Josephine Lovett

Reviews of Lovett’s films repeatedly emphasized her ability to create heroines who could both please censors and appeal to female fans. Lovett’s greatest success was probably the story and scenario for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production Our Dancing Daughters (1928), a film promoted as featuring the new “sound,” but for all intents and purposes still a silent motion picture. In June 1928, as Don Crafton tells us, MGM followed Warner Brothers in announcing that it would begin to use talking sequences, but their facilities for recording synchronized sound had not yet been built (206). In this transitional period, while MGM was still producing silent films, Our Dancing Daughters attempted sound effects and a music track, but dialogue was still “seen” on screen in intertitles not heard as the lip-synchronized speech that defined the new rage, the “Talkies.” For Our Dancing Daughters, Lovett was nominated for the first Academy Award in writing achievement. Alexander Walker’s popular biography claims that Joan Crawford lobbied for the role of Diana after reading Lovett’s story in a newspaper serial (42)

Aesthetic Fingertips

Sculptor Christian Petersen is a rugged, silent man with a humorous, dancing glint in his eye. His personality is such that students register in his class to get to know him. But how many do know him

The Voices of Young Women Dance Students.

What is dance and what is the experience of dancing? What does dancing mean for those who do it? Dance scholars and critics have written many words in response to these questions. Choreographers give their answers to "what is dance?" in the work they create and, often, in commentary about it. Professional dancers have also spoken, primarily in biographies and autobiographies, of what dance and dancing mean to them. Not all voices are heard in dance literature, however. In particular, the voices of children and adolescents, especially those not enrolled in professional schools, are silent. What is the dance experience like, and what does it mean, for them? What do their experiences—and the meanings they make of them—say to us, who work with young people in dance

[Review of] Judith Ortiz Cofer. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood

This is a rather loose collection of cuentos, or stories, by a person of two very different worlds. In the years of her youth, Judith Ortiz was shuttled between Paterson, New Jersey, and Puerto Rico. Her parents were immersed in the Spanish culture of the Caribbean tropics; but like so many other Puerto Ricans, her father left the island in the 1950s to secure a better life for his family. He joined the US Navy and spent six months of every year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the rest of the time at sea. When he was stationed in Brooklyn, he would send for his wife and children to live with him in an apartment outside Paterson. Thus, young Judith spent her childhood years alternately living in a small town on a tropical island and in a large urban area in North America. Her father adjusted to the new culture, but her mother never did

Effects on Inter-Personal Memory of Dancing in Time with Others.

We report an experiment investigating whether dancing to the same music enhances recall of person-related memory targets. The experiment used 40 dancers (all of whom were unaware of the experiment's aim), two-channel silent-disco radio headphones, a marked-up dance floor, two types of music, and memory targets (sash colors and symbols). In each trial, 10 dancers wore radio headphones and one of four different colored sashes, half of which carried cat symbols. Using silent-disco technology, one type of music was surreptitiously transmitted to half the dancers, while music at a different tempo was transmitted to the remaining dancers. Pre-experiment, the dancers' faces were photographed. Post-experiment, each dancer was presented with the photographs of the other dancers and asked to recall their memory targets. Results showed that same-music dancing significantly enhanced memory for sash color and sash symbol. Our findings are discussed in light of recent eye-movement research that showed significantly increased gaze durations for people observing music-dance synchrony versus music-dance asynchrony, and in relation to current literature on interpersonal entrainment, group cohesion, and social bonding

Jazz and nation in Australia: bridging the gap on screen, 1919–1933

When jazz arrived in Australia as live performance in 1918, it initially was taken by the establishment as a threat to national identity, in particular as that identity had been associated with masculinist rural mythologies centred on what was known as ‘the Bush’.1 The Bush was where the nation was created, through the heroic labour required for the conquest of the land. With its roots in nineteenth century pioneer frontier narratives, the values of the Bush were at odds with urban modernity and the lifestyles it fostered. The musical expression of the latter was jazz – a cacophonous importation from the USA with connotations of ‘negroid’ savagery and decadent effeminisation. Jazz thus functioned as the ‘Other’ in received discourses of nation. By the 1950s there was a growing synergy between Australian identity and jazz, consolidated by the arrival of a new music of the Other in the form of rock’n’roll. But the beginnings of this rapprochement can be identified from the early thirties when changes in the understanding of both jazz and nation began to bring the two into closer alignment. This paper explores those early relational shifts as they were manifested cinematically. Although it is widely held that the Great Depression ended the first phase of Australian jazz history, nonetheless it will be argued here that it was the search for solutions to the problem of the Depression that help to build a ‘bridge’ between jazz and Australian identity, in conjunction with a new appreciation of the meliorative possibilities of modernity, particularly as reflected in the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the transition from silent to sound films

Comedy, pain and nonsense at the Red Moon Cafe: The Little Tramp's death by service work in Modern Times

Paper presented at the Art of Management Conference, 2004, ParisThis paper was originally presented at the Art of Management Conference, in Paris in 2004. The paper is an essay about The Red Moon Cafe scene in Charlie Chaplin's masterpeiece, Modern Times (1936). In this scene, famous for the Nonsense Song, where the Little Tramp 'speaks' for the first and the last time on screen, Chaplin explores service work, especially the theme of authenticity, and uses his skills as a dancer, musician, choreographer, and film maker, to provide a commentary on service work

The Canon, [1975-76]: Volume 6, Number 2

The Basement Hermit by John Kleyn The Lute Player by Bonnie Kuipers Of Dordt and Dancing by Syd Hielema Film too Crammed by Dorann Williams Of Janitors by Dave Van Kley I Have a Dream by Bill Huisken Second Thoughts by Daryl Sas Disappointing Choice by Joanne Feenstra Holding in her hands... by Ken Koopmans [drawing of a woman] by Lugene Vanden Bosch Whiteheat by Dorann Williams Silent Forces by Marianne Scholte Moments running by... by Bonnie Kuipers [drawing of a country church] by Gerald Cupidohttps://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/dordt_canon/1077/thumbnail.jp

To Dance Again

Exodus 15:1-11,20-21

Nietzsche on embodiment : a Proto‐Somaesthetics?

Abstract: This chapter considers Richard Shusterman’s claim in his The Silent, Limping Body of Philosophy2 that Friedrich Nietzsche’s work constitutes a mere inversion of the mind‐body hierarchy, by providing an interpretation of selections from the Nietzschean corpus. The aim of the chapter is to show that Nietzsche’s position on the self is able to avoid falling into the “logic of reversal” that Shusterman diagnoses in his thinking. The chapter’s arguments then provide support for the conclusion that Nietzsche’s writings on the singing, dancing body could be seen as an example of a (proto‐) phenomenology, and indeed, a (proto‐) somaesthetics