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This Master’s thesis will discuss the occurrence of everyday movement in dance performances, focusing on walking. It will try to determine why choreographers decide to use it even when they work with highly trained dancers. The thesis will attempt to answer questions such as: What are the differences and similarities in the way Judson Dance Theater and Rosas use walking in their choreographies? What does it signify to recreate everyday movements on stage and why do choreographers decide to use pedestrian movement in their creations? Why are choreographers inspired by everyday life and everyday movement? Walking is one of the simplest movements in our daily lives, which is why we mostly do not think about it. Nevertheless, walking bears a greater cultural significance than we usually realise. It has often been an inspiration for artists or the main object of artworks. In contemporary dance, walking is an important point of reference that choreographers frequently include in their works. However, walking was not always considered interesting enough to perform on stage. Members of the dance collective Judson Dance Theater were one of the first ones to introduce walking and other everyday actions in their performances in the 1960s. The paper will trace the reasons why walking became a focal point within performance arts and dance. Ordinary movements play a significant role in the works of many Judson choreographers as well in many Rosas’ dance pieces. The paper talks about Steve Paxton and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and their works in order to analyse a number of chosen pieces they have created and in which walking and other daily gestures are emphasised, such as Proxy, State, Rosas danst Rosas, and Rain. We focus on two of their dance pieces as case studies, namely Paxton’s Satisfying Lover and De Keersmaeker’s Cesena. Walking is significant in both pieces, but in distinct ways. We thus attempt to create an account and comparison of the mentioned pieces. In the former walking is exhibited in a very simple everyday way, defying technique and suggesting equality, while in the latter it serves as inspiration for developing dance material, emphasising walking as the starting point of movement.
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During the last year, I met this mostly new revival of the nineteenth-century, Neo-Victorianism. Before it, I have not noticed that it was more present in our daily lives than I thought: films, literature, fashion, music, TV series, decoration, etc. Furthermore, I remembered that almost two years ago, it started a TV show that amazed and shocked me at the same time, Penny Dreadful. I was not its fan because I have never liked the horror genre, not in literature neither in films, but reading about it and already having an idea about Neo-Victorianism, I decided to give it a chance and I found that beyond horror there was something else; not something but many interesting aspects of a television programme that is set in a epoch known for the oppression of women, but that empowers the female figure and places a woman as the centre of the story; a show that engages with literature, specially with its “monsters” and with nineteenth-century’s society, but also with our own, because ‘monstrosity’ aims at answering what is human and what is nonhuman and this is present all along history.
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The links between archaeology and digitization are more than ever putting under scrutiny. In this context and after establishing the evolution of archaeology and digitization over the last centuries through the presentation and comparison of case studies, we try to evaluate how digitization contributes to the reception of Classical archaeology, from in situ to the museum space. In order to do so, we chose to consider three cases study carried out over the last twenty years, as well as their treatments of archaeological artifact, specifically epigraphic materials and the way in which those digitization processes make it possible to recover a certain materiality of the archaeological object intended both for archaeologists, researchers and the general public.
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Although Anglophone academic exploration of youth cultural behavior is vast, exploration of youth cultural movements in former socialist countries still lags behind. The aim of this paper is to offer insight into youth cultural behavior in self-governing socialist Yugoslavia, or more specifically, the Yugoslav youth cultural movements of the 1960s – the 1980s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Three prominent youth movements of the period will be introduced and discussed – Yugoslav New Wave, Yugoslav Black Wave, and Yugoslav New Feminism. The aforementioned movements are chosen based on their importation from the West, which grew into the development of autonomous, unique, and highly contextual, and locally bound youth cultures, that have had a long-lasting impact on the (post)Yugoslav culture. The wider aim of this paper is to point to the potentiality of Yugoslav cultural movements in (re)conceptualizing youth cultural behavior, and help in bridging the gap between the polarized academic discourse regarding this topic. The paper will, thus, firstly introduce the dominant Western academic discourse about youth cultural behavior and its polarized status. It will then cast light upon theoretical approaches to youth cultural behavior in East European, late socialist societies. This segment will be followed by the introduction of the Yugoslav sociopolitical context and the birth and development of youth cultural movements in Yugoslavia. The segment will be succeeded by an effort to (re)conceptualize youth cultural behavior and bridge the gap between the polarized Western discourse by applying different theoretical approaches to the Yugoslav New Wave, Yugoslav Black Wave, and Yugoslav New Feminism. Lastly, the topic will be concluded by offering a summary and a brief reflection on the research process and the findings. A SWOT analysis will also be provided.
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The current ecological crisis and the critical discussion developing around it can often be narrowed down to a critique of the ways humans organize their relationship to the surrounding environments, calling for a shift in thinking as a means towards tackling the climate urgency. Taking into account the underlying principles that have driven the current ecological issues, such as human exceptionalism, many authors have argued for a necessity to reconstruct the relationships between human and more-than-human beings. This thesis considers the links between cultural theory and contemporary art, uncovering the expressions and resonance of post-anthropocentric and non-dualistic thinking in artistic practices. An overview of cultural theorists and philosophers working within the framework of theoretical streams such as posthumanism and speculative realism is supplemented by two sections with case studies, locating the traces of these ideas in contemporary artists’ practice. The first section of case studies provides an analysis of diverging approaches to depicting nature, positioning immersive artworks in a spectrum between realism (in a traditional sense) and speculation. It is argued that speculative immersive art can function as a tool for practicing new ways of relating to the non-human realm. The second case study takes a deeper look into speculative art, analysing artistic practices that are concerned with interspecies communication and redefinition of the notion of the human. Artists working with species of plants and bacteria are challenging the notion of intelligence and broadening our perspective on non-human experience, meanwhile problematizing the ontological status of other biological forms of life, as well as technology, such as artificial intelligence. The artworks studied in this thesis propose a new approach to human subjectivity, reframing the human not as individual, but as inseparably allied, connected and co-existing with other species.
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This thesis selected four women from various backgrounds and used them as case study for four different iconic events highlighting the common factor ‘Art of Dressing’. The impact of these four iconic events both on countries involved and on the rest of the world is highlighted. Semiotics was used as methodology to understand how dress works for image perception, and how dress codes are set within our society. First chapters discussed meaning of dress and its importance in our society. How culture influences the way we dress and different types of dress codes. The concept of Power dressing and how women had to adopt this power dressing to be taken seriously. Modern day women has changed the concept of power dressing, knowing that it will have an impact on their target audience and will convey their message to the world simultaneously. The use of dress as soft power has influenced public debate. The art of dressing of these four women on different iconic events was analyzed through Barthes connotation and denotation theory and his theory on fashion. This research further examined what these women wore to convey their message and how it gained them popularity and made these events iconic. The first two case studies analyzed women holding positions with direct power such as Benazir Bhutto (Prime Minister of Pakistan) and Madeleine Albright (State secretary of the United States) and how their dressing was different from other two case studies which discussed women (Hillary Clinton and Michele Obama) with indirect power in position such as First Ladies. It was concluded that these women very wisely used fashion as a tool to convey their messages and improved their image in public eye. They used this art of dressing to empower women and change perception about women in politics.
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Abstract: This thesis aims to explore the function of walking in archiving dance practices. The case that will be used is Walk+Talk, a project that was initiated by Philip Gehmacher in Vienna, in 2013 and continued also in Brussels, Stockholm and Reykjavik. In this project, the invited artists were expected to create, each one on their own, lecture- performances under the instruction of the simultaneous use of walking and talking in order to reflect on their own methods and practices. Due to the vast amount of the material created, only the first series of lecture-performances that took place in Vienna will be used and analyzed. The concept of the walking archive is a contemplation consisted of notions taken from the writings of Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour, André Lepecki and Lena Hammergren. The notion of walking as a creative device and the relationship between walking and thinking are not new ideas; this thesis attempts to be a valid account of this connection in relation to the notion of the archive, a complex notion that its relationship with the human body is rather recent. In dance as a performing art, until recently, archiving had been considered only through notation systems. Therefore, in the present thesis, a sub-chapter on the relationship between dance and notation was necessary, along with another one on the current shifts in dance archiving and the problems and challenges related to the notion of the archive. The analysis of Walk+Talk is based in the theoretical model that I call 'a walking archive'. The definition constructed is 'the walking archive', which is a body that expresses a singularity which performs the archive through walking. Walking is an action that functions in time and space. Each singularity expressed through a walking archive has also the ability to affect and be affected by the other walking archives. Spatial poems are created on stage, collections of memories, reflections, expressions of experiences that consist an assymetrical and fragmented whole, #a portrait of a generation#, as Jeroen Peeters successfully has pointed out. The performative aspect of archive is taken from Lepecki's concept on the body as archive, where he explains that the archive can only act and that choreography is a perfect medium to do so. The view of the use of space as the creation of fragmented, invisible poems is taken from Certeau's poetic view on walking and its relationship to language. Also, Hammergren's notion of the 'flâneuse' is a segment of a walking theory that is related to the writing of the history. A 'flâneuse' is someone who during writing about the past, experiences a walking, a wandering with her senses, attempting an embodied approach on the writing of history. This is also a concept that is included in that of the 'walking archive' presented here. The relationship between walking and talking is also explained with Latour's proposition on the notion of the body and especially on his approach on what it means to be an articulated subject: articulation is not only about speech, either oral or written, but it extends to include the notion of embodiment.
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This thesis is an attempt to retroactively construct a philosophical predecessor for the scholarly field that is critical heritage studies. It is a systematization of different preexisting and invented concepts centering around dissonant heritage. Dissonance being central to any critical conception of the patrimonial, keeping in mind that the critical project centers and affirms the dissonant, indeterminate, and even the unknowable character of truth itself. This text is a is positing of dissonance as the locus of heritage, and not as the nature of all heritage as it has been previously articulated by different scholars of critical heritage studies. It is an exploration of the conceptual and material conditions which both potentiate and foreclose heritage, as well as the conceptual and material arenas in which patrimony is enacted. It looks at the cognitive intervention necessary to render patrimony coherent and the different social configurations in which patrimony functions, and how it changes or does not as these configurations change. This is expressed in a central concept, patrimony, which is inherently premodern but has been democratized in modernity with the peripheral concept of heritage. This thesis will also look at the material and epistemological limits of heritage, what exists beyond it, and how to thin of that which exists beyond it. This thesis articulates the structure of patrimony as patrimonial object A’s legitimate belonging to patrimonial subject B, who is in the perpetual endowment of object A to a patrimonial subject B’, which then endows A to subject B’’, and so on perpetually. This creates a nearly immortal patrimonial subject, which is irreducible to any one subject that owns patrimonial object A.
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Female consciousness has been symbolized in Chinese feminine writing since the early 20th century when gender inequity debates began. Significantly, in the 1990s, the introduction and afterwards popularity of western feminist ideals, such as Hélène Cixous’s groundbreaking concept “écriture féminine” as embodied in The Laugh of Medusa (1975), ushered in a new era. Strongly influenced by Cixous’ appeal for women to write about their feelings, desires, and inspirations, a significant phenomenon of writing about the writers’ personal sexual experiences has evolved in mainland China and Taiwan over the last decade. Chen Ran and Qiu Miaojin’s magnum opuses, The Private Life (1996) and Last Words of Montmartre (1995) have been chosen as case studies for a detailed examination of the literary application of écriture féminine in mainland China and Taiwan, as both writers have acknowledged Cixous’ feminist theory and have produced unique reinterpretations in the process of writing. Through a critical reading of the two selected works, I suggest that Chen Ran and Qiu Miaojin, as the pioneering female writers in the 1990s, established a new discursive order in the literary arena, guided by the concept of écriture féminine. Their works are notable for their presentation of anti-patriarchal or anti-heteronormativity narratives, female or lesbian sexuality, and erotism, with Chen emphasizing the fight against patriarchy and Qiu emphasizing the resistance to heteronormality. Their work adds a new dimension to reimaginings of sexuality, erotism, gender objective formation, and queerness. Qiu’s suicide, in particular, exemplifies the problems associated with nonacceptance on both the social and cultural levels.
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Over the past few decades, women have had a significant influence on video games. The industry that was once dominated by men has now undergone major changes in female representation with the participation of more women gamers and staff. With an increasing number of women receiving higher education and gaining importance in their careers, the appropriate portrayal of females and gender-friendly gameplay in video games are taken into consideration by video game corporations and Nintendo is no exception. This thesis will explore Nintendo's video games in female representation in terms of character design and gameplay with two cases: the Japanese role-playing game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) and the life simulation game Animal Crossing (2020), which are all exclusive for Nintendo Switch, the latest hardware console of Nintendo. By analyzing the text of these two games, in combination with the influence of the feminist movements in Japanese society on the whole video game industry, the paper will discuss the shaping of gender identity by Nintendo.