Exhausting dance : performance and the politics of movement, by Andre Lepecki

The article reviews the book "Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement," by Andre Lepecki.

Abstract art or the politics and pedagogies of getting read

The writing of academic abstracts is more than a tiresome necessity of scholarly life. It is a practice which goes beyond genre and technique to questions of identity and the promotional economies of academic work. In this paper we deconstruct a series of abstracts from a variety of refereed journals and conferences and develop a set of questions that allow us to 'read' the representation of data, argument, methodology and significance. We argue that the rules of abstract engagement are fluid and increasingly important with the advent of online journals and global citation indices. We suggest that abstract art is now an obligatory aspect of postgraduate supervision.

"Where myth becomes history" : the politics of mythical time in Heiner Muller's Medea

Heiner Müller in the 1980s produced a sequence of plays featuring Euripides’ heroine Medea using his distinctive, poetic modality of “the theatre of images”. These ostensibly postmodern narratives take the form of disjointed, visual and textual representations that are also fragmentations of historical and mythical times and spaces. Müller’s Medea plays are thus suggestive of the intersection between the discourses of history and myth — and the blending of historical time with ahistorical, supposedly “timeless” mythical narratives. Further, the postmodern possibility of history’s textuality to liquidate it into a type of (modern) mythology seeks expression in the plays’ representation of a converse equation: the moment signaled in the text as that “where myth becomes history”. This paper examines the problematisation of the myth-history dichotomy in Müller’s Medea plays, outlining the ways in which the “timeless” myth of the classical, infanticidal figure of Medea is strategically deployed to politicise evolutionist teleology, Western colonialism and the technologies of war in twentieth century Europe.