'Marie Salle'

This dictionary entry, which highlights the choreographer's significance to the historical study of music, is placed in a very high profile and reputable online resource.

'Michel Blondi'

Highlights the significance of this dancer-choreographer to musicologists.

‘A dance for all the outcasts’: Class and Postcolonialism in Brendan Behan’s An Giall and The Hostage

As Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi argue, ‘translation does not happen in a vacuum, but in a continuum; it is not an isolated act, it is part of an ongoing process of intercultural transfer’. In understanding Brendan Behan's most celebrated and controversial translation, of his spare Irish language play An Giall (1958) to its riotous English counterpart The Hostage (1958), understanding the problematic ‘intercultural transfer’ between British and Irish life in the 1950s is crucial. Comparisons between both works reveal significant changes that illuminate Behan's relationship with both nations and provide a sometimes oblique metacommentary regarding his most pressing political and personal anxieties. Yet for all their differences, the plays also share a common desire to transcend the divisions forged by the colonial experience through critical understandings of life on either side of the Irish Sea. In this essay, I argue that Behan's act of transculturation reveals a great deal more reflexivity and depth than many of his critics would allow, developing an iconoclastic dialogue between British and Irish mid-century life.

Performer as perceiver: perceiver as performer

The proposition in the title of this paper is intended to draw a link between psychological processes involved in aesthetic gestural performance (e.g. music, dance) for both performers and perceivers. In the performance scenario, the player/dancer/etc., perceptually guides their actions, and acquires the skill for a performance through their previous perceptions. On the other side, the perceiver watching, listening to and experiencing another’s motor performance, simulates the actions of the performance within the range of their own motor capabilities. These phenomena are possible due to common mechanisms of action and perception, and in tandem provide the basis for the rich experience of gestural performance.
This paper reviews evidence for these claims, using examples from the domains of music and dance performance. Questions that arise from these propositions are addressed and suggested empirical explorations of these ideas are given. Further problems in incorporating these theories about gestural performance experience within Enaction are highlighted for future discussion.

Spectres of Shakespeare:Ong Keng Sen’s Search: Hamlet and the Intercultural Myth

Arguably, the myth of Shakespeare is a myth of universality. Much has been written about the dramatic, thematic and ‘humanistic’ transference of Shakespeare’s works: their permeability, transcendence of cultures and histories, geographies and temporalities. Located within this debate is a belief that this universality, among other dominating factors, is founded upon the power and poeticism of Shakespeare’s language. Subsequently, if we acknowledge Frank Kermode’s assertion that “the life of the plays is the language” and “the secret (of Shakespeare’s works) is in the detail,” what then becomes of this myth of universality, and how is Shakespeare’s language ‘transferred’ across cultures? In Asian intercultural adaptations, language becomes the primary site of confrontation as issues of semantic accuracy and poetic affiliation abound. Often, the language of the text is replaced with a cultural equivalent or reconceived with other languages of the stage – song and dance, movement and music; metaphor and imagery consequently find new voices. Yet if myth is, as Roland Barthes propounds, a second-order semiotic system that is predicated upon the already constituted sign, here being language, and myth is parasitical on language, what happens to the myth of Shakespeare in these cultural re-articulations? Wherein lies the ‘universality’? Or is ‘universality’ all that it is – an insubstantial (mythical) pageant? Using Ong Keng Sen’s Search Hamlet (2002), this paper would examine the transference of myth and / as language in intercultural Shakespeares. If, as Barthes argues, myths are to be understood as metalanguages that adumbrate social hegemonies, intercultural imaginings of Shakespeare can be said to expose the hollow myth of universality yet in a paradoxical double-bind reify and reinstate this self-same myth.