Dancing horses and reflecting humans

In October 2012, German dancer and philosopher Aurelia Baumgartner presented her 90-minute production Tanzende Pferde: Spiegelungen im Raum/Dancing Horses: Reflections in Space. Set in an arena, with a raised stage and a projection screen in the background, it provided a performed anthology of the relationship between human and horse. In the article, Meyer-Dinkgräfe discusses the production based on viewing a 40-minute DVD edited by Baumgartner from footage from two cameras recorded during the two 90-minute performances. The author’s testimony is complemented by Baumgartner’s comments and the context of critical literature exploring the relation of performance and animals that has emerged over the past fifteen to twenty years

Spartan Daily, February 17, 2015

Volume 144, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2097/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, February 17, 2015

Volume 144, Issue 10https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2097/thumbnail.jp

Orfeo, Osmin and Otello: towards a theory of opera analysis

Three diverse operatic selections are discussed in light of a new approach to opera analysi

The Margins of the Rational Man: Fluid Identities in Eighteenth-Century Biography

This study will explore the Enlightenment conception of the individual of reason, its attempted formulations in actor biographies, and its ultimate denial by the reality of human identity as multiple, fluid, and dialogical. Such fluidity sought to overcome the marginal status of the stage player through the embodiment of rational models of personality. Some stage celebrities, most notably David Garrick, were offering themselves as public models of identity for the new age of reasoned discourse. This involved the presentation before the public of stage performers as fully realized individuals. However, the unavoidable problem was that presenting an individual, even a renowned stage star, as a living paradigm of the enlightened person of reason would prove elusive. Aside from the inherent contradiction of locating any perfected stereotype in an actual person, the qualities making an individual in full conformity to his or her “reason” did not match the particular cultural qualities demanded for a successful eighteenth-century middle-class Englishman or Englishwoman. Nonetheless, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, significant advances were made both within the particular profession of acting and before the onstage and offstage public. The acting profession was moving quickly and for the first time in England away from its marginalized status to offer respected agents for cultural change. The new genre of actor biographies as well contributed to this more fully realized formulation of the modern individual

Processing (Post)humanism, Mediating Desire: Technology in the Works of Three Border Playwrights

New electronic technology, such as personal video cameras, videotape players, and the internet, has increasingly sparked interest from Northern Mexican border authors across genres. In Juan Ríos’s Generación Atari, Francisco J. López´s Cibernauta: cómo vivir atrapado en la red, and Bárbara Colio’s Teoría y práctica de la muerte de una cucaracha (sin dolor) and La habitación, technological innovations play a key role in the development of the central emotional conflicts. The four dramatic works relate new technology to an increased social openness regarding more diverse expressions of sexuality, yet they also portray existing hierarchies, fraught relationships, and tragic events that signal the limits and interruptions involved in the technological mediation of desire. Rather than any wholesale condemnation or celebration of technology, these works pose human-machine relations as an open question to be shared with and pondered by the audience

The New Hampshire, Vol. 105, No. 15 (Oct. 26, 2015)

An independent student produced newspaper from the University of New Hampshire