Soft is fast: Simone Forti in the 1960s and after by Meredith Morse [Book review]

Book revie

Humphrey, Doris (1895-1958)

Doris Humphrey's contribution to modernism, illustrated with images by seminal dance photographer, Barbara Morgan in: Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism International Editorial Advisory Board: General Editor – Stephen Ross; Dance Editor – Susan Manning The REM will be a comprehensive online resource that will provide definitions and essays on terms associated with modernity, modernism and/or the avant-garde related to dance, music, theatre, film, architecture, poetry, prose, philosophy, social theory, and visual arts. The REM will redefine the field temporally and will include the most important examples of the modern/modernist/avant-garde from around the globe. The REM will be the leading peer-reviewed resource in modernist studies to include all of the arts and to consider a wide range of international examples

The dances of Doris Humphrey: creating a contemporary perspective through interpretation

The focus of this article is on interpretive strategies developed to enable modern dance production to move beyond existing practices in dance reconstruction. The article takes up and rearticulates, for a different audience/ readership, some of the enquiries established in the restaging for Arke Dance Theatre: in further pursuing those enquiries and resulting observations discursively, however, and in its ability to set to one side some of the necessary compromises imposed on an ongoing research enquiry by the imperatives specific to creative and professional production, it arrives at a differently developed set of reflections on ""history"", ""reconstruction"" and ""the new"", and formulates and emphasises these differently. The article was the first relating to Doris Humphrey's work and the problems of reconstruction and new authorship, to be published in Dance Research. The article was further disseminated and discussed in detail by Charles H.Woodford (Humphrey's son) at the Humphrey Symposium in Massachusetts, USA in August, 2006

The pedagogic significance of 20th Century modern dance training on the 21st Century dancing body, with reference to Doris Humphrey’s dance technique and movement philosophy

What are the critical issues in dance education and training? A primary issue is ensuring that the ‘trained body’ is equipped for the range of activity today’s dance practitioner will encounter. The paper considers both the relevance and impact that ‘traditional’ modern dance training can have on today’s dancer. Issues addressed will include: what our students are using technique for; the progression from ‘training body’ to ‘trained body’ and how this is achieved; what a codified dance technique offers; appropriate pedagogic approaches. A dance technique could be defined as a set of movement vocabulary/sequences that progress; that are designed to train or develop the body or parts of the body to perform specific action/s; usually sequenced in a particular order. Humphrey and Graham techniques both come within this definition, as could others within the modern dance genre such as Cunningham, Limon, Hawkins and Horton. The original purpose of these techniques remains relevant within a repertory context today but their practice and potential is unexploited within an educational/training context. I argue that these techniques offer the 21st Century dancer a depth of knowledge and experience that should not be ignored – a danger in our ephemeral ever-evolving field. Engagement with these dance traditions involves a physical articulation underpinned by a distinctive movement philosophy. The ‘training body’, therefore, is exposed to a breadth of knowledge on numerous and inter-related levels encompassing the physical, physiological, artistic, historical, musical and analytical. The scholarship entailed in this form of engagement is no less substantive than any other form of study although the outcomes may have a more ephemeral existence. Formal modern dance techniques, therefore, are not simply historical but have the potential to make a significant contribution to the technical and artistic training of today’s dancer

Nature moving naturally in succession: an exploration of Doris Humphrey’s Water Study with live performance

This paper and accompanying live performance of the work will focus on Humphrey’s creative intention and the interplay she explored between ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’ in a range of contexts. A brief historical synopsis will contextualise the place of Water Study in the Humphrey canon, as it was the first major ensemble work she choreographed following her departure from Denishawn in 1928 and it continues to be staged today, most recently in Turin, Italy in 2008. The main body of the paper will consider the influences of ‘the natural’ and ‘nature’ in Humphrey’s creative process in terms of movement, rhythm and time, and the resulting implications of interpreting ‘the natural’ in contemporary staging

The spectacle of silence and stillness

This paper explores the interconnecting themes of ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ as they relate to notions of ‘spectacle’. The discussion will be illustrated with examples from Doris Humphrey’s choreographic works along side contemporary reference points. The paper considers the meaning/s and occurrence of spectacle and will discuss the implications of definitions such as ‘wonderment’, ‘breathtaking’, ‘mesmerising’ and ‘escapist’ in relation to the viewer’s response. A further premise is that the appeal of ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ is a growing phenomenon in a contemporary society besieged by visual and aural stimulation, and that our notions of what constitutes ‘spectacle’ are shifting accordingly

Creative choice – on whose authority

This article considers issues of legacy and tradition alongside the impact of choice on the choreographic processes involved in restaging modern/contemporary works by Merce Cunningham, Jose Limón and Doris Humphrey. The work of these three choreographers represents a cross-section of staging practices that have evolved over time as a response to the absence of the choreographer. The relevance of these practices in a broader context is that they demonstrate possibilities for choreographers working today whose work is significant to our cultural heritage

Semiclassical quantization with bifurcating orbits

Bifurcations of classical orbits introduce divergences into semiclassical spectra which have to be smoothed with the help of uniform approximations. We develop a technique to extract individual energy levels from semiclassical spectra involving uniform approximations. As a prototype example, the method is shown to yield excellent results for photo-absorption spectra for the hydrogen atom in an electric field in a spectral range where the abundance of bifurcations would render the standard closed-orbit formula without uniform approximations useless. Our method immediately applies to semiclassical trace formulae as well as closed-orbit theory and offers a general technique for the semiclassical quantization of arbitrary systems

Closing the Gap: How Improving Information Flow Can Help Community-Based Organizations Keep Uninsured Kids From Falling Through the Cracks

Evaluates how community-based organizations used a tool for systematic, ongoing data exchange with the state to monitor children's enrollment and redetermination status in public health insurance. Explores its potential to boost outreach and enrollment

Semiclassical Accuracy in Phase Space for Regular and Chaotic Dynamics

A phase-space semiclassical approximation valid to $O(\hbar)$ at short times is used to compare semiclassical accuracy for long-time and stationary observables in chaotic, stable, and mixed systems. Given the same level of semiclassical accuracy for the short time behavior, the squared semiclassical error in the chaotic system grows linearly in time, in contrast with quadratic growth in the classically stable system. In the chaotic system, the relative squared error at the Heisenberg time scales linearly with $\hbar_{\rm eff}$, allowing for unambiguous semiclassical determination of the eigenvalues and wave functions in the high-energy limit, while in the stable case the eigenvalue error always remains of the order of a mean level spacing. For a mixed classical phase space, eigenvalues associated with the chaotic sea can be semiclassically computed with greater accuracy than the ones associated with stable islands.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures; to appear in Physical Review