Review: \u27Improvising Improvisation: From Out of Philosophy, Music, Dance, and Literature\u27

This book review attempts to interpret the meaning and value of Gary Peters’ book in a way that is true to the kind of book, an experimental improvisation, that it purports to be. As such, it grapples with the difficulties of evaluating the merits of a philosophical discussion within a book that claims not to be philosophy and case studies in performance that beg the question of whether they accurately exemplify the (non-)philosophy they are meant to support. Despite these difficulties, this review ends with the conclusion that this book does, in fact, convey something essential about the nature of improvisation, even if it does so ironically, by demonstrating the benefits and limits of what improvisational riffs on philosophy can be

Censorship as Catalyst for Artistic Innovation

One kind of government-supported censorship of the arts targets not the expressive content of any particular artwork but instead seeks to suppress the activity of a group of people based on some feature of the group’s human identity such as race, gender or class. Using examples from the history of the development of black music in the United States that followed from the legal oppression of slavery and from evidence of changes in the Punjabi theater in Pakistan following state-sanctioned suppressions of women, this paper demonstrates that human identity-related arts censorship can actually serve to spur and enhance, rather than suppress, artistic innovation

Appreciating Dance: The View from the Audience

Dance can be appreciated from all sorts of perspectives: For instance, by the dancer while dancing, by the choreographer while watching in the wings, by the musician in the orchestra pit who accompanies the dance, or by the loved-one of a dancer who watches while hoping that the dancer performs well and avoids injury. This essay will consider what it takes to appreciate dance from the perspective of a seated, non-moving audience member. A dance appreciator in this position is typically someone who can hear and see, who can feel vibrations of sound through their skin, and who can have other human, kinaesthetic responses and perceptions as well as the cognitive ability to process them. This appreciator is also someone who is a person with a history that may or may not include experiences of dance that have conditioned his or her responses to watching dance. Based on both this experience, and the skill and capacity to focus, pay attention, make judgments, and convey those judgments, there are different types and levels of audience appreciation. This essay will consider three: 1. Innocent Eye Appreciation, 2. Dance-Trained Appreciation, and 3. Critical Appreciation

A Philosopher Explains Why Dance Can Help Pandemic-Proof Your Kids

Dance is good because it expresses human nature – it’s not just fun, although it is certainly fun. It’s not just exercise, either. At its best, dance is an extension and expression of who we are as human beings in ways that can allow us to share emotions that increase our sense of community and connection. This is why, in good times and bad, in times of war, slavery, fleeing homelands and during pandemics, kids still bounce, leap and spin

Morris Weitz

Morris Weitz’s initial theory of art was provided in his book Philosophy of the Arts (1950). Here Weitz calls his theory of art “empirical” and “organic,” and he defined “art” as “an organic complex or integration of expressive elements embodied in a sensuous medium. By “empirical” he means that his theory answers to the evidence provided by actual works of art. “Organic,” for Weitz, means that each element is to be considered in relation to the others in a living and not merely mechanical way. Weitz also has a broad understanding of “expressive,” which refers to an artistic property that functions as a semiotic sign, either of a specific emotional feeling, an emotional quality, or another sign of an emotional feature. These expressive signs are at once presentational and representational in his view, by which he means that they both are something and are about something (at the very least they are about emotion or emotional qualities). In this way his early theory of the art object can be classified as a formalist one that expands upon the traditions of Clive Bell and Roger Fry in a way that deepens the concept of form so that it provides particular kinds of emotional content, thereby incorporating the theories of John Dewey and a list of practicing artists and critics that includes DeWitt Parker, A.C. Bradley, Albert Barnes, Martha Graham, Frank Lloyd Wright and others. Indeed, in Weitz’ initial theory form and content are identical; he denies that in art these are separable dichotomies, since both refer to the “what” and the “how” of an artwork as a whole

Review: \u27Body Aesthetics\u27

This is a book review of Sherri Irvin\u27s edited book Body Aesthetics, a collection of 16 essays exploring a wide range of perspectives on the human body and how it is embodied, lived, viewed, perceived, and constructed by ourselves and by others in both positive and harmful ways. The book’s contributors include philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and artists, as well as scholars who focus on law, culture, and Africana, race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies

Review: \u27The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: Identity, Performance, and Understanding\u27

Graham McFee is one of the few philosophers who can be credited with helping to pioneer and forge a path for dance as a fine art in the field of analytic aesthetics. His 1992 book, Understanding Dance, following Francis Sparshott’s 1988 book Off the Ground: First Steps to a Philosophical Consideration of the Dance, was a significant introductory step toward situating dance in a field that has traditionally focused primarily and nearly exclusively on painting, sculpture, literature, and (more recently) music. In general dance has not been taken seriously as a legitimate art form by the philosophic academy; indeed, it was originally excluded from Hegel’s system of the fine arts (see Sparshott 1983). Analytic aesthetics has yet to fully recover from this historical exclusion. The articles and books on dance in the field have been sporadic, often ad hoc, and dance has yet to attract enough scholars of analytic aesthetics to sustain a robust dialogue on what counts (or should count) as the key features of dance as art

Interpretation in Dance Performing

This essay is on the role and function of the dance performer, the person who is dancing in a kind of dance-as-art event that is designed for and performed for an audience that perceives, witnesses, experiences, and appreciates the dance in various ways. As such this chapter focuses on a component of dance practice that diverges from critical-philosophical practice in two ways: 1) it is from the point of view of an embodied person engaged in a dynamic process, and 2) the dance as art on which this perspective focuses is itself treated as a process or event that need is neither static nor necessarily enduring – it could be ephemeral in the sense that it may not have identical features from performance to performance. My particular focus within this framework will be to consider to what extent is the dance performer an interpreter, and if she is an interpreter, in what sense, and what does she interpret? This paper thus seeks to better understand the nature of dance performance in practice by analyzing the role of the dance performer’s contribution in light of any interpretive function she might have.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/books/1089/thumbnail.jp

The Philosophy of Dance

This encyclopedia entry surveys the field of philosophy of dance both within and beyond Western philosophical aesthetics

Review: \u27Embodied Philosophy in Dance: Gaga and Ohad Naharin’s Movement Research\u27

This book is an original and complex philosophy of dance that Katan (now Katan-Schmid) has extrapolated from a close examination of and studio-based engagement with Gaga, Ohad Naharin’s style of contemporary dance movement. It is culled from Katan’s first-hand experience as a participant in the training and as a researcher in conversation with Naharin and Gaga-engaged dancers. Gaga is both practiced alone as somatic movement research (one which studies internal, bodily perception and experience) and exhibited in dances that are choreographed by Naharin and other collaborators for the Batsheva Dance Company of Tel-Aviv, Israel. The philosophy provided here is organic and closely tied to Gaga, although the relevancy and resonance of this philosophic achievement for dance and other types of movement philosophy is indisputable. The reader can make extensions from Katan’s theory to the aesthetic, felt, and understood qualities of other types of dance movement research practices, as well as to other kinds of dance events offered for appreciation as theatre or concert art, but these extensions are not Katan’s main focus