ISLAMIC ELEMENTS IN TRADITIONAL INDONESIAN AND MALAY THEATRE

From the earliest times, traditional theatre in Southeast Asia has been shaped by a wide range of religious and cultural influences—those deriving from animism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, as well as from Chinese and western traditions. The overwhelming influences, especially of Hinduism, have had the tendency to obscure contributions from the Middle- and Near-East. The view that Islam, with rare exceptions, prohibits performing arts has resulted in a negligence of these arts forms in Muslim societies with the possible exception of Indonesia. This paper highlights significant elements of Islamic culture that have shaped Indonesian and Malay traditional theatre through the adaptation of borrowed genres such as taziya, as well as locally created styles of shadow play (wayang kulit) and the doll-puppet theatre (wayang golek); the use of important themes from Islamic literature, in particular thosederived from Hikayat Amir Hamza; as well as esoteric interpretationsof certain episodes originally derived from pre-Islamic sources,including the Mahabharata, in terms of Sufism to make them both highly meaningful and acceptable to Muslim audiences

The Kelantan Mak Yong dance theatre : a study of performance structure

Typescript.Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1976.Bibliography: leaves [381]-392.Microfiche.xii, 393 leaves il

Piet Mondrian, early Neo-Plastic compositions, and six principles of Neo-Plasticism

In spite of the prominent role of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) as a pure abstract painter and writer of his theories who developed the abstract art into what he called Neo-Plasticism, little has been written about him compared to other painters such as Picasso and Matisse. Examining the past and recent literature published about Mondrian, some scholars examined the aesthetic evolution of Mondrian’s vision toward his Neo-Plastic art and theory within a historical context by depending on the influences he received from circle of thinkers, artists, and friends during his life. While other scholars analyzed the components of Neo-Plastic theory through formal tenets of De Stijl or a metaphysical lens through premises of western philosophies such as Theosophy, Hegel, and Platonism. Nevertheless, despite the emphasis of the majority of scholars on close relation between Mondrian’s paintings and writings, researchers showed little tendency to examine the development of core formal theories of Neo-Plasticism through a parallel analysis of his Neo-Plastic paintings and his theoretical writings. Therefore, in this paper I aim to examine Mondrian’s early artistic ideas, through a coinciding analysis of his 1919-1920 paintings and his 1919-1923 theoretical essays. In this article, I have considered six principles of Neo-Plasticism published in 1926 by Mondrian, as my main point of departure. The main objective of this paper is to reveal the degrees of Mondrian’s awareness toward his refined, crystalized, aesthetic principles - he wrote in 1926 - by examining his early Neo-Plastic 1919-1920 compositions and his 1919-1923 theoretical essays. By conducting a context independent research on Mondrian’s paintings and writings, I aim to propose a novel perspective looking through the very core theory of Neo-Plasticism and to motivate more scholars to examine Mondrian’s Neo-Plastic paintings and writings as integrated body of his Neo-Plasticism

New Physics and Schmitt’s Work: The Play of "Einstein’s Treason"

Humankind has walked many roads to achieve understanding of themselves and to discover their own nature as God's creation. The cognition of humanity, God, and nature is a permanent, pervasive issue throughout history. In this quest to discover humanity, the fields of philosophical anthropology and biological anthropology have emerged and developed alongside each other. Science and philosophy are also trying to find a way to explain creation with all various products created throughout the history. But the noticeable point is the fact that a number of play writers have stepped in to ease the way for a better understanding of complicated concepts such as theology and anthropology in regard to philosophy and physics, and help to facilitate this understanding by creating literary work. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (1960) as a contemporary writer had focused his attention on the achievements of science and new physic in recent decades. His works invites the audience to think and contemplate on meaning and, once again, raise issues of human existence and life’s meaningful activities. This paper attempts to investigate Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt as a modern dramatist through a detailed, qualitative and critical analysis of one of his most important works, Einstein’s Treason. In Einstein’s Treason, physics and Einstein's life has been used widely. The study explored how the concept of new physics and quantum theory could be incorporated in to literature of drama in Einstein’s Treason

Piet Mondrian’s Intuitive Neo-Plastic Art and Zen Notion of Mu-shin

Reviewing scholarly materials pertinent to prominent Dutch painter Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), one faces perplex interpretations of his essays based on Western thought such as Hegelism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Theosophy. This research strives to shed a novel light on Mondrian’s esoteric essays in respect to the pivotal notion of “pure intuition” in Neo-Plastic art from antirational standpoint of Zen Buddhism. To this end, the concepts of “inferior intellect” and “pure intuition”, discussed in Mondrian’s essays, are confronted with an antirational approach of Zen in disclosure of truth. Moreover this paper chronologically depicts the kinships between the pivotal Zen concept of mu-shin (no-mind) and Mondrian’s notion of pure intuition as a universal vision which is further exemplified through three Neo-Plastic artworks representing three phases of Mondrian’s artistic career. The results of this paper illuminate Mondrian’s quasi-philosophical essays within the role of “pure intuition” through the ideology of Zen Buddhism