Artistic Choices Research Articles

A brief history of Cia Ludens and its productions of Irish plays in Brazil

This essay intends to give an account of the activities undertaken by Cia Ludens, a professional Brazilian theatre company, since its foundation in 2003 up to present days. With the sole purpose of translating and producing Irish plays in Brazil, mainly by contemporary dramatists, and establishing possible connections with the Brazilian reality, the company has so far produced four plays and three staged readings, designed to show part of its researching process. Interwoven by the concept of play, the reflections presented here reveal how some of Huizinga's ideas influenced the company's artistic choices in its various productions.

Calvario y tabor de Vicente Riva Palacio: historia de un texto

The first edition of Calvario y Tabor by Vicente Riva Palacio was published in 1868 by Manuel C. de Villegas; fifteen years later it returned to print (1883) from the press of Filomeno Mata, within the publications of El Diario de Hogar with numerous corrections, to such a degree that, in effect, it can be considered as a “2nd edition, corrected by the author,” as is stated on the title sheet. The most important editions of Calvario y Tabor are examined in this article, from both the 19th and 20th centuries, and, after taking a few samples from their variations, the main defects from which it suffers are shown by several examples, which in general boil down to those inherent in any act of transcription and ignorance of the culture of the time, and the language of the author. Finally, it is proposed that the edition published in the Tipografia Literaria de Filomeno Mata (1883) be used as the base for a critical edition, since this represents the final artistic choice of its author.

Futz Buddies: The Effect of “An Evening with Futz” on Buddies in Bad Times

Describing the censorship case arising from the 1969 Toronto production of An Evening with Futz , a play depicting nudity and bestiality, DANIELLE I. SZLAWIENIEC-HAW provides the history of the key judgement that opened up artistic choice in Canada, but suggests that other economic and marketing factors affect the programming decisions of today.

Futz Buddies: The Effect of "An Evening with Futz " on Buddies in Bad Times

Describing the censorship case arising from the 1969 Toronto production of An Evening with Futz , a play depicting nudity and bestiality, DANIELLE I. SZLAWIENIEC-HAW provides the history of the key judgement that opened up artistic choice in Canada, but suggests that other economic and marketing factors affect the programming decisions of today.

II Freestanding Sculpture

In 2003, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Furtwängler was celebrated with an exhibition in his home town of Freiburg, accompanied by a memorial volume and an international symposium. His influence on Greek sculptural studies through emphasis on the search for individual craftsmen via Roman copies continues, particularly in Germany and the USA. The mystery of the ‘whodunit’ is still strong, and the cult of the creative artist is too deeply ingrained in our own thinking to be totally jettisoned for other, more impersonal considerations. There is such an innate desire to link a work of art to a name that, over the years, there has been a tendency to concentrate on the few names that have been vouchsafed to us from classical texts and the random discovery of inscriptions carrying the names of sculptors (the earliest dating from c.600 BC). Recent major exhibitions have centred round the sculptors Polykleitos, Praxiteles, and Lysippos, and there are studies that have highlighted the conjectural personalities of these and other named artists. Pollitt has declared his allegiance to this traditional approach:Those who believe that ancient Greek art, like that of all other places and times, was the result of the insights, instincts, taste and choices of individual artists and not the product of impersonal, mechanical, evolutionary forces have good reason for wanting to carry on the tradition of Furtwängler.

Looking in: Albert A. Smith's Use of Repoussoir in Cover Illustrations for the Crisis and Opportunity

In many of his illustrations for the Crisis and Opportunity magazines, the African American graphic artist Albert Alexander Smith (1896-1940) used the formal convention of repoussoir, a figure that brackets or pushes back objects within an image. Smith’s figures both guide the viewer’s eye into the image and mediate between her and the internal narrative. However, even as the repoussoir figures work as a pictorial device, they are also signs that carry meaning. Situated between the viewer and the active narrative elements, these figures visually suggest the presence of W.E.B. Du Bois’s veil of double-consciousness and, more specifically, Smith’s own response, which was to integrate learned history into the narrative of his work, while his personal lived history is evidenced in the form. This paper will identify Smith’s formal and content-laden use of the repoussoir figure. It will frame its use within the contemporaneous public discourses between the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) literary arm, the Crisis magazine, edited and spearheaded by W. E. B. Du Bois, the Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, and Alain Locke’s, The New Negro. At the same time it will consider Smith’s own biography and ultimately his negotiation, revealed in his art, between overlapping and competing stratagems of self-hood open to African Americans in the 1920s. Relatively little has been written about Albert A. Smith, even though, accor ding to Theresa Leininger-Miller, he produced some 220 prints, drawings, and paintings. 1 Her book, which includes one chapter on Smith, is the most complete to date and includes extensive archival information. Laural Weintraub wrote about one of Smith’s etchings, Plantation Melodies, in her 2003 article. 2 Some of Smith’s work has also been discussed by Amy Kirschke and Caroline Goeser. 3 The gap in the existing scholarship that this essay will address is that of the formal artistic choices Smith made in his periodical covers that signify his status as an artist whose formative experiences gave him a somewhat different world-view from that of many of his peers and therefore

Finding the hidden messages in the film "Korean War"

This research is a study of the documentary film entitled "Korean War." My research focuses on the collective trauma and amnesia of the Korean War among the people of the U.S. in an effort to understand ongoing tensions between the U.S. and the two Koreas, both North and South. A study of the film also gives a way to read the hidden meaning of the film through deconstructing the film with Peircian semiotics, and scrutinizing its artistic choices of visual language. This study provides a review of the theory of trauma. It also gives insight into understanding the perceptions of the Korean War in the U.S.

Living the Politics of teatro in Los Angeles: An Interview with Diane Rodriguez

FALL 2009 143 Living the Politics of teatro in Los Angeles: An Interview with Diane Rodriguez Chantal Rodríguez On June 23 2009, I met Diane Rodriguez in her office at the Music CenterAnnex in downtown LosAngeles to discuss her impressive career.An OBIE Award winning actor and multi-disciplinary teatrista, Diane’s work is distinguished for its deeply political bend and use of humor to confront oppression. A founding company member of El Teatro de la Esperanza, El Teatro Campesino and Latins Anonymous, Diane has become an expert in activist performance and ensemble work. Committed to diversity and equal access, Diane was appointed Co-Director of the Latino Theater Initiative at the Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper Forum) along with Luis Alfaro in 1995. A self proclaimed “theater geek,” Diane is currently an Associate Producer at Center Theater Group. I have followed her career with great interest as she continues to produce, direct, and write new work whose reach extends far beyond U.S. stages. How did you get started in teatro? I come from a performing family; my father was a singer and sang in a Baptist church. My mother was the church pianist. That sanctuary, holy place, was where I learned how to be in front of people and perform in plays. In the late 60’s my cousins were members of El Teatro Campesino and I saw them perform in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which was the first time I saw the teatro. Then my uncle and aunt sold their house and moved to Delano, CA, worked on the paper “El Malcriado” and belonged to the farm workers’ union. So, the notion of church and a social consciousness was in my family before there was really a Chicano Movement. But I think the real seminal moment was going to UC Santa Barbara and studying theater with Jorge Huerta.1 144 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW When did you begin working with El Teatro Campesino (ETC)? How did your experience there shape your artistic perspective? I performed with ETC during my summers in college and then became an ensemble member after graduation. When I went into ETC, I basically learned the concept of activism in terms of both social and theater activism: using theater to inspire and move a people to social action but also as a way of making choices as an actor. You have to make artistic choices and commit to them to make the moment work, and so in that way you are an activist, you activate a moment. It’s also a metaphor for being an activist in life. That’s the main concept that I took away and always carried with me. The other was building a foundation for our work. We used to do exercises based on the steps of the Mayan Pyramid that would build some part of your character as you climbed each step of the pyramid. You would listen to your heart, or simply your breathing. These rigorous exercises made me look inside and learn to follow my heart and listen to my instincts. It was instrumental in shaping my rostro, the Nahuatl concept of face or character. When did you leave ETC and why? Honestly, the resources began to change in the 80s with Reagan and it just felt like it was time to move on. The money wasn’t there to support a full time ensemble so we had to think about what we were going to do. It was a natural evolution and so we packed up our stuff and left, it always makes me sad to think about it though. I wrote a testimonial about it called “Searching for Sanctuaries: Cruising through Town in a Red Convertible.”2 It was very hard and traumatic, I came of age in the ETC and I learned how to create work on my own which was very empowering because I had to create the work, no one was going to create it for me and I’ve carried that through my whole career. When you left ETC for Los Angeles what did you hope to do? I was going to be an actor. I was very...

An artist life cycle model for digital media content: Strategies for the Light Web and the Dark Web

This paper surveys and categorizes emerging digital media business models. We apply the customer activity cycle of Vandermerwe (2000) to the consumption of digital media, taking three phases into account: pre-consumption, consumption and post-consumption. Our analysis of the business models focuses on their social costs and benefits. We derive the parameters as follows: convenience of use, exposure, ease of compliance and administration. We distinguish two polar environments for digital media: the Dark Web with content created by the masses, and the Light Web with content created by big media. We develop an artist life cycle model in which different business models appear to be optimal at different stages of an artist's career. Voluntary payment-based models seem to be ideal for newcomers in the Dark Web, while digital rights management-based and complementary product and service-basedmodels are the likely choice of established artists in the Light Web. Established artists might change their approach again, using voluntary payment-based or complementary product and service-based models when they retire.

Still performing Bach

Since the 1980s, vehement discussions have been held—most of them in the pages of Early Music—concerning performance practice in J. S. Bach's vocal works. Although the polemics were lively—many people clearly do care for Bach's music—the discussions always ended in a tacit resignation, caused by the confrontation with what seemed to be a Babylonian confusion. A recent and constructive contribution to the discussion was Andrew Parrott's book The essential Bach choir (2000 with revisions in 2002 and 2004) in which he offered a more detailed and in-depth study of these issues than possible within the limits of a journal article. Nevertheless, the reading of the diverse historical sources used as documentation for historical performance praxis remains ambiguous and often raises more questions than answers. This unavoidable ambiguity implies the need for artistic choices and a creative dialogue between interpreters and the sources in order to provide a solution that is both aesthetically convincing and deals with the historical challenges. To gain a better understanding of the necessary decisions involved in the creating of a historically informed performance, the Lemmens Institute set up a cross-disciplinary research project and organized a symposium concerning The authentic performance praxis of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (4–5 December 2008) with the central aim of mapping and discussing these differences as regards source reading, artistic interpretation and the implications for the final result in performance.

Evidence, Decisions, Guidelines, and Standards

HERD promotes the concept of research-informed design for health environments. I have written that design professionals should consider a rigorous process for the examination of relevant evidence and the development of appropriate design interventions for important projects (Hamilton & Watkins, 2009). This suggests that I am a proponent of rational decision making, and indeed I am. On the other hand, I also recognize the need for balance. Most decisions on architectural, engineering, or design projects are made on the basis of practice. The majority of design decisions are made expeditiously and based on prior experience with similar situations, familiar materials, and known technologies. This is as it should be. Some decisions are made on the basis of experiment or artistic choice. This is also as it should be, because architecture is still an art.Are Decisions Ever Truly Rational?Rational decision making would appear to be the logical outcome of an evidence-based process. Decisions based on careful interpretation of credible evidence would seem to help us avoid subjective, intuitive, emotional, or purely aesthetic decision making. For some who observe that architecture lacks rigor, rationality is a positive goal. Yet architecture has always been a blend of science and art. I believe it always will be.Making decisions is a fascinating capability of the human brain, and our brains use a wonderful mix of rational (neocortex) and emotional (limbic) processes to make decisions. The rational factors are more readily accessible to being put into language, and so we tend to be more aware of them. But the emotional factors drive the bus. (A. Kruse, JD, MSOD, personal communication, February 24, 2009)So while we yearn for answers to important questions and for guidance at critical moments in the design process, not all decisions can be expected to be rational. Furthermore, some decisions we believe to be rational certainly have been influenced by our subconscious emotional responses. Neuroscience tells us that there is no such thing as a totally rational decision (Lehrer, 2009). Many in the design professions would argue that irrational or emotionally intuitive decisions are frequently those that produce the highest quality architecture and design. Such people would argue against any limitation on the freedom to perform design in their own individual and idiosyncratic way.What Is the Role of Standards......in a field that demands both rigorous and artful decisions? Many who practice or employ design are eager for strong, credible evidence that can lead to reliable guidelines and standards. Strong guidelines can simplify decisions and codify best practice in a way that satisfies our rational brains. When I was in architectural practice, I had health system clients who initially expected that design professionals who relied on evidence would be able to produce readily available answers to their problems. These clients did not realize that evidence- based design is a process, not a product. While it is tempting to believe that an exhaustive search of the relevant literature, careful interpretation of the implications of the research, the development of related and derivative design concepts, the construction of a physical structure, measurement of the associated outcomes, and a subsequent published report lead to certainty about a topic, such confidence may be premature.The evidence in every field-especially in medicine- is constantly evolving and growing, so rigid standards based on findings that can easily be superseded are likely to be inappropriate. The evidence from environment-behavior studies and many types of social science research in complex, multivariable settings is often less conclusive than the quantitative studies one associates with medicine and the hard sciences. Evidence applied to one situation may produce a completely different recommendation in another situation. …

Dispositional Resistance to Change and Occupational Interests and Choices

Through two field studies, we examine the role that individuals' orientation toward change has in determining their occupational choices and interests. In Study 1, 139 job applicants' dispositional resistance to change (RTC) scores were associated with occupational choice, such that individuals applying for investigative and enterprising jobs tended to have lower RTC scores in comparison to those applying for realistic and conventional jobs. In Study 2, among 45 individuals in artistic jobs and 61 individuals in conventional jobs, the routine-seeking dimension of RTC was negatively associated with the artistic choice and interests and positively associated with the conventional choice and interests. The inverse pattern of relationships was found for the emotional reaction dimension of RTC. The relevance of these findings for the occupational field is discussed.

Norah Borges: (Self-)Criticism, (Self-)Censorship, (Self-)Effacement

At present, even in scholarly circles, few are aware of the pioneering role Norah Borges played in the introduction of modern art into Argentina when she returned to Buenos Aires in 1921 after her formation in European vanguardism. More than a critical oversight, this lack of knowledge regarding her role in the Argentinian avant-garde is the result of a process of conscious and unconscious repression or erasure of an individual and collective nature affecting not only the artist's choice of media, subject matter, style, and palette, but also the ways in which contemporary critics and subsequent cultural historians perceived her work. Because of this process of erasure constantly at work in the artist's psyche, oeuvre, and cultural milieu, reconstructing her place in Argentinian vanguard art often requires a peripheral reading of the margins and interlinear spaces of the official discourse of Argentinian cultural history in order to identify distortions, omissions, or even explicit, yet untruthful, denials in regard to the artist and her works. Similarly, an interstitial study of numerous texts by and about her older, more famous brother (Jorge Luis Borges) is often necessary in order to reveal her role in the movement in question.

“Paralyzed, with Gold -”: Dickinson’s Poetics of Photography

This essay considers Dickinson’s use of photographic vocabulary and imagery as informative to her larger canon’s aesthetic goals, particularly her separation of the biographical self from the lyric first-person. Dickinson’s consideration of photography makes up only a small part of her writing on the visual arts more broadly, but it is clearly distinct from her competitive attitude toward painting. Photography in Dickinson’s canon stands apart from this traditional art in that she represents it as a natural force, divorced from artistic choice and calculation. A close examination of Dickinson’s letters and poems shows that Dickinson approaches this natural artistry not only with personal alarm, as her letters seem to emphasize, but also as a model for her own representation. By examining “The Trees like Tassels - hit - and swung -” (Fr523), “The Soul’s distinct connection” (Fr901), and “How the old Mountains drip with Sunset” (Fr327), the essay argues that photography—or the properties and discourse of photography—offers the poet a model for art that resists the emphasis on individual authorship fostered by painting.

Amiri & Odette: A Love Story (review)

Reviewed by: Amiri & Odette: A Love Story Deborah Stevenson Myers , Walter Dean. Amiri & Odette: A Love Story; illus. by Javaka Steptoe. Scholastic, 2009 [40p] ISBN 978-0-590-68041-7$17.99 Reviewed from galleys Ad Gr. 7-12 "The Swan Lake Projects" are the setting for this romantic tale in verse, a retelling of the story of the ballet Swan Lake in a modern urban setting. Out playing ball with his friends one night, Amiri falls for a beautiful girl named Odette, who informs him that she's in thrall to the malign Big Red, to be freed only by a true and exclusive declaration of love. Amiri swears he loves Odette, but when he mistakes her double for her at a dance and publicly, if unintentionally, proclaims his love for a woman other than Odette, Big Red's claim on Odette is confirmed. It's an interesting project: certainly the hyper-romantic ballet story has considerable possibility for appealing adaptation, and the use of verse is a logical analog for the [End Page 211] formality of classical ballet, while Myers' knotty and alliterative language has some of its lush and studied elegance. The poetry is variable, however, with meter (mostly pentameter) uneven and inconsistent, and some of the language overworked to the point of opacity or bathos (it may in fact be difficult for those unfamiliar with the ballet to discern the plot). While altering the ending to a happy one offers romantic satisfaction, the fact that that success is achieved by Amiri basically beating Big Red up raises the question of why he didn't just do that first and bypass the intervening drama. Steptoe's illustrations are tense, moody, and nocturnal, with an intensity and pebbly underlying texture that suggests mural art. Between the darkness and some artistic choices, the art misses opportunities to illuminate the text (the Odette/ Odette's-double issue is particularly murky in both illustration and verse), but it's got a nice sense of nighttime life and atmospheric drama. Dramatic reading aloud may be the best way into this narrative, and it could certainly make for an intriguing introduction to the classical Swan Lake. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Used by permission of Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Art Allemagne Aujourd'hui ou la reconnaissance de l'art allemand contemporain par les musées français

In 1981 the musee d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris organized the exhibition Art Allemagne Aujourd’hui which presented for the first time in France a large display of German contemporary art. This event was set up as a reconciliation with contemporary German culture, which was long rejected because of the hatred of some French people, but also of the traces of the World War II. Through the analysis of the catalogs’ text, of the choices of works and artists, we attempted to understand what was shown to the French. Which german artists were chosen to represent contemporary Germany in the context of the Cold War, which symbols did the exhibition finally attempt to embody ?

:Renaissance Art Reconsidered: An Anthology of Primary Sources

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Budgetary constraints and programmatic choices by Flemish subsidized theatres

We analyse programmatic choices of Flemish theatres and examine how they are affected by the theatres’ budgetary situation. Following Lancaster's characteristics approach, we identify several output characteristics of individual Flemish theatres during the period 1980 to 2000. A simultaneous equation approach is used to capture the theatre managers’, subsidizing government's and consumers’ behaviour. We find that changes in the budgetary situation of a theatre are translated into changes of both the ‘amount’ and the nature of the theatre's output. The budgetary impact on artistic choices has intensified since the introduction of a 4-yearly instead of yearly allocation of subsidies. The decrease in financial risk for the individual theatres leads to an increase in artistic risk-taking.

Autonomy of Artistic Expression for Adult Learners with Disabilities

AbstractWhen an art tutor adopts the role of assistant to a disabled artist it is difficult not to move from helping with the physical handling of materials on the one hand into the actual creative process on the other, thus influencing how the artwork looks. Ecas is an Edinburgh‐based charity which promotes opportunities for physically disabled people to be self‐fulfilled and to participate in all aspects of society. They run, among other things, traditional art classes and computer classes. The use of computer technology (CT) in art seemed to offer the chance for self‐fulfilment for disabled artists by increasing control over artistic choices and providing for self expression with only minimal assistance required from others. Ecas decided to fund a research project in the form of a ten‐week pilot course and the data collected during the trial confirmed these possibilities and it was clear that adult learners with disabilities could benefit from CT in order to have greater autonomy in the creation of their art than before. In particular the program Corel Painter IX.5 and various graphics tablets proved to be a powerful arsenal for self‐expression without having to wait for a tutor to tape paper to a board, replenish paint, change brushes attached to a head pointer or any one of the many and varied problems disabled students had with traditional art materials.

Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary

Research Article| March 01 2008 Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary Siobhan Phillips Siobhan Phillips Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (1): 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-2005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Siobhan Phillips; Wallace Stevens and the Mode of the Ordinary. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 March 2008; 54 (1): 1–30. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-2005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.