Classicism, post-classicism and Ranjabati Sircar’s work: re-defining the terms of Indian contemporary dance discourses

This essay discusses contemporary dance in India foregrounding the link between dance and politics. The author proposes that contemporary dance in today’s India can be seen as a continuum, under which is tension and rupture. It embraces on one hand, ‘classicism’- strictly speaking ‘neo-classicism’ - on the other, an ideological move away from this ‘classicism’, which constitutes itself into an heterogeneous movement motivated by a search for new dance languages. These new languages, growing out of ‘traditional roots’ (variously defined), claim to be sustained by the ‘classicism ’ of Indian dance. This movement can be referred to, for convenience, as ‘post-classicism’; this ‘post-classicism’is otherwise known as ‘Contemporary’ dance – with a capital c , in accordance with a western model. Dance in today’s India, whether ‘classical’ or ‘post-classical’ is wholly entangled with the issue of an Indian religious and secular identity, increasingly dominated by a Hinduising discourse, and this informs the artistic choices of dance artists. The essay will discuss the work of Ranjabati Sircar, here seen as ‘post-classical’, against this scenario, and will begin to reflect on the impact Ranjabati Sircar’s choreography and her cosmopolitanism has had on dance in contexts other than India, such as the British South Asian diaspora

Internationalisation of Spanish fashion brand Zara

Zara is one of the world’s most successful fashion retailers operating in 59 countries. However, there is little research about the firm in English as the majority of publications have been written in Spanish. This paper seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining the internationalisation process of Zara. This study adopts an in-depth case approach based on extensive secondary research. Literature published in both English and Spanish has been reviewed, including company documents such as annual reports. The paper starts with a brief overview of the global textile and clothing industry, followed by the case study of Zara. The main part of the case examines the key aspects in the internationalisation of Zara namely: motives for internationalisation, market selection, entry strategies, and international marketing strategies. In the final section, comparisons are made between Zara and two of its main competitors, H&M and Gap

Dance in ninth century Java. A methodology for the analysis and reconstitution of the dance

This short essay presents a case study – that of the dance reliefs of the Prambanan complex in Central Java, aiming to steer the discussion around an important aspect of any archaeological investigation of dance. Rather than focusing solely on contextual issues, such as the nature and function of dance at a particular point in time and in a specific socio-cultural context, the Prambanan case study questions how to engage with the archaeological dance record from a dancer’s point of view, in other words in terms of movement reconstitution and its re-embodiment. It is almost tautological to say that dance is practice based and performance oriented. However it is often the case that it is precisely this aspect of dance which is neglected in archaeological accounts and no methodologies are being developed to deal with such issues. My work on the Prambanan dance reliefs attempts to bridge this gap

Dance in the British South Asian diaspora: redefining classicism

This paper discusses South Asian dance forms and genres in Britain, one of the major locations of the South Asian diaspora. It addresses issues of "classicism," "neoclassicism" and "contemporaneity" in South Asian dancing, particularly important as in the British context availability of public funding depends on the artists demonstrating an innovative engagement with their own practice. The author focuses, as a specific case study, on the work, Moham, choreographed and danced as a solo by bharatanatyam artist Chitra Sundaram in 2002 and argues for the need to address issues of difference and cultural specificity, questioning the underlying assumptions of western notions of classicism, as these impinge on South Asian dance praxes in the British context

Choreographing heritage, performing the site

The paper reflects on the different types of performance which take place at archaeological sites, as a global phenomenon, and more broadly on the archaeology/ performance interface

Direct and Inverse Results for Multipoint Hermite-Pade Approximants

Given a system of functions f = (f1, . . . , fd) analytic on a neighborhood of some compact subset E of the complex plane, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for the convergence with geometric rate of the common denominators of multipoint Hermite-Pade approximants. The exact rate of convergence of these denominators and of the approximants themselves is given in terms of the analytic properties of the system of functions. These results allow to detect the location of the poles of the system of functions which are in some sense closest to E.Comment: 18 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1606.07920, arXiv:1801.03004, arXiv:1203.494

Normative agent reasoning in dynamic societies

Several innovative software applications such as those required by ambient intelligence, the semantic grid, e-commerce and e-marketing, can be viewed as open societies of heterogeneous and self-interested agents in which social order is achieved through norms. For agents to participate in these kinds of societies, it is enough that they are able to represent and fulfill norms, and to recognise the authority of certain agents. However, to voluntarily be part of a society or to voluntarily leave it, other characteristics of agents are needed. To find these characteristics we observe that on the one hand, autonomous agents have their own goals and, sometimes, they act on behalf of others whose goals must be satisfied. On the other, we observe that by being members, agents must comply with some norms that can be in clear conflict with their goals. Consequently, agents must evaluate the positive or negative effects of norms on their goals before making a decision concerning their social behaviour. Providing a model of autonomous agents that undertake this kind of norm reasoning is the aim of this paper