Advocacy, Austerity, and Internationalization in the Anthropology of Dance (Work in Progress). (2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Gore, Georgiana; Grau, Andrée; Koutsouba, Maria
• Is Part Of: Conference proceedings. (2016)
• Page Start: 180
• Page End: 190
• Publication Date: 2016
• Subjects: Dance -- Congresses; Dance -- History and criticism -- Congresses; Dance criticism -- Congresses; 792.8
• DOI: 10.1017/cor.2016.25
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2049-1255

Abstract

Abstract : This paper is concerned with resonances of the tragic in twentieth-century central-European dance theatet, to be discussed with particular reference to Pina Bausch's 1975 Orpheus and Eurydice . In my study Resonances of the Tragic: Between Event and Affect (2015), I have argued that in terms of a history of the "longue durée, " the evocation of the tragic occurs in a field of tension between technique, the mise-en-scène, and conceptions, as well as procedures and moments of interruption, of suspension, of disruption and of the indeterminable resulting from ecstatic corporeality. Its structure and function can generate an event in the emphatic sense of the term; consequently, it provides a paradigm for recognizing structures of form and of an aesthetic of reception, structures emerging from individual constellations of the fictional and choric, absence and presence. From the perspective of dance studies, the tragic emanates from the representation of horrendous monstrosity testing the limits of what can be imagined by means of the moved body in all senses of the word; but how exactly does Bausch produce the qualities of the ambivalent, ambiguous, and paradoxical—and, consequently, the tragic?