Theatre and Its Other: Abhinavagupta on Dance and Dramatic Acting

What is Dance? What is Theatre? What is the boundary between enacting a character and narrating a story? When does movement become tinted with meaning? And when does beauty shine alone as if with no object? These universal aesthetic questions find a theoretically vibrant and historically informed set of replies in the oeuvre of the eleventh-century Kashmirian author Abhinavagupta. The present book offers the first critical edition, translation, and study of a crucial and lesser known passage of his commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra, the seminal work of Sanskrit dramaturgy. The nature of dramatic acting and the mimetic power of dance, emotions, and beauty all play a role in Abhinavagupta’s thorough investigation of performance aesthetics, now presented to the modern reader

Theatre and Its Other

In Theatre and Its Other, Elisa Ganser revisits a telling debate on the intertwined natures of dance and dramatic acting; preserved in Abhinavagupta’s eleventh-century commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra, it reflects complex historical shifts in aesthetic theory and performance practice. ; Readership: All those interested in the history of Indian dance and theatre and in Abhinavagupta’s aesthetics, including scholars and students of Indology, performance, dance, and theatre studies, as well as performers

The emotional and aesthetic experience of the actor: Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien in Sanskrit dramaturgy

International audienc

Thespian musings beyond Abhinavagupta

This paper is the fruit of a close and lasting collaboration between the two authors, Elisa Ganser and Daniele Cuneo, the former being responsible for the first half (pp. 137-160), the latter for the second (pp. 161-183). The present contribution is the continuation of our ongoing research on the thespian experience, whose first instalment focused squarely on Bharata and Abhinavagupta. Elisa Ganser wishes to acknowledge the Swiss National Science Foundation for generously funding research for the present article in the framework of the project Performing Arts and Religious Practices in Classical and Medieval Sanskrit Literature (Department of Indian Studies, University of Zurich). We wish to thank Manasicha Akepiyapornchai and Naresh Keerthi for their insightful suggestions

Upper and/or lower respiratory tract infection caused by human metapneumovirus after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.

peer reviewed[en] PATIENTS AND METHODS: This retrospective multicenter cohort study examined the epidemiology, clinical characteristics, and risk factors for poor outcomes associated with human metapneumovirus (hMPV) infections in recipients of allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-HCT). RESULTS: We included 428 allo-HCT recipients who developed 438 hMPV infection episodes between January 2012 and January 2019. Most recipients were adults (93%). hMPV infections were diagnosed at a median of 373 days after allo-HCT. The infections were categorized as upper respiratory tract disease (URTD) or lower respiratory tract disease (LRTD), with 60% and 40% of cases, respectively. Patients with hMPV LRTD experienced the infection earlier in the transplant course and had higher rates of lymphopenia, neutropenia, corticosteroid use, and ribavirin therapy. Multivariate analysis identified lymphopenia and corticosteroid use (>30 mg/d) as independent risk factors for LRTD occurrence. The overall mortality at day 30 after hMPV detection was 2% for URTD, 12% for possible LRTD, and 21% for proven LRTD. Lymphopenia was the only independent risk factor associated with day 30 mortality in LRTD cases. CONCLUSIONS: These findings highlight the significance of lymphopenia and corticosteroid use in the development and severity of hMPV infections after allo-HCT, with lymphopenia being a predictor of higher mortality in LRTD cases

Incomplete mimesis, or when Indian dance started to narrate stories

It has become customary to refer to traditional Indian performance genres as “dance-theatre” in cases where they patently display techniques of narration or storytelling, carried out through the codified and controlled use of the body in time with the music of instruments and sung lyrics. The Indic vocabulary dedicates a specific term, nṛtya, to those forms in which the narrative element clearly prevails over the abstract dance movements—where gestures and facial expressions are used to communicate emotions but the dialogues or poetic lines are assigned to a singer and not recited by the actor/dancer. However, if we look at the way in which Sanskrit theoreticians have divided the spectacular object into specific genres, things get fuzzy. The ancient theory of Indian theatre (Nāṭyaśāstra, 2nd century BC–4th century AD?), in fact, acknowledges only a binary distinction between “theatre” (nāṭya)—the conjunction of a dramatic text and its representation on stage—and “dance” (nṛtta)—movements set to a rhythm with the sole aim of producing beauty and devoid of a narrative-cum-representational function. From this perspective, the recognition of a narrative capacity in dance looks more like the fruit of great theoretical effort rather than a natural development, which has posed a number of significant challenges to literary critics, who must painstakingly negotiate between the constantly evolving genres of performance, the binding categories reiterated in the śāstras (authoritative treatises), and the newly developed aesthetic theories of drama, requiring an ever more specialized concept of dramatic mimesis. Apart from giving an overview of how the performance genres are divided and classified in the Sanskrit treatises, with an explanation of the relevant vocabulary, this article will focus on some of the theoretical problems that emerge when dance starts to narrate stories, in particular in the work of Abhinavagupta, a prominent Kashmirian philosopher writing at the turn of the first millennium