Noh Creation of Shakespeare

This article contains select comments and reviews on Noh Hamlet and Noh Othello in English and Noh King Lear in Japanese. The scripts from these performances were arranged based on Shakespeare’s originals and directed on stage and performed in English by Kuniyoshi Munakata from the early 1980s until 2014. Also, the whole text of Munakata’s Noh Macbeth in English (Munakata himself acted as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in one play) is for the first time publicized. The writers of the comments and reviews include notable people such as John Fraser, Michael Barrett, Upton Murakami, Donald Richie, Rick Ansorg, James David Audlin, Jesper Keller, Jean-Claude Saint-Marc, Jean-Claude Baumier, Judy Kendall, Allan Owen, Yoshio ARAI, Yasumasa OKAMOTO, Tatsuhiko TAIRA, Hikaru ENDO, Kazumi YAMAGATA, Hanako ENDO, Yoshiko KAWACHI, Mari Boyd, and Daniel Gallimore

Can a teaching university be an entrepreneurial university? Civic entrepreneurship and the formation of a cultural cluster in Ashland, Oregon

There has been debate over whether a teaching university can be an entrepreneurial university (Clark, 1998). In a traditional conception of academic entrepreneurship focused on achieving commercial profit, a research base may be a pre-requisite to creating spin-offs. However, if we expand entrepreneurship into a broader conception to map its different forms such as commercial, social, cultural and civic entrepreneurship, it is clear that the answer is positive. In this study, we focus on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), which has transformed a small town based on resource extraction, a market center and a rail-hub into a theatre arts and cultural cluster. The convergence of entrepreneurship, triple helix model, cluster and regional innovation theories, exemplified by the Ashland case, has provided a model as instructive as Silicon Valley, to seekers of a general theory and practice of regional innovation and entrepreneurship. The role of Southern Oregon University (SOU) in the inception of a cultural cluster gives rise to a model for education-focused universities to play a significant role in local economic development through civic entrepreneurship

The British film industry: creativity and constraint

An article on the potential impact of the changes to film policy, culture and infrastructure in light of significant changes in 2010-11

Cultural ecology and Chinese Hamlets

This essay examines the critical potential of cultural ecology and cultural mobility studies for modeling the relations between literature and culture. It investigates the mobility and portability of literary effects across different media, periods, and cultural and geographical spaces. It intends to offer a glimpse of what a continentally informed view of cultural ecology can contribute to the understanding of literary history as a cultural history of media effects. With a view to the twofold promise of cultural ecology, it hopes to accommodate both the historical singularity of literary objects (mostly, but not exclusively, texts) and their multifarious continuations in other media configurations. As a paradigmatic example, it explores the global cultural mobility of Shakespeare. Using the example of the adaptation of Hamlet in recent Chinese films, the essay demonstrates how literary effects circulate in different media contexts across temporal and spatial distances, beyond the range of traditional literary history. In the larger framework of cultural mobility studies, these suggestions also attempt to overstep the self-imposed generic limits of current world literature studies and to find an alternative to their methodological problems

Review Article: Shakespeare and Perception

This article reads some familiar speeches from key Shakespeare plays in the light of modern theories of perception, asking the Shakespeare texts for advice on such matters as “inattentional blindness,” “the distribution of the sensible,” visual perception and imagination, the “extended mind,” and “embodied cognition”. Holderness triangulates Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry with contemporary psychological and philosophical theories, and early modern works of philosophy and medicine, and asks whether these convergences are endorsements of Shakespeare’s universal wisdom, or genuinely new ways of seeing Shakespeare and the world.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in dance performance

In this paper we present a study of spectators’ aesthetic experiences of sound and movement in live dance performance. A multidisciplinary team comprising a choreographer, neuroscientists and qualitative researchers investigated the effects of different sound scores on dance spectators. What would be the impact of auditory stimulation on kinesthetic experience and/or aesthetic appreciation of the dance? What would be the effect of removing music altogether, so that spectators watched dance while hearing only the performers’ breathing and footfalls? We investigated audience experience through qualitative research, using post-performance focus groups, while a separately conducted functional brain imaging (fMRI) study measured the synchrony in brain activity across spectators when they watched dance with sound or breathing only. When audiences watched dance accompanied by music the fMRI data revealed evidence of greater intersubject synchronisation in a brain region consistent with complex auditory processing. The audience research found that some spectators derived pleasure from finding convergences between two complex stimuli (dance and music). The removal of music and the resulting audibility of the performers’ breathing had a significant impact on spectators’ aesthetic experience. The fMRI analysis showed increased synchronisation among observers, suggesting greater influence of the body when interpreting the dance stimuli. The audience research found evidence of similar corporeally focused experience. The paper discusses possible connections between the findings of our different approaches, and considers the implications of this study for interdisciplinary research collaborations between arts and sciences

The performance of pain: the consequences for the performing body and its portrayal of mental health

In 2001 the performance artist Kira O’Reilly wrote an article for A-N magazine1 that reflected on the institutional anxieties provoked by ‘Wet Cup’ a performance that includes the cutting and suctioning of her flesh through ‘cupping’ to draw blood. The art institution, despite inviting O’Reilly to perform the work, demonstrated their fears at showing ‘risky’ work through a process which aimed to sanction the ‘health’ of the artwork and subsequently its reflections on the artist herself. They asked O’Reilly to respond to various health and safety demands to account for her mental state and bodily health to prove that she was ‘safe’ to perform2. In asking her to conform to their demands they were making both internal and public assurances that the work was art and not the product of catharsis or breakdown. The institutional unease that O’Reilly could be acting out a psychiatric or psychological disorder through ‘Wet Cup’ demonstrated the sense of mistrust the performing body can instill. Kira O’Reilly’s experience follows a tradition within performance art that inflicts physical pain or suffering. In situating the physical or psychological transgressive within easy and ‘live’ grasp this type of practice presents the performing body as a confrontation to be negotiated. Indeed, when an artist chooses to cut or open their body or remove it from social interaction, their motives are scrutinized for deviance, distress and sanity. Are they mad, eccentric or just responding to questions that ask what it is to be observed and physical creative objects? This paper will analyse the consequences of making performance from physical acts of pain and how this can be understood as sane regarding institutional and public risk. It will reflect on the trauma, stigma and perceptive danger involved with making performance work that includes cutting, or isolating the body from more regular, everyday activity. The paper will reflect on the consequences for the artist, and perceptions of their health both in, and beyond the gallery. The year long works by Tehching Hsieh and the exploration of physical and mental limits through performance by Marina Abramović with be examined along with O’Reilly

Graduate Catalog, 1964-1965 & 1965-1966

https://scholar.valpo.edu/gradcatalogs/1001/thumbnail.jp