Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

Libby Larsen's My Antonia: the song cycle and the tonal landscape of the American prairie

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityLibby Larsen is one of the most prolific composers living today. Her music is frequently performed, and her art songs in particular have found a place in the American canon. This paper seeks to provide a detailed analysis of Libby Larsen's 2000 song cycle, My Antonia. Each song is discussed at length, and harmonic, formal, motivic, and textual elements as well as other noteworthy components are detailed. I also elaborate the ways in which Larsen evokes the prairie landscape through her music. The vastness of the prairie, its late- nineteenth-century settlers and the emotional journey of Jim, the narrator, are all captured in the song cycle, My Antonia. My own analysis of My Antonia is the primary source of material for the paper, supplemented by information from related scholarly writings. Quotes from my December 18th, 2013 interview with Libby Larsen are interspersed throughout the paper, and the interview is included in full as an appendix. Also included in the body of the paper are biographical information on the Minnesotan composer's formative years and an examination of her general compositional style. I discuss the physical landscape of the bygone prairie of Willa Cather's youth, and will provide a synopsis of her 1918 novel, My Antonia. I examine Larsen's selection of text from the Cather novel and her construction of poems for each song

Transferring principles: the role of physical consciousness in Butoh and its application within contemporary performance praxis.

This thesis addresses the role of physical consciousness in contemporary performance training praxis, outlining my position as a performance maker involved in a range of dance and theatre training disciplines, with particular recourse to the Japanese contemporary movement expression of Butoh. The term praxis refers to a set of practical aims put forward throughout the writing, as well as referencing an ethos of self governed practice within independent movement training and performance. The arguments posed draw from a personal critical understanding based on different training programs with European and Japanese butoh artists. Through evolving my performance training praxis towards certain choreographic as well as metapractical aims, I seek to challenge the notion of 'performance mastery' - a term which, within a traditional western performance context might imply control, virtuosity and technical discipline - in response to an anti-aesthetical approach to dance, as found in what I argue to be the dysfunctional, non-kinetic body of the butoh dancer. In making explicit the connections between studio practice, anatomical and somatic investigation and outdoor environmental exploration, I examine the role of 'physical consciousness' in butoh as a contemporary movement approach which might shift current established discourses surrounding western theatrical dance training towards an open investigation of movement practice and repertoire through transdisciplinary approaches which interface the languages of ecology, geology and cartography. Physical consciousness refers to an internal dialogue held by the butoh dancer between a range of visual images, or actual experiences gained through direct contact with specific environments, and his or her means of physicalising these images and experiences in movement. Thus, physical consciousness requires the butoh dancer to constantly engage in a double exposure between the internal image, as fed through language, and those external forms presented. The experiential mode of practice is prioritised throughout as the writing seeks to stabilise empiricist notions of practice as contingent on both first hand and collated accounts of perceptual mechanisms, while research methods used here draw on social science practices with the aim of producing an embedded critique of physical consciousness. Within my dance research and production methods, physical consciousness articulates an internal awareness of the body's movement potential which questions the how rather than the why or where of the dancer's movement capabilities, minimising the distance between internal awareness and aesthetic form, between the dancer and the danc

Brahms the Exotic: The Representation of Non-European and Ethnic `Others\u27 in the Hafiz/Daumer Settings of Opus 32, Romanzen aus L. Tieck\u27s Magelone, and Zigunerlieder, Opus 103

Though scholars, performers, and classical enthusiasts alike recognized and praised the many facets of his compositional craft, Johannes Brahms\u27s treatment of poetry in his Lieder has led to much conflicting assessments. The negative critiques exist partially because the majority of scholars do discuss an interpretation of the poems but seldom explain precisely how Brahms conveys the texts\u27 meanings through his music, leaving the more specific details of text-to-music relationship and what it shows about Brahms\u27s own understanding of the texts unexplored. Brahms\u27s Lieder have also been criticized because of the supposed lack of exotic qualities in those works that portray non-Western characters or music, especially those dealing with Persian, Turkish, and Hungarian themes. Previous scholars have approached them with the attitude that they are musically not at all exotic, and as a result most of Brahms\u27s Lieder with exotic subjects received little detailed attention in musicological research. Many of the dismissive critiques reflect a common misunderstanding of exotic works in musicological literature. As Ralph P. Locke has shown in his book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections, musicologists tend to focus on what he calls the Exotic Style Only Paradigm, an approach referring only to music which explicitly evokes an exotic other. As a result, many studies of musical exoticism overlook important clues in works that do not sound overtly exotic. To solve the problem, Locke proposed a new, more inclusive approach to musical exoticism--the All the Music in Full Context Paradigm. According to the Full Context view, scholars should not only look at the explicit musical markers of exoticism but also the extra-musical elements. This approach helps to identify not only exotic-sounding musical tropes, but also specific and previously overlooked points of view about exotic Others. In this thesis, I will explore three song collections using Locke\u27s Full Context view in order to challenge existing scholarship as well as explain how Brahms used exotic subtleties to bring out the various meanings of the texts in a highly refined way

Interactive Tango Milonga: An Interactive Dance System for Argentine Tango Social Dance

abstract: When dancers are granted agency over music, as in interactive dance systems, the actors are most often concerned with the problem of creating a staged performance for an audience. However, as is reflected by the above quote, the practice of Argentine tango social dance is most concerned with participants internal experience and their relationship to the broader tango community. In this dissertation I explore creative approaches to enrich the sense of connection, that is, the experience of oneness with a partner and complete immersion in music and dance for Argentine tango dancers by providing agency over musical activities through the use of interactive technology. Specifically, I create an interactive dance system that allows tango dancers to affect and create music via their movements in the context of social dance. The motivations for this work are multifold: 1) to intensify embodied experience of the interplay between dance and music, individual and partner, couple and community, 2) to create shared experience of the conventions of tango dance, and 3) to innovate Argentine tango social dance practice for the purposes of education and increasing musicality in dancers.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Music 201

STILL DREAMING OF PARADISE : RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN \u27 S OKLAHOMA!, SOUTH PACIFIC , AND POSTWAR AMERICA

Oklahoma! and South Pacific were Rodgers and Hammerstein\u27s most successful and popular musicals of the 1940\u27s. This study demonstrates their function as modern morality plays for their audiences. Specifically, the two musicals provided Americans with a prescription for a postwar Paradise. This was a Paradise based upon the American Dream of rebirth and renewal acted out in a landscape of second chances. The components of this Paradise are examined in topical essays that consider such issues as Americanism, consumerism, tourism, racism, and optimism. Each of these elements links what would otherwise appear to be disparate narratives: the American West at the turn of the century and the South Seas during World War II. The most significant connection between the two musicals and the basis for a postwar Paradise is the geopolitics of an expanding American frontier, paralleling the nation\u27s evolution from a national to a global power in the years during and after World War II. Sources such as Western films and recordings of the singing cowboys, popular images of the Pacific Islands, travel literature and advertisements, anthropological and sociological tracts on race and ethnicity, the theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, and foreign policy publications are used to demonstrate Oklahoma!\u27s and South Pacific\u27s connections to contemporary discourses and to provide historical and cultural contexts for understanding the musicals. Finally, Chapter 7 explores the relationship between the emergent postwar youth culture (the Children of Paradise ) and the issues raised by the musicals

2D to 3D non photo realistic character transformation and morphing (computer animation)

This research concerns the transformation and morphing between a full body 2D and 3D animated character. This practice based research will examine both technical and aesthetic techniques for enhancing morphing of animated characters. Stylized character transformations from A to B and from B to A, where details like facial expression, body motion, texture are to be expressively transformed aesthetically in a narrated story. Currently it is hard to separate 2D and 3D animation in a mix media usage. If we analyse and breakdown these graphical components, we could actually find a distinction as to how these 2D and 3D element increase the information level and complexity of storytelling. However, if we analyse it from character animation perspective, instance transformation of a digital character from 2D to 3D is not possible without post production techniques, pre-define 3D information such as blend shape or complex geometry data and mathematic calculation. There are mainly two elements to this investigation. The primary element is the design system of such stylizes character in 2D and 3D. Currently many design systems (morphing software) are based on photo realistic artifacts such as Fanta Morph, Morph Buster, Morpheus, Fun Morph and etc. This investigation will focus on non photo realistic character morphing. In seeking to define the targeted non photo realistic, illustrated stylize 2D and 3D character, I am examining the advantages and disadvantages of a number of 2D illustrated characters in respect to 3D morphing. This investigation could also help to analyse the efficiency and limitation of such 2D and 3D non photo realistic character design and transformation where broader techniques will be explored. The secondary element is the theoretical investigation by relating how such artistic and technical morphing idea is being used in past and today films/games. In a narrated story contain character that acts upon a starting question or situation and reacts on the event. The gap between his aim and the result of his acting, the gap between his vision and his personality creates the dramatic tension. I intend to distinguish the possibility of identifying a transitional process of voice between narrator and morphing character, while also illustrating, through visual terminology, the varying fluctuations between two speaking agents. I intend to prove and insert sample demonstrating “morphing” is not just visually important but have direct impact on storytelling

Photo-performance: A study of the performativity of butoh dance photography

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.This thesis analyses the detailed performativity and the intuitive act of photographing the Japanese dance form Butoh. It argues that the photographer’s embodied experience constitutes an ‘inner’ performance and introduces new terms: the photo-performance and the photo-actor. The author argues that the photo-performance, similarly to Butoh dance, manifests itself not only in physically apparent (visually perceived) movements but also within the multi-modal pre-reflective consciousness of the reciprocal interaction between the photo-actor and a Butoh dancer.Butoh has been widely photographed since it began in 1959 in Japan. However studies formalising the relationship between dancers and photographers have been largely absent in academic research so far. Butoh photographers such as Nourit Masson-Sekine (1988, 2006, 2008) or Maja Sandberg (2003) suggest that their photographic act places them closer to the performers than the rest of the audience and, as a result, they become part of the dance itself. However, Butoh dancers including Yoshito Ohno (1938 - ) and Tatsumi Hijikata (1928 – 1986) amongst others, express their concerns as to whether photographs can capture the essence of their art. This thesis confronts the tensions between the fields of dance and photography by elucidating the performative dimension of dance photography.This thesis brings the qualities of the Butoh photographer’s performative act to the forefront by using interdisciplinary methods to attain an intersubjective knowledge of the nature of the photographer’s experience. The methods include: a practical research presented in a form of case studies of the photographic projects carried out by the author in London with various Butoh dancers; an analysis of the structure of the photographer’s subjective experience through the use of first-person methodologies (an explicitation interview); an analysis of theories of theatre represented by Tadeusz Kantor (1915 – 199) and Jerzy Grotowski (1933 – 1999) whose work helps to develop the notion of a performative body; and a description of the photo-performance aesthetic and the performative potential of photographic documents informed by cognitive phenomenology. This thesis argues that drawing attention to the performativity of Butoh photography would contribute greatly to the pedagogical aspects of photography and performing arts