartedness for, as reviewers, our responsibility is to the audience not to the filmmaker. But when you’ve met with cash-strapped filmmakers, and heard their stories and their struggles, it’s sometimes hard to put personal compassion aside and see the film as the punter will. But you must. August 2005 It’s a busy time with the Melbourne International Film Festival just finishing up. Hordes of film directors accompany their films to the festival, promoting them here ahead of a later national release schedule, and making themselves available for rare face-to face interviews. This year I find a bunch of goodies that seem like they were tailor-made for our readership. There are winning local films like Sarah Watt’s life-affirming debut Look Both Ways; and Rowan Woods’ gritty addiction-drama Little Fish. There’s my personal favourite, Bahman Ghobadi’s stunning and devastating Kurdish/Iranian feature Turtles Can Fly; and Avi Lewis’s inspiring documentary The Take, about Argentine factory workers who unite to revive their bankrupt workplaces. It’s when I see films like this, and get to talk to the people who bring them into existence, that I realize how much I value writing about films for a publication that doesn’t exist just to make a profit or fill space between advertisements. As the great American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has eloquently argued, most of the worldwide media coverage concerning film is merely a variation on the ‘corporate stories’ that film studios feed us as part of their advertising. To be able to provide some small resistance to that juggernaut is a wonderful privilege. I love to be lost in the dark, studying films frame by frame, and with reference only to some magical internal universe of ‘cinema’ and its endless references to itself. But as the real world outside falls apart, such airless cinephilia feels just plain wrong. As a writer whose subject is films, what I’m compelled to do is to come out of the cinema and try to use my words to convey the best of what I’ve seen to my friends and readers, pointing them towards small treasures they may have overlooked amidst the hype. So maybe I’m not a ‘pure’ critic, and maybe there’s no shame in that. The films I’ll gravitate towards share an almost indefinable quality – to use Jauss’s phrase, they reconstruct and expand my “horizon of expectation” (28). Sometimes these films are overtly committed to a cause, but often they’re just beautiful and strange and fresh. Always they expand me, open me, make me feel that there’s more to the world than expected, and make me want more too – more information, more freedom, more compassion, more equality, more beauty. And, after all these years in the dark, I still want more films like that. Endnotes As of August 2005, the role of DVD editor of The Big Issue has been filled by Anthony Morris. According the latest Morgan Poll, readers of The Big Issue are likely to be young (18-39), urban, educated, and affluent professionals. Current readership is estimated at 144,000 fortnightly and growing. References Bolles, Scott. “The Critics.” Sunday Life. The Age 10 Jul. 2005: 19. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 1982. Morris, Meaghan. “On Going to Bed Early: Once Upon a Time in America.” Meanjin 4 (1998): 700. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Junket Bonds.” Chicago Reader Movie Review (2000). 2 Sept. 2005 http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/2000/1000/00117.html>. The Big Issue Australia. http://www.bigissue.org.au/> 10 Oct. 2005. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Siemienowicz, Rochelle. "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience." M/C Journal 8.5 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>. APA Style Siemienowicz, R. (Oct. 2005) "Diary of a Film Reviewer: Intimate Reflections on Writing about the Screen for a Popular Audience," M/C Journal, 8(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0510/01-siemienowicz.php>.

IntroductionClowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this paper, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing performances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fiction, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.Diminutive CatastropheI have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small “c.” In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if anything he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus; Stradda). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of "failing better” in the vein of Charles Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala; Coover; Salisbury)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big “C” Catastrophes? Creation and CatastropheTo wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catastrophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological “completeness” of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by “disaster” which changed but ultimately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of species wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance:Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into nothingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 109–10)For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a powerful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evolutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreciated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to western thought which privileges progression—and here evolution is a prime example—Hindu conceptualisation appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdependency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge.To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regeneration through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Territory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role.In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, projections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu time scale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different?Turning the Lens onto the Small-ScaleSmall-scale, clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incompetence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with the virtuosic delicacy—take Charles Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nail-bones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of decorum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” (87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to continue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this continuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongruous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pursuit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage.I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his persona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he intervened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory.Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the 20th century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charles Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri:They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (496) Clowning as a State of Mind/ConsciousnessAnother perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is “to keep on trying even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better’” (Le Feuvre 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradictory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: “Failure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power” (Werry & O’Gorman 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theatrical clowning pivots on “finding that basic state of vulnerability and allowing the audience to exist in that state with you” (Butler 64). Butler argues that this “state of clowning” is “a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion” (ibid). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indication of this intricate lineage:Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch's universe to the world of fairy tales. “History invades it like trouble, like summer flies [...] The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe [...] The whole is nothing but children's play”. (Biro 68)Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clownish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Dancing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions side-by-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None are able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.Becoming “Inhuman” or SacrificialA variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the “inhuman” rights of clowns. His premise matches a “grotesque attachment to the world of things” to a clown’s existence that is “victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality” (133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms:Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)The play on a clown’s “undead” propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend "man’s inhumanity to man.” It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and visa versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice.There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder (1948), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns:Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real. (47)Miller’s fictional Auguste’s “special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself” (29). With overtones of a Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes “wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens” (40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imagination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and...—the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction.With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: “Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world” (505).Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devastation. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small “c” catastrophes. They are known otherwise as clowns.ReferencesBala, Michael. “The Clown.” Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche 4.1 (2010): 50–71.Bausch, Pina. Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre, 1977.Big Apple Circus. Circopedia. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.circopedia.org/index.php/Main_Page›.Biro, Yvette. “Heartbreaking Fragments, Magnificent Whole: Pina Bausch’s New Minimyths.” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 20.2 (1998): 68–72.Butler, Lauren. “Everything Seemed New: Clown as Embodied Critical Pedagogy.” Theatre Topics 22.1 (2012): 63–72.Coover, Robert. “Tears of a Clown.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 42.1 (2000): 81–83.Dancing Dreams. Dirs. Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. First Run Features, 2010.Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. “Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns.” SubStance 39.2 (2010): 131–41.Foucault, Michel. “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as Practice of Freedom.” Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997. 281–302. Ghosh, Oroon. The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India. New York: New American Library, 1965.Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ’65. Dir. Pina Bausch. Paris: L’Arche Editeur, 2007.Le Feuvre, Lisa. “Introduction.” Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art. Ed. Lisa Le Feuvre. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2010. 12–21.McKnight, Jesse H. “Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.3–4 (2008): 493–506.Miller, Henry. The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder. New York: New Directions Books, 1974.Raoul. Dir. James Thiérrée. Regal Theatre, Perth, 2012.Salisbury, Laura. “Beside Oneself Beckett, Comic Tremor and Solicitude.” Parallax 11.4 (2005): 81–92.Stradda. Stradda: Le Magazine de la Creation hors les Murs. 27 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.horslesmurs.fr/-Decouvrez-le-magazine-.html›.Weitz, Eric. “Failure as Success: On Clowns and Laughing Bodies.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 79–87.Werry, Margaret, and Róisín O'Gorman. “The Anatomy of Failure: An Inventory.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 17.1 (2012): 105–10.

Until the 1980s research into computer technology was developing outside of a context of media culture. Until the 1970s the computer was seen as a highly effective calculator and a tool for the use in government, military and economic life. Its popular image from the 1940s to 1950s was that of a calculator. At that time the computer was a large machine which only white lab-coated engineers could understand. The computer was studied as a technical instrument, not from the viewpoint of the user. The peculiar communication between the user -- engineers at this point -- and the machine was described in caricatures like those in Electric Media (Brown & Marks 100). Many comics handled the issue of understanding. In one cartoon one engineer asks another: "Do you ever feel that it is trying to tell us something?" And in Robert Sherman Townes's novel "Problem of Emmy", the computer (Emmy) acts out of control and prints the words: "WHO AM I WHO AM I WHO AM I?". In these examples the man-machine relationship was taken under consideration, but the attitude towards the relationship was that of a master-tool way. The user was pronouncedly in control and the machine just a passive tool. After the 1980s the image of the computer was turning into that of a playful toy and a game machine, thanks to the game houses' and marketing departments' efforts. Suddenly the player was playing with the computer, and even fairly often got beaten by it. That definitely raises feelings towards the machine! The playing situation was so intensive that the player did not often pay any attention to the interface, and the roles were not so clear anymore. This was a step towards the idea of natural communication between human and machine. Later science fiction influenced depictions of virtual reality, and haptic interfaces mediated the ideas into reality. In this paper I will discuss the man-machine relationship from the viewpoint of interface design. My expertise is in electronic games, and thus I will use examples from the game industry. This paper is a sidetrack of RAID -- Research of Adaptive User Interface Design, which was going on at the University of Lapland, Finland in 1995-1999. The RAID project was about research into adaptive interface design from the viewpoint of media archaeology, electronic games, toys and media art. Early Visions Already in the 1960s, MIT professor J.C.R. Licklider wrote about man-machine symbiosis. He saw that "man machine symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers". He believed that it would lead to a new kind of cooperative partnership between man and machine (9). Licklider's visions are important, because the relationship between man and machine was seen generally differently at those days. At the time of the first mainframe computers in the 1940s, man and machine were seen as separate entities from the viewpoint of data processing. The operator put in data to the machine, which processed it by its own language which only the machine and very few engineers could understand. Fear -- a fearful affection -- has affected the development of machines and the idea of man-machine relationships throughout the decades. One reason for this is that the ordinary person had no contact to the computer. That has led to fears that when cooperating with the machine, the user will become enslaved by it, or sucked into it, as in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). The machine captivates its user's body, punishes it and makes its movement impossible at the end. Or the machine will keep the body's freedom, but adapt its functions to work by the automatic rhythm: the human body will be subordinated to the machine or made a part of it. What Is the Interface? In reality there still is a mediator between the user and the machine: the interface. It is a connector -- a boundary surface -- that enables the user to control the machine. There has been no doubt who is in charge of whom, but the public image of the machine is changing from "computer as a tool" to "computer as an entertainment medium". That is also changing the somewhat fearful relationship to the computer, because such applications place the player much more intensively immersed in the game world. The machine as a tool does not lose its meaning but its functionality and usability are being developed towards more entertainment-like attributes. The interface is an environment and a structural system that consists of the physical machine, a virtual programming environment, and the user. The system becomes perfect when all its parts will unite as a functional, interactive whole. Significant thresholds will arise through the hapticity of the interface, on one hand questioning the bodily relationship between user and machine and on the other hand creating new ways of being with the machine. New haptic (wearable computing) and spatial (sensors in a reactive space) interfaces raise the question of man-machine symbiosis from a new perspective. Interfaces in a Game World In games the man-machine relationship is seen with much less emotion than when using medical applications, for example. The strength of electronic games is in the goal-oriented interaction. The passivity of older machines has been replaced by the information platform where the player's actions have an immediate effect in the virtual world. The player is already surrounded by the computer: at home sitting by the computer holding a joystick and in the arcades sometimes sitting inside the computer or even being tied up with the computer (as in gyroscope VR applications). The symbiosis in game environments is essential and simple. During the 1980s and 1990s a lot of different virtual reality gear variants were developed in the "VR boom". Some systems were more or less masked arcade game machines that did not offer any real virtuality. Virtuality was seen as a new way of working with a machine, but most of the applications did not support the idea far enough. Neither did the developers pay attention to interface design nor to new ways of experiencing and feeling pleasure through the machine. At that time the most important thing was to build a plausible "virtual reality system". Under the futuristic cover of the machine there was usually a PC and a joystick or mouse. Usually a system could easily be labelled as a virtual theater, a dome or a cabin, which all refer to entertainment simulators. At the beginning of the 1990s, data glasses and gloves were the most widely used interfaces within the new interaction systems. Later the development turned from haptic interfaces towards more spatial ideas -- from wearable systems to interaction environments. Still there are only few innovative applications available. One good example is Vivid Group's old Mandala VR system which was later in the 1990s developed further to the Holopod system. It has been promoted as the interface of the future and new way of being with the computer. As in the film Modern Times so also with Holopod the player is in a way sucked inside the game world. But this time with the user's consent. Behind the Holopod is Vivid Group's Mandala VGC (Video Gesture Control) technology which they have been developing since 1986. The Mandala VGC system combines real time video images of the player with the game scene. The player in the real world is the protagonist in the game world. So the real world and the game world are united. That makes it possible to sense the real time movement as well as interaction between the platform and the player. Also other manufacturers like American Holoplex has developed similar systems. Their system is called ThunderCam. Like Konami's Dance Dance Revolution, it asks heavy physical involvement in the Street Fighter combat game. Man-Man and Man-Machine Cooperation One of the most important elements in electronic games has been reaction ability. Now the playing is turning closer to a new sport. Different force feedback systems combined with haptic interfaces will create much more diverse examples of action. For example, the Japanese Konami corporation has developed a haptic version of a popular Playstation dance game where karaoke and an electronic version of the Twister game are combined. Besides new man-machine cooperative applications, there are also under development some multi-user environments where the user interacts with the computer-generated world as well as with other players. The Land of Snow and Ice has been under development for about a year now in the University of Lapland, Finland. It is a tourism project that is supposed to be able to create a sensation of the arctic environment throughout the year. Temperature and atmosphere are created with the help of refrigerating equipment. In the space there are virtual theatre and enhanced ski-doo as interfaces. The 3-D software makes the sensation very intense, and a hydraulic platform extends the experience. The Land of Snow and Ice is interesting from the point of view of the man-machine relationship in the way that it brings a new idea to the interface design: the use of everyday objects as interfaces. The machine is "hidden" inside an everyday object and one is interacting and using the machine in a more natural way. For example, the Norwegian media artist Stahl Stenslie has developed "an 'intelligent' couch through which you communicate using your body through tactile and visual stimuli". Besides art works he has also talked about new everyday communication environments, where the table in a café could be a communication tool. One step towards Stenslie's idea has already become reality in Lasipalatsi café in Helsinki, Finland. The tables are good for their primary purpose, but you can also surf the Internet and read your e-mail with them, while drinking your tea. These kind of ideas have also been presented within 'intelligent home' speculations. Intelligent homes have gained acceptance and there are already several intelligent homes in the world. Naturally there will always be opposition, because the surface between man and machine is still a very delicate issue. In spite of this, I see such homogeneous countries as Finland, for example, to be a good testing ground for a further development of new man-machine interaction systems. Pleasure seems to be one of the key words of the future, and with the new technology, one can make everyday routines easier, pleasure more intense and the Internet a part of social communication: within the virtual as well as in real world communities. In brief, I have introduced two ideas: using games as a testing ground, and embedding haptic and spatial interfaces inside everyday objects. It is always difficult to predict the future and there are always at least technology, marketing forces, popular culture and users that will affect what the man-machine relationship of the future will be like. I see games and game interfaces as the new developing ground for a new kind of man-machine relationship. References Barfield, W., and T.A. Furness. Virtual Environments and Advanced Interface Design. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Brown, Les, and Sema Marks. Electric Media. New York: Hargrove Brace Jovanovich, 1974. Burdea, G., and P. Coiffet. Virtual Reality Technology. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994. Greelish, David. "Hictorically Brewed Magazine. A Retrospective." Classic Computing. 1 Sep. 1999 <http://www.classiccomputing.com/mag.php>. Huhtamo, Erkki. "Odottavasta Operaattorista Kärsimättömäksi Käyttäjäksi. Interaktiivisuuden Arkeologiaa." Mediaevoluutiota. Eds. Kari Hintikka and Seppo Kuivakari. Rovaniemi: U of Lapland P, 1997. Jones, Steve, ed. Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997. Kuivakari, Seppo, ed. Keholliset Käyttöliittymät. Helsinki: TEKES, 1999. 1 Sep. 1999 <http://media.urova.fi/~raid>. Licklider, J.C.R. "Man-Computer Symbiosis." 1960. 1 Sep. 1999 <http://memex.org/licklider.pdf>. Picard, Rosalind W. Affective Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1997. "Return of the Luddites". Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale. Wired Magazine June 1995. Stenslie, Stahl. Artworks. 1 Sep. 1999 <http://sirene.nta.no/stahl/>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Sonja Kangas. "From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/haptic.php>. Chicago style: Sonja Kangas, "From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/haptic.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Sonja Kangas. (1999) From haptic interfaces to man-machine symbiosis. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/haptic.php> ([your date of access]).

In the past two decades a number of new disciplines (cultural studies, media studies, gender studies, women's studies, etc.) have established themselves within the academy. They have often been developed from an overtly radical political stance and set out to challenge entrenched ways of thinking about the world and the society we live in. They transgress academic norms by bringing under academic scrutiny things (film, popular music, computer games, etc.) that, in the past, would have been seen as unimportant and unworthy of critical attention. Basically, these new disciplines have provided a space in which to take popular culture seriously in a way that was difficult, if not impossible, within more traditional academic disciplines. By doing so they have also opened up the more traditional disciplines so that musicologists, for example, can now write about Led Zeppelin (Headlam) and professors of philosophy and of English can write learned works about Madonna (Bordo, Kaplan). They have breached academic defences, let popular culture in, made it both acceptable and respectable as a subject of study. As these new disciplines mature, however, it is time for those of us working and studying within them to ask ourselves just what 'taking popular culture seriously' really means. We must be careful not to simply rest on our laurels and presume that work within these disciplines is somehow inherently transgressive. Sometimes our work is not as challenging as we might like to think, but rather it serves to reinforce some boundaries as it undermines others. I want to address this idea here by using as an example the study of pop music, as this is where my research interests lie, but I am sure that what I have to say applies to other areas of popular culture and its critique too. In the bad old days before these new disciplines came along culture was thought of in terms of a simple binary division between 'high art' and 'mass culture'. 'High art' was work produced by an artist who, by dictionary definition, is 'someone who displays in his [sic] work qualities such as sensibility and imagination' (Collins). Its appeal was to an educated elite who could appreciate the depth and complexity of the work, and who could actively engage with the music they were listening to. Mass music, commonly called 'pop', was work produced commercially for profit, performed by artistes rather than artists, entertainers rather than creators. Its appeal was thought to be restricted to those who could be duped into buying it; who, by implication at least, lacked the knowledge and the intelligence to do anything more than passively consume the products of the culture industry (see, for example, Adorno, Gans). High art was about quality, and was differentiated in terms of quality; mass culture referred only to quantity, how many units people could be persuaded to buy. 1960s TV programmes such as Britain's Juke Box Jury, which asked of each record 'will it be a hit or a miss?' rather than 'is it good or bad?', epitomised this. 'Hit or miss?' was a question that had no relevance to high art but was all that could be asked about 'pop'. High art was seen to have meaning, mass culture merely had effects; high art appealed to a distinguished elite of cultured individuals, mass culture to the masses, the people, undistinguished and indistinguishable. One of the earliest tasks for cultural studies and the other new disciplines was to criticise this simple binary opposition that depicted ordinary people as mindless dupes and their tastes as no taste at all. Writers such as Dick Hebdige, and others working at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s (e.g. Hall and Jefferson), showed that certain groups of young people actively produced meaning from the products of popular culture. They were not simply a passively duped audience. Others discussed the influence of art on popular music and the way in which "pop musicians apply 'high art' skills and identities to a mass cultural form" (Frith and Horne 2). This work blends well with post-modern theories of the breakdown of distinctions between the high and the mass. Here we have 'mass' audiences behaving as if they were listening to high art, 'mass' musicians behaving as if they were making high art. This work is given further credibility by writers such as Peterson and Bryson who argue that society's 'elite' no longer enjoys art music to the exclusion of everything else. Those high status, high income individuals who in the past would have looked down on mass produced work now enjoy 'lowbrow' music like rock or hip hop as well as opera and classical symphonies. Not only are 'mass' audiences behaving as if they were enjoying art but elites are starting to behave as if they were part of the mass. All the work that I have mentioned is very important and played a necessary part in the development of the study of popular music. It clearly demonstrates that the high art/mass culture divide is nowhere near as clear-cut as was often presumed. The main problem with it, however, is that it all challenges the high/mass binary on an empirical level. It says that popular music isn't simply the opposite of art music because some pop musicians bring high art values to their work. It argues that the audience for commercially produced music does not simply consist of cultural dupes because some actively create meanings from commercial products, or that some are part of the cultural elite, 'highbrow' audience. Nowhere does it challenge the value system on which the high/mass divide depends; a value system whereby imaginative, demanding, intelligent music is thought to be somehow better, more worthy, more valuable than music that simply has a catchy tune and is fun to sing along to. A value system that also implies that those who listen to imaginative, demanding, intelligent music are somehow better, more worthy, more valuable people than those who do not. When we say that some music, some parts of the audience are not 'mass' we are saying that the rest are. We are drawing the same lines just in a different place; we are constructing a high popular music/mass popular music divide that is essentially the same as the high art/mass culture divide. This worries me for a number of reasons, far too many to go into in the space allowed. I want to concentrate, therefore, on two, related problems. Firstly it mirrors the same sort of distinctions that are made in music journalism and music subcultures where, for example, Chuck D complains that most hip-hop nowadays is simply hip-pop (Touch magazine) and journalist Burhan Wazir argues that drum and bass is too intelligent for the general public to appreciate (The Observer). Surely we, as radical academics, should be critiquing this sort of attitude,not implicitly supporting it! And we do support it every time we write an article that talks about the artistic and/or political importance of a genre of pop music, or a pop music video, everytime we write about some of the audience in a way that implies they are better than the rest because of the musical choices they have made. Secondly it limits the sort of music that academics are concerned with. What seems to have happened is that when academics get their hands on popular culture they have to treat it as if it were 'high art'. They/we make judgements based on the artistic integrity of the performer, on the 'sensibility and imagination' that they bring to their product. And the popular culture that gets discussed is only that which can be discussed as if it were high art. Work that doesn't make any claims to artistic integrity is ignored. Try looking through cultural studies, media studies, gender studies journals and books for articles about 'boy band' pop or the Spice Girls, or for that matter serious academic work on Phil Collins or Céline Dion; work that is highly popular but has no artistic pretensions. You'll find almost nothing. You will, however, find loads about 'intelligent', 'artistic' music; Madonna's transgressive play with sex and gender imagery (e.g. Schwichtenberg), dance culture's artistic and political importance (e.g. Hemment, Hesmondhalgh), hip-hop's post-modern Blackness (e.g. Potter, Rose) etc.,etc. Many of these articles will draw explicit distinctions between the people they are talking about, the music they are talking about, and commercial 'mass' music. Drew Hemment, for example, is critical of the "growth of corporate clubs, corporate magazines and corporate house dance labels" (Hemment 38), and Russell Potter talks about hip-hop that has been "commodified by the music industry, 'made safe' ... for the masses" (Potter 108). Both set up distinctions between commercial music and 'art' music that would do credit to the strictest mass culture theorist. In the past two or three decades the challenge to academic orthodoxy by disciplines such as cultural studies, media studies, gender studies and women's studies has had an effect. The world, and the academy, are now very different places to what they once were. Treating commercial music as if it were art is no longer enough. If these new disciplines are to maintain a radical edge we must continue to push at the limits of the acceptable and bring into question how the boundaries of the acceptable are defined and justified. We need to be exploring ways of undermining the whole concept of cultural elites. It isn't radical to simply replace one elite with another. References Adorno, T. Prisms. London: Spearman, 1967. Bordo, S. "'Material Girl': The Effacements of Postmodern Culture". The Madonna Connection. Ed. C. Schwichtenberg. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Bryson, B. "'Anything But Heavy Metal': Symbolic Exclusion and Musical Dislikes". American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 884-899. Collins English Dictionary. London: Collins, 1991. Frith, S., and H. Horne. Art into Pop. London: Routledge, 1987. Gans, H. Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Hall, S., and T. Jefferson, eds. Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain. London: Hutchinson, 1976. Headlam, D. "Does the Song Remain the Same? Questions of Authorship and Identification in the Music of Led Zeppelin." Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical Studies. Eds. E. W. Marvin and R. Hermann. New York: U of Rochester P, 1995. 313-363. Hebdige, D. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979. Hemment, D. "e is for Ekstasis". New Formations 31 (1997): 23-38. Hesmondhalgh, D. "The Cultural Politics of Dance Music." Soundings 5 (1997). Kaplan, E. A. "Madonna Politics: Perversion, Repression, or Subversion? or Masks and/as Master-y." The Madonna Connection. Ed. C. Schwichtenberg. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Peterson, R. "Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore". Poetics 2 (1992): 243-258. Potter, R. Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism. New York: U of New York P, 1995. Rose T. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: UP of New England, 1994. Schwichtenberg, C., ed. The Madonna Connection. Boulder: Westview, 1993. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Diane Railton. "Justify My Love: Popular Culture and the Academy." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/love.php>. Chicago style: Diane Railton, "Justify My Love: Popular Culture and the Academy," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/love.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Diane Railton. (1999) Justify my love: popular culture and the academy. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/love.php> ([your date of access]).

This research examines one of the most remarkable exhibits of the Riga Porcelain Museum – the Riga Jubilee Vase made in J. C. Jessen's porcelain factory in honour of the 700th anniversary of Riga. In 1901, the Riga Jubilee Vase was displayed for the first time – in the Riga Anniversary Exhibition of Industry and Crafts. The impressive porcelain object was kept in the Riga Porcelain Factory's museum until 2001, but after the factory's closure it became the pride of the Riga Porcelain Museum's permanent exhibition. Upon reading the article on this outstanding artefact in the 2012 February issue of the magazine Illustrated History, despite it being prepared in cooperation with the Riga Porcelain Museum, reasonable doubt arose about the accuracy of the description of the technical execution of the vase. The article Impressive dedication to Riga reads: 'The red-brown selenium ground and matte gold ornamental band creates a somewhat heavy impression, uncharacteristic for porcelain.' The study aims to find out whether the assertion 'the red-brown selenium ground' is true and eliminate some of the inaccuracies in the use of terms. The research is based on the analyses of the Riga Porcelain Museum's inventory of the Riga Jubilee Vase; the chemical composition data of red porcelain overglaze paints and their technical particularities; an experiment, testing the interaction of cadmium / selenium and iron-containing red overglazes with gilding; and consultations with leading experts – Dace Bluma, formerly employed in the Riga Porcelain Factory, and Sergei Rusakov from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St. Petersburg. The acquired data allows conclude that iron-containing rather than selenium-containing red paint has been used for the Riga Jubilee Vase grounding and the painting technique's description in the museum's inventory is incorrect.

Briareos: If it's so quiet, then why do they need machines like that? I thought it was supposed to be peacetime. I'll tell you why-eighty per cent of the people here are artificial. Genetic engineering's out of control! -- Shirow, Appleseed 1.5: 37. Welcome to the 'machine' issue of M/C, appropriately mediated to you through the global network of machines sometimes known as the Internet. The question of the machine might seem a curious one for media and cultural studies scholars -- after all, commonsense tells us that whilst machines may let us practice culture or produce media, they are by definition not cultural. The cultural, the human, the social, is that which is left after all the nonhuman components have been properly contained within a 'machine'. And yet, what is a machine? When we talk of the machine in everyday discourse, it is always, explicitly or implicitly, part of a binary opposition between humans and machines, between motive biology and immobile artefacts, between active subjects and passive objects. In a similar vein the machine is always spectral, always metaphoric: it is one of the defining tropes of our industrialised civilisation. Whether it is the machinic Gehenna of H. G. Wells's or Fritz Lang's nightmares, all demonic steam engines and inhuman cogs; the shadowy, fifth column clones of Appleseed or the invasive 'Alien' that is micro-computerisation, the Human Genome project and nanotechnology, the machine is a metaphor that structures all levels of our relationships to culture. In scientific thought, at least since Newton and Descartes, the world has been composed of machines -- instruments which transmit and direct force, and which can be investigated, manipulated, invented. In humanistic thought, the machine is the other, the Frankenstein, the binary category against which the human gains its definition. It is the gleaming machine against which unruly women have been defined, the efficient machine against which uncontrollable mobs have had no recourse, the starkly military machine against which disenfranchised and colonised peoples have had no recourse but death. The machine is thus a significant cultural category, organising and policing ideological, discursive, historical, spiritual and political boundaries. In this issue of M/C, a range of authors address from different perspectives this question of the machine and its imbricated other, the human. Our feature writer, Anna Munster, in "Love Machines" critiques contemporary writing about sexuality and sexual experiences in cyberspace, commenting that "an erotic relation with the technological is occluded in most accounts of the sexual in cyberspace and in many engagements with digital technologies", arguing instead that these accounts engage in a kind of "onanistic" logic instead. She begins to address ways around this unsatisfactory arrangement by using the theories of Félix Guattari and Avital Ronell. Our second feature article is by the feminist philosopher and sociologist of technology, Zoë Sofoulis. In an article entitled "Machinic Musings with Mumford", Sofoulis returns to historian of technology Lewis Mumford for ideas about the role and purpose of machines in cultural development. She suggests that the machine's fascinating autonomy may inspire notions of the 'post-human', which can be critiqued from Mumford's humanist position as well as Latour's "non modern" stance. Taking up Mumford's point about the over-emphasis on machines in technology studies, Sofoulis argues that it is important to look at machines not just as things in themselves, but also the purposes they serve. A concern with the work of Guattari returns in Andreas Broeckmann's article "Minor Media -- Heterogenic Machines". Broeckmann reads a series of works by contemporary artists through the prism of Guattari's writings on art, media and the machine to argue that the "line of flight" of such media experimentation "is the construction of new and strong forms of subjectivity". Such artistic practices, which draw upon the networking and transformative features of digital media, Broeckmann suggests, "point us in the direction of the positive potentials of post media". 'Desire' Issue Editor Laurie Johnson takes a slightly different tack in this issue by developing a reading of classic 50s SF film Forbidden Planet in order to come to terms with deleuzoguattarian theorisations of the machine. He asks the question of Deleuze and Guattari: "how can we use a concept of machine that claims to go beyond the concept of utility (or techné, the function of technical machines)?" Johnson's article "Félix and Gilles's Tempestuous, Monstrous Machines" develops through a sophisticated cross-reading of Forbidden Planet with its source text, The Tempest, and the analysis of civilization that Deleuze and Guattari elaborate in Anti-Oedipus: "what the film demonstrates instead is that stripping a civilisation of its instrumentalities produces something other than just a return of the primitive repressed". In "From Haptic Interfaces to Man-Machine Symbiosis", Sonja Kangas provides an historicised account of the ways in which humans and machines interact with one another, which develops into a discussion of the problems of interactivity from the paradigm of game interface design. Drawing on the notions of cultural capital as developed by Pierre Bourdieu and the theorisations of the cyborg by Donna Haraway, Susan Luckman in "XX @ MM: Cyborg Subjectivity as Millennial Fashion Statement" addresses "some of the ways in which the traditional determinants of class are being redefined in light of the so-called postmodern capitalist information economy". In doing so she brings in "nerd chic", cyborgs, rave culture and I-Macs. Paul Benneworth, in his article "The Machine as Mythology -- The Case of the Joyce-Loebl Microdensitometer", takes us on an archeology of technology, examining the history and the fate of a small, pre-digital measuring device, the microdensitometer. His social history locates the device within its geographic and historical -- as well as its technological -- milieux, to demonstrate that the existence of any machine depends upon far more than merely its technical characteristics; that every machine is a social machine. If the machinic philosophy of Félix Guattari is the refrain of this issue of M/C, then Donna Haraway's cyborg metaphor is its melody. Drawing on the work of Haraway, Sophie Taysom's article "True Love Is a Trued Wheel: Technopleasure in Mountain Biking" seeks to make clear some of the ways in which mountain biking magazines have an important role in negotiating the boundaries between the "inside" and "outside" of mountain biking practices. Taysom achieves this by conducting a semiotic reading of this magazine genre, to prise open the trope of technology and see how it is reconfigured both literally and figuratively within their pages. Frances Bonner takes to task the highly gendered division in Science Fiction of "hard" and "soft" SF through an analysis of the representations of the 'technological' in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga. As Bonner explains, this series is not so easily placed in either category, mixing as it does the tropes of space adventure with explorations of the ramifications of advanced reproductive technology. The engagement with the work of Guattari returns as a coda in Belinda Barnet's article "Machinic Heterogenesis and Evolution: Collected Notes on Sound, Machines and Sonicform". Hotwiring together Guattari's machinic philosophy with the work of the complexity theorists such as Stuart Kauffman and Ilya Prigogine, and using the example of the self-organising and evolving Sonicform Web site/sound system, Barnet examines the use and spread of evolutionary metaphors beyond their scientific origins. As she points out, "evolution is not just conflict, competition, selfish genes, tree diagrams, living and non-living systems. It's not just something furry, crawling things do. It's music. It's a dance. Poetic-existential. Hybrid subjectivities. And all the wor(l)ds in between". Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith -- 'Machine' Issue Editors Citation reference for this article MLA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. "Editorial: 'Machine'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.6 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php>. Chicago style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith, "Editorial: 'Machine'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 6 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Nick Caldwell, Sean Aylward Smith. (1999) Editorial: 'machine'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(6). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9909/edit.php> ([your date of access]).

“I realised some time ago that I am a showgirl. When I perform it is to show the girl, whereas some performers take the approach of caricaturing or ‘burlesquing’ the girl.” (Lola the Vamp) “Perhaps the most surprising idea of contemporary feminism is that women are female impersonators” (Tyler, 1) In recent years, femininity has been the subject of much debate in mainstream culture, as well as in feminist theory. The recent moral panic over “size zero” bodies is only the latest example of the anxieties and tensions generated by a culture in which every part of the female body is subject to endless surveillance and control. The backlash against the women’s movement of the late 20th century has seen the mainstreaming of high femininity on an unprecedented scale. The range of practices now expected of middle-class women, including cosmetic surgery, dieting, fake tanning, manicures, pedicures, and waxing (including pubic waxing) is staggering. Little wonder, then, that femininity has often been imagined as oppressive labour, as work. If women were to attempt to produce the ideal femininities promoted by women’s magazines in the UK, USA and Australia, there would be little time in the day—let alone money—for anything else. The work of femininity hence becomes the work of adapting oneself to a current set of social norms, a work of adaptation and adjustment that must remain invisible. The goal is to look natural while constantly labouring away in private to maintain the façade. Alongside this feminine ideal, a subculture has grown up that also promotes the production of an elaborately feminine identity, but in very different ways. The new burlesque is a subculture that began in club nights in London and New York, has since extended to a network of performers and fans, and has become a highly active community on the Internet as well as in offline cultural spaces. In these spaces, performers and audiences alike reproduce striptease performances, as well as vintage dress and styles. Performers draw on their own knowledge of the history of burlesque to create acts that may invoke late 19th-century vaudeville, the supper clubs of pre-war Germany, or 1950s pinups. However the audience for these performances is as likely to consist of women and gay men as the heterosexual men who comprise the traditional audience for such shows. The striptease star Dita von Teese, with her trademark jet-black hair, pale skin, red lips and tiny 16-inch corseted waist, has become the most visible symbol of the new burlesque community. However, the new burlesque “look” can be seen across a web of media sites: in film, beginning with Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), and more recently in The Notorious Bettie Paige (Mary Harron, 2005), as well as in mainstream movies like Mrs Henderson Presents (Stephen Frears, 2005); in novels (such as Louise Welsh’s The Bullet Trick); in popular music, such as the iconography of Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour and the stage persona of Alison Goldfrapp; and in high fashion through the work of Vivienne Westwood and Roland Mouret. Since the debut in the late 1990’s of von Teese’s most famous act, in which she dances in a giant martini glass, the new burlesque has arisen in popular culture as a counterpoint to the thin, bronzed, blonde ideal of femininity that has otherwise dominated popular culture in the West. The OED defines burlesque as “a comically exaggerated imitation, especially in a literary or dramatic work; a parody.” In this article, I want to think about the new burlesque in precisely this way: as a parody of feminine identity that, by making visible the work involved in producing feminine identity, precisely resists mainstream notions of feminine beauty. As Lola the Vamp points out in the quotation that opens this article, new burlesque is about “caricaturing or burlesquing the girl”, but also about “showing the girl”, not only in the literal sense of revealing the body at the end of the striptease performance, but in dramatising and making visible an attachment to feminine identity. For members of the new burlesque community, I want to suggest, femininity is experienced as an identity position that is lived as authentic. This makes new burlesque a potentially fruitful site in which to think through the questions of whether femininity can be adapted, and what challenges such adaptations might pose, not only for mainstream culture, but for feminist theory. As I have stated, feminist responses to mainstream femininity have emphasised that femininity is work; that is, that feminine identities do not emerge naturally from certain bodies, but rather have to be made. This is necessary in order to resist the powerful cultural discourses through which gender identities are normalised. This model sees femininity as additive, as something that is superimposed on some mystical “authentic” self which cries out to be liberated from the artificially imposed constraints of high heels, makeup and restrictive clothing. This model of femininity is summed up by Naomi Wolf’s famous statement, in The Beauty Myth, that “femininity is code for femaleness plus whatever society happens to be selling” (Wolf, 177; emphasis added). However, a potential problem with such a view of gender identity is that it tends to reproduce essentialist notions of identity. The focus on femininity as a process through which bodies are adapted to social norms suggests that there is an unmarked self that precedes adaptation. Sabina Sawhney provides a summary and critique of this position: Feminism seems to be relying on the notion that the authentic identity of woman would be revealed once the drag is removed. That is to say, when her various “clothes”—racial, ethnic, hetero/homosexual, class textured—are removed, the real, genuine woman would appear whose identity would pose no puzzles. But surely that is a dangerous assumption, for it not only prioritises certain forms of identity formation over others, but also essentialises a sexual or gendered identity as already known in advance. (5) As Sawhney suggests here, to see femininity only in terms of oppressive labour is implicitly essentialist, since it suggests the existence of a primary, authentic “femaleness”. Femininity consists of consumer “stuff” which is superimposed onto unproblematically female bodies. Sawhney is right, here, to compare femininity to drag: however, female and male femininities are read very differently in this account. Drag and cross-dressing are decried as deliberate (male) parodies of “women” (and it is interesting to note that parodies of femininity are inevitably misread as parodies of women, as though the two were the same). However, those women who engage in feminine identity practices are to be pitied, not blamed, or at least not explicitly. Femininity, the compulsion to adapt oneself to incorporate “whatever society is selling”, is articulated in terms of “social pressure”, as a miserable duty over which women have no control. As Samantha Holland argues, the danger is that women become positioned as “mindless consumers, in thrall to the power of media images” (10). Resisting the adaptations demanded by femininity thus becomes a way of resisting mindlessness, particularly through resisting excessive consumption. This anxiety about female excess is echoed in some of the press coverage of the burlesque scene. For example, an article in the British Sunday paper The Observer takes a sceptical position on some performers’ claims that their work is feminist, wondering whether the “fairy dust of irony really strips burlesque of any political dubiousness” (O’Connell, 4), while an article on a feminist Website argues that the movement “can still be interpreted as a form of exploitation of women’s bodies,” (DiNardo, 1), which rather suggests that it is the purpose of feminism to try and interpret all manifestations of femininity in this way: as if the writer is suggesting that feminism itself were a system for curbing feminine excess. This is not to deny that the new burlesque, like more mainstream forms of femininity, involves work. Indeed, a reading of online burlesque communities suggests that it is precisely the labour of femininity that is a source of pleasure. Many books and Websites associated with this movement offer lessons in stage performance; however, these real and virtual classes are not limited to those who wish to perform. In this subculture, much of the pleasure derives from a sense of community between performer and audience, a sense which derives mainly from the adaptation of a specific retro or vintage feminine identity. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy offers courses in the more theatrical aspects of burlesque, such as stripping techniques, but also in subjects such as “makeup and wig tricks” and “walking in heels” (Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque). Burlesque, like cross-dressing suggests that femininity needs to be learnt: and learning femininity, in this sense, also involves unlearning whatever “one [usually restrictive] size fits all” forms of femininity are currently being sold by the fashion and beauty industries. In contrast to this normative model, the online accounts of burlesque fans and performers reveal an intense pleasure in creating and adapting new feminine identities within a subculture, through a “DIY” approach to femininity. This insistence on doing it yourself is important, since it is through the process of reclaiming vintage styles of clothing, hair and makeup that real adaptation takes place. Whereas mainstream femininity is positioned as empty consumption, and as a source of anxiety, burlesque is aligned with recycling, thrift shopping and the revival of traditional crafts such as knitting and weaving. This is most visible in magazines and Websites such as Bust magazine. This magazine, which launched in the early 1990s, was an early forerunner of the burlesque revival with its use of visual imagery taken from 1950s women’s magazines alongside pinups of the same era. The Website has been selling Bettie Page merchandise for some time alongside its popular Stitch n’ Bitch knitting books, and also hosts discussions on feminism, craft and “kitsch and make-up” (Bust). In the accounts cited above, femininity is clearly not imagined through an imperative to conform to social norms: instead, the practice of recovering and re-creating vintage looks is constructed as a pleasurable leisure activity that brings with it a sense of achievement and of engagement with a wider community. The appeal of burlesque, therefore, is not limited to a fetishistic preference for the trappings of burlesque or retro femininity: it is also defined by what it is not. Online discussions reveal a sense of dissatisfaction with more culturally visible forms of femininity promoted by celebrity culture and women’s magazines. Particular irritants include the low-maintenance look, skinniness, lip gloss, highlighted and layered hair, fake tan and, perhaps unexpectedly, jeans. These are seen as emblematic of precisely stereotypical and homogenising notions of feminine identity, as one post points out: “Dita VT particularly stands out in this day and age where it seems that the mysterious Blondifier and her evil twin, the Creosoter, get to every female celeb at some point.” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 17 2006, 3.32 am) Another reason for the appeal of New Burlesque is that it does not privilege slenderness: as another post says “i think i like that the women have natural bodies in some way” (Bust Lounge, posted on Oct 8 2006, 7:34 pm), and it is clear that the labour associated with this form of femininity consists of adorning the body for display in a way that opposes the dominant model of constructing “natural” beauty through invisible forms of labour. Burlesque performers might therefore be seen as feminist theorists, whose construction of a feminine image against normative forms of femininity dramatises precisely those issues of embodiment and identity that concern feminist theory. This open display and celebration of feminine identity practices, for example, makes visible Elizabeth Grosz’s argument, in Volatile Bodies, that all bodies are inscribed with culture, even when they are naked. A good example of this is the British performer Immodesty Blaize, who has been celebrated in the British press for presenting an ideal of beauty that challenges the cultural predominance of size zero bodies: a press cutting on her Website shows her appearance on the cover of the Sunday Times Style magazine for 23 April 2006, under the heading “More Is More: One Girl’s Sexy Journey as a Size 18” (Immodesty Blaize). However, this is not to suggest that her version of femininity is simply concerned with rejecting practices such as diet and exercise: alongside the press images of Immodesty in ornate stage costumes, there is also an account of the rigorous training her act involves. In other words, the practices involved in constructing this version of femininity entail bringing together accounts of multiple identity practices, often in surprising ways that resist conforming to any single ideal of femininity: while both the athletic body and the sexualised size 18 body may both be seen as sites of resistance to the culturally dominant slender body, it is unusual for one performer’s image to draw on both simultaneously as Blaize does. This dramatisation of the work involved in shaping the body can also be seen in the use of corsets by performers like von Teese, whose extremely tiny waist is a key aspect of her image. Although this may be read on one hand as a performance of conformity to feminine ideals of slimness, the public flaunting of the corset (which is after all a garment originally designed to be concealed beneath clothing) again makes visible the practices and technologies through which femininity is constructed. The DIY approach to femininity is central to the imperative to resist incorporation by mainstream culture. Dita von Teese makes this point in a press interview, in which she stresses the impossibility of working with stylists: “the one time I hired a stylist, they picked up a pair of my 1940’s shoes and said, these would look really cute with jeans. I immediately said, you’re out of here” (West, 10). With its constant dramatisation and adaptation of femininity, then, I would argue that burlesque precisely carries out the work which Grosz says is imperative for feminist theory, of problematising the notion of the body as a “blank, passive page” (156). If some feminist readings of femininity have failed to account for the multiplicity and diversity of feminine identity performances, it is perhaps surprising that this is also true of feminist research that has engaged with queer theory, especially theories of drag. As Carol-Ann Tyler notes, feminist critiques of drag performances have tended to read drag performances as a hostile parody of women themselves (60). I would argue that this view of drag as a parody of women is problematic, in that it reproduces an essentialist model in which women and femininity are one and the same. What I want to suggest is that it is possible to read drag in continuum with other performances, such as burlesque, as an often affectionate parody of femininity; one which allows female as well as male performers to think through the complex and often contradictory pleasures and anxieties that are at stake in performing feminine identities. In practice, some accounts of burlesque do see burlesque as a kind of drag performance, but they reveal that anxiety is not alleviated but heightened when the drag performer is biologically female. While drag is performed by male bodies, and hence potentially from a position of power, a female performer is held to be both complicit with patriarchal power, and herself powerless: the performance thus emanates from a doubly powerless position. Because femininity is imagined as a property of “women”, to parody femininity is to parody oneself and is hence open to being read as a performance of self-hatred. At best, the performer is herself held to occupy a position of middle class privilege, and hence to have access to what O’Connell, in the Observer article, calls “the fairy dust of irony” (4). For O’Connell however the performer uses this privilege to celebrate a normative, “politically dubious” form of femininity. In this reading, which positions itself as feminist, any potential for irony is lost, and burlesque is seen as unproblematically reproducing an oppressive model of feminine identities and roles. The Websites I have cited are aware of the potential power of burlesque as parody, but as a parody of femininity which attempts to work with the tensions inherent in feminine identity: its pleasures as well as its constraints and absurdities. Such a thinking-through of femininity is not the sole preserve of the male drag performer. Indeed, my current research on drag is engaged with the work of self-proclaimed female drag queens, also known as “bio queens” or “faux queens”: recently, Ana Matronic of the Scissor Sisters has spoken of her early experiences as a performer in a San Francisco drag show, where there is an annual faux-queen beauty pageant (Barber, 1). I would argue that there is a continuity between these performers and participants in the burlesque scene who may be conflicted about their relationship to “feminism” but are highly aware of the possibilities offered by this sense of parody, which is often articulated through an invocation of queer politics. Queer politics is often explicitly on the agenda in burlesque performance spaces; however the term “queer” is used not only to refer to performances that take place in queer spaces or for a lesbian audience, but to the more general way in which the very idea of women parodying femininity works to queer both feminist and popular notions of femininity that equate it with passivity, with false consciousness. While burlesque does celebrate extreme femininities, it does so in a highly self-aware and parodic manner which works to critique and denaturalise more normalised forms of femininity. It does so partly by engaging with a queer agenda (for example Miss Indigo’s Academy of Burlesque hosts lectures on queer politics and feminism alongside makeup classes and stripping lessons). New Burlesque stage performers use 19th- and 20th-century ideals of femininity to parody contemporary feminine ideals, and this satirical element is carried through in the audience and in the wider community. In burlesque, femininity is reclaimed as an identity precisely through aligning an excessive form of femininity with feminism and queer theory. This model of burlesque as queer parody of femininity draws out the connections as well as the discontinuities between male and female “alternative” femininities, a potentially powerful connectivity that is suggested by Judith Butler’s work and that disrupts the notion that femininity is always imposed on women through consumer culture. It is possible, then, to open up Butler’s writing on drag in order to make explicit this continuity between male and female parodies of femininity. Writing of the need to distinguish between truly subversive parody, and that which is likely to be incorporated, Butler explains: Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony (Gender Trouble, 177). The problem with this is that femininity, as performed by biologically female subjects, is still positioned as other, as that which presents itself as natural, but is destabilised by more subversive gender performances, such as male drag, that reveal it as performative. The moment of judgment, when we as queer theorists decide which performances are truly subversive and which are not, is divisive: having drawn out the continuity between male and female performances of femininity, it reinstates the dualistic order in which women are positioned as lacking agency. If a practice is ultimately incorporated by consumer culture, this does not necessarily mean that it is not troubling or politically interesting. Such a reductive and pessimistic reading produces “the popular” as a bad object in a way that reproduces precisely the hegemonic discourse it is trying to disrupt. In this model, very few practices, including drag, could be held to be subversive at all. What is missing from Butler’s account is an awareness of the complex and multiple forms of pleasure and desire that characterise women’s attachment to feminine identities. I would argue that she opens up a potentially exhilarating possibility that has significant implications for feminist understandings of feminine identity in that it allows for an understanding of the ways in which female performers actively construct, rework and critique feminine identity, but that this possibility is closed down through the implication that only male drag performances are “truly troubling” (Gender Trouble, 177). By allowing female performers to ”parody the girl”, I am suggesting that burlesque potentially allows for an understanding in which female performances of femininity may, like drag, also be “truly troubling” (Butler, Gender Trouble, 177). Like drag, they require the audience both to reflect on the ways in which femininity is performatively constructed within the constraints of a normative, gendered culture, but also do justice to the extent to which feminine identity may be experienced as a source of pleasure. Striptease, in which feminine identity is constructed precisely through painstakingly creating a look whose layers are then stripped away in a stylised performance of feminine gesture, powerfully dramatises the historic tension between feminism and femininity. Indeed, the labour involved in burlesque performances can be adapted and adopted as feminist theoretical performances that speak back to hegemonic ideals of beauty, to feminism, and to queer theory. References Barber, Lynn. “Life’s a Drag”. The Guardian 26 Nov. 2006, 10. Bust Lounge. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.bust.com/>. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. ———. Undoing Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 2004 DiNardo, Kelly. “Burlesque Comeback Tries to Dance with Feminism.” Women’s E-News 2004. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2099>. Dita von Teese. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.dita.net>. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a New Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994. Holland, Samantha. Alternative Femininities. London: Berg, 2004. Immodesty Blaize. 10 Apr. 2007 http://www.immodestyblaize.com/collage2.html>. Lola the Vamp. 8 Mar. 2006 http://www.lolathevamp.net>. Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque. 8 Mar. 2007 http://www.academyofburlesque.com>. O’Connell, Dee. “Tassels Will Be Worn.” The Observer 28 Sep. 2003, 4. Sawhney, Sabina. “Feminism and Hybridity Round Table.” Surfaces 7 (2006): 113. Tyler, Carol Ann. Female Impersonation. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. West, Naomi. “Art of the Teese.” Daily Telegraph online edition 6 Mar. 2006: 10. 1 Mar. 2007 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/main.jhtml?xml=/fashion/2006/03/06/efdita04.xml>. Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ferreday, Debra. "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>. APA Style Ferreday, D. (May 2007) "Adapting Femininities: The New Burlesque," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/12-ferreday.php>.