A Choreographic Dialogue with Caribbean Poetry: The sacredness of the feminine in Walcott's Omeros (1990)

The aim of this paper is to show how the poetry and art of Caribbean writer Derek Walcott (1930-2017) tends to manifest and substantiate the desirable cultural transformation promoted by the work of the American anthropologist and scholar Riane Eisler. The recognition and the exaltation of symbols connected to the feminine world stand at the core of Walcott\u2019s masterpiece Omeros. In a creative mutual dialogue between different genres and identities, the Caribbean author materialises Eisler\u2019s attempts to forge a type of society based on a new partnership ethic. In a second perspective, this paper analyses how Walcott\u2019s work opens the path to possible creative interdisciplinary approaches in the world of the arts. In my own contribution, as a professional dancer and choreographer, I have tried to \u201cgive voice\u201d through movements to some episodes relating to the feminine included in Omeros

A Prayer for Life: Water, Art and Spirituality in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

This article reads T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land from an “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) and “blue” (Hau’ofa 2008; Ingersoll 2016; Mathieson 2021) or ‘water’ perspective. It focuses on Eliot’s magical and aesthetic (r)evolutions depicting the sterility and degradation of life after World War I. I focus on three episodes that mix modern expressions and arts with highly evocative and spiritual forces coming from Eliot’s American heritage and his interest in Eastern religions and philosophies. Madame Sosostris’s reading of the ‘wicked’ cards becomes in this way a Modernist dance of ‘liquid’ archetypes. Tiresias, the prophet and true ‘seer’ evokes a Cubist painting while substantiating the need for fluid and more positive encounters in our life. The three-time beating refrain in the Shanti prayer epitomises the rhythm of water-dropping, the expected coming of water that will heal and re-connect humanity with the ‘One life’. In this “undisciplined” (Benozzo 2010) interpretation, I read The Waste Land as a prayer for water, a communal and “partnership” (Eisler 1988; Eisler & Fry 2019) claim for regeneration and transformation, in the acknowledgement that we, humans, are just one side of the spiralling and cosmic music of the world

Dance as decolonial and partnership praxis. José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, a ballet reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello

Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the biocultural partnership-dominator model propounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler (1987; Eisler, Fry 2019), this essay explores The Moor’s Pavane (1949), one of the most successful dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Mexican-American emigree, dancer and choreographer José Limón (1908-1972). In this paper I will draw a parallel between the Bard’s text and Limón’s dance composition to show how textual and embodied forms can merge and become a perfect medium for the displaying of all nuances in human ‘nature’, desires, and relations. In the world of ballet, the performance was revolutionary because it presented for the first time Limón’s original technique, a complex re-working of Humphrey and Weidman’s practices and a mixture of different dance-styles and tempos. The Pavane, a rigidly fixed court dance performed in Northern Italy around the Renaissance period, becomes the means through which Limón portrays the changing of order and stability of Shakespeare’s plot, so as to debunk the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society and embody Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap. In my analysis, I will explore how Limón transposed and decolonised the Shakespearean tragedy through highly innovative fall-recovery movements, iconic gestures, and precise geometrical patterns. I will focus in particular on Limón’s choice to reduce the intricate plot to a four-hand partnership dance between two different and yet parallel couples, Othello-Desdemona and Emilia-Iago. The aim of my analysis is to show how Limón slowly breaks up the Pavane’s immutable tempo in order to provide a rhythmical crescendo of movements that express the tensions, disillusionment and final choices of the main protagonists

Dance as Decolonial and Partnership Praxis: José Limón’s The Moor’s Pavane, a ballet reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello

Drawing from the decolonial perspective (Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2012; Mignolo, Walsh 2018) and the biocultural partnership-dominator model propounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler (1987; Eisler, Fry 2019), this essay explores The Moor’s Pavane (1949), one of the most successful dance adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello by the Mexican-American emigree, dancer and choreographer José Limón (1908-1972). In this paper I will draw a parallel between the Bard’s text and Limón’s dance composition to show how textual and embodied forms can merge and become a perfect medium for the displaying of all nuances in human ‘nature’, desires, and relations. In the world of ballet, the performance was revolutionary because it presented for the first time Limón’s original technique, a complex re-working of Humphrey and Weidman’s practices and a mixture of different dance-styles and tempos. The Pavane, a rigidly fixed court dance performed in Northern Italy around the Renaissance period, becomes the means through which Limón portrays the changing of order and stability of Shakespeare’s plot, so as to debunk the hypocrisy of Elizabethan society and embody Othello’s falling into Iago’s trap. In my analysis, I will explore how Limón transposed and decolonised the Shakespearean tragedy through highly innovative fall-recovery movements, iconic gestures, and precise geometrical patterns. I will focus in particular on Limón’s choice to reduce the intricate plot to a four-hand partnership dance between two different and yet parallel couples, Othello-Desdemona and Emilia-Iago. The aim of my analysis is to show how Limón slowly breaks up the Pavane’s immutable tempo in order to provide a rhythmical crescendo of movements that express the tensions, disillusionment and final choices of the main protagonists

Empathizing with Migrants: Multimodality and Partnership in Teachers’ Professional Development

The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 years mainly due to migration flows from the south and east. During the scholastic year 2018-2019, Maltese schools had a 12% non-Maltese population overall, but in some coastal areas, this meant an 80% shift to a cohort of non-Maltese students. Teachers have been abruptly faced with the need to adopt multicultural and inclusive pedagogical approaches for which they did not feel they were fully equipped. This article describes the creation of a multimodal video production aimed at filling in this gap. It is based on the Partnership Studies philosophy, proposed and expounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, and on the Blue Option, a cooperative and proactive approach that looks at the “sea” as a space for encounter, understanding, and new intercultural awareness. The video has been tested with two groups of teachers in training, in order to investigate whether, and in what ways, it inspires student-teachers to express empathy with the migrants. Positive results have been extrapolated from the written reflections of the participants

Partnership Encounters in Literature(s), Poetry and Voices from Other Worlds

The academic bulk of this year’s Blue Gum contains texts in both English and Italian. Out of fourteen articles, seven are in Italian and seven in English. They all scrutinise and illuminate a diversity of relevant literary works under the lens of the biocultural partnership-domination theory (Eisler 1987). The literary texts in this issue range from the ancient to the contemporary, from ‘canon’ to post-decolonial literature, in a joyful variety of interrelated recurrences, connections and encounters. William Shakespeare, Walter Scott, Doris Lessing, Ursula Le Guin, Bram Stoker, David Malouf and Jean Rhys are just few of the many writers tackled by our invited authors

The Whale and the Girl: a Reading of Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider from a Blue and Partnership Perspective

This paper analyses Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (Ihimaera [1987]), one of the most renowned Māori novels, from a twofold perspective: first, through an ecologically-oriented "blue option" (Hau’ofa [2008], Ingersoll [2016], Mathieson [2021]), an exciting and provocative slant that emerged in the humanities as a framework to investigate sea literatures and cultures of the ocean, and second, through a "partnership thought" (Eisler [1988]; [1995]; [2002], Eisler - Fry [2019]), a transformational approach propounded by the social theorist and activist Riane Eisler on the urgent need to re-think relationships between individuals, communities and the environment (Riem - Thieme [2020], Riem - Hughes-d’Aeth [2022]). The Whale Rider is a powerful decolonial (Quijano [2007], Mignolo [2012]) story that recounts the adventures of Kahu, the female descendent of a strict patriarchal Māori community, who will have to re-establish not only the sacred role of women within her society but also revive the tribe’s ancestral bond with the more-than-human world (Hubbel - Ryan [2021]). In tune with the Māori spiralling perception of life, the analysis uncovers Ihimaera’s narrative strategies in depicting an ever shifting "tidalectic" (Brathwaite [1992]) reality in which gender boundaries, mythical genealogies and natural manifestations are re-drawn in light of a more interrelated and peaceful oceanic future. The Whale Rider presents an insightful re-writing of Western-European and Northern Atlantic postcolonial views through an alter-native and "blue" text that depicts an-Other and more ecologically sustainable partnership world

'We going change round the carnival': decolonial narratives and partnership encounters in Derek Walcott\u2019s Drums and Colours

To celebrate the short experience of the Federal government of the West Indies in April 1958, the Caribbean writer Derek Walcott was commissioned to work on a play that would capture the shared values and cultural unity of his multifaceted community. This \u201cmassive undertaking\u201d led to the production of Drums and Colours, an epic pageant covering four hundred and fifty years of Caribbean history through the depiction of four emblematic characters linked to the Antillean archipelago: Christopher Columbus, Sir Walter Raleigh, Toussaint L\u2019Ouverture and George William Gordon. Walcott wanted to decolonise the narratives of the Western literary \u201ccanon\u201d in re-writing these characters according to a new perspective. At the same time, he presented original \u201cunknown heroes\u201d and \u201cdispossessed voices\u201d and their unpredictable encounters shaping the \u201copen\u201d hybridity and schizophrenic reality of the Caribbean. I will study how Walcott reverses the carnivalesque West Indian performance in a destabilising theatre within theatre. I will show how paintings, dances, and songs articulate the colourful rhythms of tribal drums in a creative form that unbridles conventional artistic practices, thus enriching our \u201cecosophical\u201d perception of reality

Dismantling Colonial Frontiers: The Partnership Word in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians

Drawing from decolonial thinking and non-binary studies, and from Riane Eisler’s biocultural partnership-dominator approach, this paper focuses on the power of the unpredictable encounters and the dialogic wor(l)d in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Whilst most postcolonial literary critique stresses the violent divisions at the core of the different stories in the novel, my analysis demonstrates how narrative, linguistic, cultural and historical boundaries are suspended in an unmarked territory in which the cycles of nature re-establish the sacred meaning of life, human consciousness and its relationship with all creations. Coetzee wittingly portrays the inconsistency of colonial frontiers in the Magistrate’s self-destabilising quest and his uncertain understanding of the “barbarian” systems of signs, embodied in the alien Otherness of the girl. In this sense, my analysis reads the novel as a partnership quest that reveals profound spiritual truths and dissolves the constraints of Western dominator outposts and their borders

Derek Walcott tra poesia e pittura in Tiepolo\u2019s Hound

Nel poema Tiepolo\u2019s Hound (Il Levriero di Tiepolo) Derek Walcott sovrappone la storia di Camille Pissarro, pittore francese di origini caraibiche, a quella di un suo alter-ego che, tormentato dalla \u201cvampa di luce\u201d sulla coscia di un levriero intravista in un quadro in esposizione al Metropolitan Museum of Art, non riesce a ricordare se \ue8 da attribuire a Tiepolo o a Veronese. Le vicende offrono lo spunto per riflettere su temi cari alla poetica walcottiana, quali l\u2019esilio, l\u2019idea di rappresentazione identitaria e il ruolo e il significato dell\u2019arte e del processo artistico nel \u201cnuovo\u201d e nel \u201cvecchio mondo\u201d, e quindi nei Caraibi e in Europa. Fine ultimo di questo intervento sar\ue0 quello d\u2019indagare, in un primo momento, quel particolare rispecchiamento che Walcott suggerisce tra il proprio percorso artistico e quello di Pissarro per poi passare all\u2019analisi della de-strutturazione di forme e strutture poetiche operata in relazione all\u2019organizzazione e alle tematiche delle tele che lo ispirano. Infine si esamineranno gli itinerari di riflessione identitaria che l\u2019autore propone nel tentativo di \u201crappresentare\u201d una regione che non pu\uf2 esimersi dal trascurare i fardelli del passato coloniale, ma neppure il presente, contraddistinto da popoli dai retaggi plurimi ed eterogenei