Performance Genres Research Articles

Song in the Sumatran Highlands

Song in the Sumatran Highlands

Devotional contextures: the māla songs and Muslim ethical formation in contemporary Kerala

ABSTRACT This article explores how a devotional performance genre called the māla in Arabi Malayalam continues to fashion devotional piety for many Mappila men and women in contemporary Kerala. My analysis will focus on the practices of Mappila literary culture – especially that of reciting literary texts composed in Arabi Malayalam. Highlighting the performative dimensions of two māla songs, the early seventeenth century Muhyiddin Māla and the early twentieth century Nafisat Māla, I map out, in ethnographic detail, how these devotional song-poems punctuate everyday life for many contemporary Mappilas, thereby helping shape and hone these Mappilas’ affects of piety and their larger ways of being and acting in the world. In so doing, my aim will also be to underscore the social life and tone of Mappila literary culture and to reiterate that literary genres are not mere ideas but also constitutive practices that are highly consequential for the practitioners’ self-fashioning and ethical formation. The article urges a contextural approach to the study of devotional literature whereby due attention is paid to both the ‘context(s)’ and ‘texture(s)’ of genre and literary cultures.

Volution of the Concept of Popularity of a Classical Musician: Historical and Cultural Analysis

Music culture plays an important role in historical development of culture. Performers face the problems of finding their place in the world, choosing the trajectory for their personal evolution and professional development and nowadays these issues have become pressing for the professional community of musicians. One of the complex issues researchers need to address is the evolution of the concept of popularity of music performance. Even though the topic of the popularity of the musician, especially in the spectacular genres of performance, has been extensively studied, there are very few works, which focus on the performer of classical music in the context of cultural pragmatics. The study of a significant historical period in the development of European culture from the Ancient World to the present reveals a number of features in the interpretation of the concept of popularity in different historical periods. Complex cultural analysis as the primary method of research was used to investigate the unique features of each period. The study analyzed popularity of the performer of classical music within a particular sociocultural context and resulted in a set of distinct historyspecific concepts of popularity. This paper presents the findings on the evolution of public’s attitude toward musical performance and investigates historical group values determining popularity. It is noted that popularity is a matter of both church and secular music. Classical music performer, intentionally or not, addresses the problem of cultural education of the public and forms their values. At the same time, musicians directly depend on the existing tastes and preferences of their audience. This paradox of popularity has existed through all ages of European music culture. Popularity may take various forms from adoration to hate. In the field of classical music, popularity is achieved by people who have a certain charisma that in terms of attractiveness to the public matters more than professionalism.

The reincarnation of Tiger Mountain: Post-socializing the model opera film

This essay is about the politics of aesthetics in the cinematic making and remaking of the model opera (yangbanxi), a performative genre that was favorably engineered by Jiang Qing so as to facilitate politicized lives of Chinese masses by virtue of igniting and uniting the revolutionary fervor among peasants, workers and soldiers. Through a comparative analysis of the narrative schemas and aesthetic strategies deployed in Xie Tieli’s Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (1970) and Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this article raises the questions of how a multiplicity of utopian visions has been reincarnated and reembodied through the contemporary remaking of the iconic model opera film. It argues that the practice of cinematic remaking in post-reform China is constituted by the underpinning logics of the politics of nostalgia and the rearticulation of geopolitical desire. Furthermore, it posits the ways that the re-imagination of national popular is enriched with and complicated by the creative impulse of regional vernacular culture and technology of global gesture.

Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History

Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and the Performance of Native American History

Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al.

Reviewed by: Race and Performance After Repetition ed. by Soyica Diggs Colbert et al. Ariel Nereson Race and Performance After Repetition. Edited by Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel. Duke University Press, 2020. Cloth $104.95, Paper $28.95. 344 pages. 34 illustrations. The new collection Race and Performance After Repetition moves several fields forward, among them theatre, dance, and performance studies, Black studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and American studies. That it does so is a testament to the richness and interdisciplinarity of the animating impulse behind the collection, the thought of José Esteban Muñoz. The editors of the collection—Soyica Diggs Colbert, Douglas A. Jones Jr., and Shane Vogel—first convened a Targeted Research Working Session in Muñoz's name at the 2016 American Society for Theatre Research conference. Race and Performance After Repetition testifies to the ongoing resonance of Muñoz's thought as well as the complexity, energy, and gracefulness of the thinking inspired by three years of these gatherings. Colbert, Jones, and Vogel do tremendous service to the field in their introduction, "Tidying Up After Repetition." I have taught this introduction in seminars on Black performance and historiography, and its offerings are many, including a primer on the centrality of the concept of temporality to theories of performance and the formation of performance studies as a discipline. In describing performance practices that cannot be accounted for by the "grammar of repetition" (4), including Simone Leigh's Free People's Medical Clinic (2014), the editors provide the key insight that we might understand performance "not only as restored behavior, but as behaved restoration" (5). In this understanding, we twice-behave (following Richard Schechner) not in order to repeat but to repair, a stepping aside of repetition that allows for greater nuance in discussion of race, performance, time, and representation. The editors usefully characterize repetition as a "time signature," and curate a collection of essays that answer the question, posed in Muñoz's terms, "what other time signatures organize minoritarian performance?" (15). The [End Page 109] introduction closes with a reading of Theaster Gates's ongoing Dorchester Projects and the artist's performance of sweeping—tidying up—therein. Their reading insists on the necessity for developing "a more nuanced lexicon" for apprehending time, race, and performance, one that does not exclude repetition, but neither does it take repetition as an a priori condition of performance's temporality (24). Refusing this condition leads the collection's authors down much needed paths for understanding minoritarian performance. Three sections comprise the collection: "Toggling Time: Metatheaters of Race," focused on the reimagining of performance genres and their histories; "Choreo-Chronographies," which centers movement beyond the proscenium and its play with temporality; and "Temporal (Im)mobilities: Dwelling Out of Time," a set of offerings on the liberatory potentialities of stillness, silence, and stasis. Space precludes detailed discussion of every author's chapter, each of which, if they appeared in another volume, would likely be the strongest essay in the collection. The first section reads three dramatic forms and the implications of live performance's play with time for genre formation. Tavia Nyong'o turns a critical and measured eye to melodrama in his analysis of Afro-fabulation and dark reparation in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon. Catherine M. Young investigates the concurrent temporalities of the Black musical (transtemporalities across times, gestational time, racial time, and the time signatures of tap dance) in the 2016 Shuffle Along. The section ends fittingly with Patricia Herrera's formulation of the loop in hip hop theatre as a "sonic-temporal strategy" (71) used by Latinx and Black performers and activists to articulate relationships with the historical past that disrupt hegemonic temporal logics in Universes' Party People (2016). Taken as a section, these chapters speak to one another in powerful ways as they demonstrate the necessity of enlarging our critical vocabulary of interpreting minoritarian performance in order to account for its complexities. In the second section, Tina Post's compelling chapter addresses the "glitch" in time performed by boxer Joe Louis's movement archive that resonates with the practices of Louis's contemporary, Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker. Jasmine Johnson also...

Production of Digital Immersive Theater for Realization of Realistic Content of Tongyeong Ogwangdae

Unlike illusionism, which produces a sense of reality, the immersive theater has developed into a new performance genre wherein the method of acquiring a unique experience through the audience’s direct participation has primacy. The boundary between the audience and the stage is unclear. Korean traditional performance is especially characterized by the fact that the audience’s reaction affects the theater. The theater elements unique to Korea, as organized in madanggeuk, can be easily expanded into the exhibition and performance genre, and offer creative and diverse experiences. As a representative case of Korean traditional theater, Tongyeong Ogwangdae is thus analyzed and a “digital immersive theater,” as a new format of experiential content, is created by applying unique ID generation and identification technology based on location tracking of multiple users.

Educational constructions in distance learning landscape design

The article examines the еducational component of the distance learning format for bachelors landscape design, considering the study of the disciplines of the art cycle, considers the methodological foundations and approbation of the model for the formation of dynamic knowledge in distance learning. The possibilities of stimulating the creative process and obtaining the desired educational product in a distance learning format are described. The content of еducational constructions is analyzed, the significance of the development of motivational and emotional spheres, the development of emotional intelligence is indicated. The distance learning format in its new capacity is becoming more meaningful for the user and public expectations. The only competitive knowledge in a rapidly changing world is constantly forming new dynamic knowledge. In the process of self-renewal, innovation passes through a spiral of knowledge, acquires specificity, and begins to be realized. In a distance learning format, constantly forming new knowledge through its translator becomes available and acquires a new carrier, through certain metamorphoses. In experimental educational activities, a landscape cluster has proven itself well, including landscape design, Land art, eco-design, public art. Bachelors create art objects, work in the genres of performance and installation. prepare their own original works, which are presented at the reporting exhibition.

Archives in drag

‘Archives in drag: Performing nachaniya towards a queer theory of indenture’ takes as its object the figure of the Indo-Jamaican nachaniya dancer as a paradigm for re-thinking queer theories of indenture. Nachaniya is a highly stylized Indo-Jamaican folk dance featuring a heterosexual male dancing in drag. The performance, which can be traced to the nineteenth century, is still common within present-day Indo-Jamaican communities and the diaspora. Nachaniya therefore presents both parts of a queer historical and living archive. By using an archival photograph from the 1960s of a nachaniya dancer as a point of entry, I consider the ways in which this genre of Indo-Jamaican folk performance demonstrates gender non-normativity as deeply embedded within the indentured archive. Since nachaniya is also read as not necessarily queer but ‘cultural’, I am interested in the tensions between a refusal to categorize the performance as a kind of drag while simultaneously elevating its ‘cultural’ status and the slippage between ‘queer’ and ‘culture’. I consider the figure of the nachaniya dancer as what Anjali Arondekar has termed a site of ‘ordinary surplus’ rather than a site of queer exception. Through a reading of this queer archival photograph, I consider destabilizing narratives of loss or absence that saturate approaches to the queer archive of indenture to suggest that nachaniya is a useful paradigm for theorizing the nexus at which Indo-Jamaican archives and queers of indenture have been theorized as ‘nothing to see’.

The Branson Hillbilly: Commingling Power and Marginalization on the "Heartland" Stage

The Branson HillbillyCommingling Power and Marginalization on the "Heartland" Stage Joanna Dee Das (bio) and Jay Buchanan (bio) In 1967, nineteen-year-old Gary Presley did not put on a tie-dye T-shirt to participate in the iconic "Summer of Love." He also did not throw a bottle to participate in the more than 150 rebellions against racism and police brutality erupting in American cities across the country. Instead, he donned his grandfather's oversized overalls, plopped a broken straw hat on his head, and blacked out several of his teeth with an eyebrow pencil to transform himself into Herkimer, a hillbilly, for his family's variety show three miles outside of Branson, Missouri. The Mabes, who had been running their own variety show out of a municipal building downtown, opened a theatre across the highway one year later, featuring Jim Mabe as hillbilly Droopy Drawers. The entertainment industry in this Ozark Mountain small town exploded in the decades thereafter. By the dawn of the twenty-first century, more than forty-five theatres were operating over one hundred shows, many with their own hillbilly characters, for more than nine million tourists a year.1 While New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas are more nationally recognized US entertainment centers, Branson holds its own as a popular destination to see live performance, particularly for residents of the South, Midwest, and Southwest regions of the United States. Dominated by variety shows, Branson's entertainment industry abides by a motto called "The Three F's": Faith, Family, and Flag, a triumvirate of values linked to the rise of what is called "movement conservatism" in US politics.2 Yet vague assertions of values will not attract audiences; a show needs a character to embody these principles. Enter the hillbilly. The hillbilly is a stock character, [End Page 88] blending the long-standing "wise fool" archetype (e.g., Feste from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night) with stereotypes about poor whites from the Southern mountain regions of the United States. In early-twentieth-century US American theatre, the hillbilly stock character had a specific name—Toby—a "red-wigged, freckled, clownishly garbed country bumpkin who was the foil of the evil, conniving urban characters that tried to take advantage of simple rural people."3 The archetype was so popular that for several decades an entire genre of rural itinerant performance, the Toby Show, was built around it. This type of touring tent show faded into obscurity in the early 1960s, precisely when Gary first appeared as Herkimer and the rapid expansion of leisure nationwide enabled Branson's success as a tourism destination.4 At Presleys' Country Jubilee in the early 2020s, septuagenarian Gary has stopped blacking out his teeth, but he still bounds onstage in overalls six nights a week, ten months of the year, to tell jokes and engage in physical comedy. When asked why the Jubilee remained popular with audiences after several decades, he stated, "When you go to Hawaii, you want to see the Hula Girl. When you go to Branson, you want to see the hillbilly."5 The persistent popularity of hillbilly performance in Branson from the 1960s to the 2020s warrants a reconsideration of how expressive culture functions to create and sustain power structures in the United States. Power comes not simply in the form of wealth or in control of government; power comes in the form of being seen as someone who has influence, recognition, and admiration. How these affective registers of feelings interact with more traditional levers of power to determine one's standing in society is a subject of major debate. Historically peripheral to the plantation economy of the antebellum South, economically disadvantaged, and culturally scorned in the centuries thereafter, the hillbilly figure nevertheless bears a primary indicator of power and centrality in the United States: whiteness. And while there are hillbilly women, the classic hillbilly archetype is a man, so it also bears the privileges of masculinity.6 The hillbilly's commingling of marginalization and privilege plays out both onstage and off in Branson. Tourism boosters express frustration about the city's negative reputation as cheesy and backward, yet the destination's differentiating characteristic in a...

Princess Sodara Kartika frees Amir from prison; The epic of Amir Hamza (?16th century)

MS Jav. b. 2 (R) is among the earliest Javanese manuscripts brought to Europe by seafarers. It was presented to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 1629. Its text – titled Stories of Amir ( Caritanira Amir ) – sheds new light on the literary and cultural history of Java and the wider Java Sea world. Probably composed in the 1500s, possibly in Banten, the text contains part of an adaptation of the Malay Hikayat Amir Hamzah , itself a rendition of an eleventh-century text in Persian. The protagonist Hamza was an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. His epic story used to be told across Islamic Asia in a range of literary and performance genres. The text is Javanized not only in its language but also its poetics and (selectively) its natural and cultural settings. Among other things, Caritanira Amir helps to clarify the relationship between Middle and Modern Javanese, and it problematizes social, political, and religious issues that were evidently of concern in the early modern Java Sea world. Several appear in the excerpt presented here.

Director's Analysis of Evolutionary Modifications of Mykola Lysenko's Work “Drowned”

The process of evolutionary modifications of M. Lysenko's work "Drowned" based on M. Gogol's play "May Night, or Drowned" from its first premiere (1884) to the present is considered. The relevance of the chosen topic in the context of self-identification of the nation against the background of transnationalization of art is clarified. The research methodology with the choice of system-analytical, historical-typological, comparative, genre-stylistic and interpretive methods is outlined. The purpose of the research is to determine the specifics of musical and directorial versions of the work, performed at different times by theaters of Ukraine in the context of theatrical aesthetics of a certain era with the transformation of its genre and style features. The degree of complexity of the director's analysis of littleknown versions of Lysenko's work is revealed, at which the director has to investigate the composer's idea from the beginning of writing to making editorial changes, to turn to the historical circumstances reflected in it; to follow the transformation of the genre defined by the author; identify the events that contributed to the changes in the stage material, which had an impact on the director's decision of the play. It was found out that the directors-interpreters of M. Lysenko's work "Drowned" initially embodied this material as music for drama. Later, with the success of the play, the composer expanded the musical accompaniment of the numbers, and his followers completely orchestrated the work in the genre of great opera. The success of the performances is closely connected to the version for musical and dramatic theaters with dramatic monologues and dialogues of the characters, and the versions of major opera performances were mostly criticized and did not have a long life in theatrical repertoires. It is proved that in search of techniques, directors often lose the composer's idea of the work, coloristic mental features and distance their own idea when creating a play from the truly established issues of musical and literary stage original. The transformation of the material by different directors is considered, which provides an opportunity to highlight the strengths, rethink the obsolete means of expression, to transform the selected material for the modern audience in terms of integration theatrical processes. The analysis of scientific achievements on the chosen issues allows to state the fragmentary research of genre variations of M. Lysenko's work "Drowned" and stage incarnations of artistic images of characters in the context of sociopsychological and mental features of the Ukrainian ethnos. The review of evolutionary modifications of the work revealed an active attempt of authors and producers to transform the material from the dramatic — with the illustrative aspect of music (1884, Kharkiv), with the definition of the vector of musicaldramatic — with the solution of musical dramatic problems (1885, Odessa), the inclusion of mass choral and ballet scenes (1937, Odessa) and the transformation into the style of a large opera performance with interesting findings and dramatic gaps (1950, Kyiv).Current transformations of Lysenko’s work “Drowned” allow us to state that the stylistics of the genre of a great opera performance had a short stage life due to the loss of the tempo of events and is not used by musical theaters of Ukraine today. The musical-dramatic version, which is presented by many performances in Ukrainian theaters, is in great demand among the public due to the rapid dynamics of events, the colorful atmosphere of the Ukrainian village, well-resolved images of characters, so it is actively addressed by modern domestic directors. The scientific novelty of the research was revealed, which consists in determining the characteristic features of genre variations of Lysenko's work "Drowned", establishing the most promising aspects for the further development of the musical theater of Ukraine. Vectors of further research of the subject, comparative analysis of opera and music-dramatic versions with determination of character of temporitums in musical drama and director's interpretations, their rethinking according to new requirements and possibilities of a theatrical scene are predicted.

Poetic care: the orientations and relations of spoken word performance at three venues in East London

ABSTRACT This paper explores the performance of spoken word poetry at three venues in East London through an attention to the ways in which participants experience and conceptualize these expressive events. Drawing from observation at events and interviews with performers, this paper illuminates the most commonly reported motivations behind the uptake of this genre of performance: achieving emotional healing and providing coping tools to others. By investigating these motivations, this paper considers how spoken word performance can become a personal and collective process of care, where performers overcome individual struggle through shifting bodily orientations and attitudes, while attuning affectively with others through pedagogical caretaking relations.

Performance anxiety in young contemporary musicians

Most research on music performance anxiety has focused on classical musicians and those being trained in the classical genre. Few studies have considered the performance experiences of contemporary musicians. The purpose of the present study was to extend the literature base by focusing the lens squarely on young contemporary musicians. Students (n=202) at a large, contemporary music college completed a questionnaire pertaining to their performance experiences, anxiety, training and coping strategies, as well as the Kenny Music Performance Anxiety Inventory-revised (2009). Results indicate that performance anxiety is a common experience among young, contemporary musicians. Females reported greater anxiety than males and solo performances elicited more anxiety than group. Coping strategies tended to be holistic in nature. Comparison with a previously examined group of classical musicians indicates similarities in factor structure, with some key differences that may distinguish between performance genres.

Features of development of the violin art in the modern theatre

The foundation of the scientific basis for understanding the processes of development of modern violin art is relevant, since it allows discovering the foundations and results of transformations in the musical consciousness. The relevance of the study is determined by the decisive modifications that occur in the space of culture and affect the type of modern theatrical art. The purpose of this study is a comprehensive analysis of specific features of the violin art in the modern theatre. For this purpose, the following research methods were employed in this study: the method of analysis and the method of synthesis, induction and deduction, comparative historical and logical analysis, as well as the positions of scientific objectivity, systematisation in the study of works of violin art. The authors of the study analysed and summarised features of the development of the violin art in the modern theatre of the 21st century. The modern theatrical creativity with the use of violin art is considered from the standpoint of consistency, as a kind of artistic integrity, in which the manner of performance, repertoire, and the choice of the genre of performance play a certain role.

“SUICIDE” ON THE KHARKIV STAGE: MUSIC AND STAGE READING BY S. PASICHNYK – H. FROLOV

Statement of the problem. The article examines the theatrical heritage of Les Kurbas, the founder of Shevchenko Kharkiv Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre (originally called «Berezil»). Les Kurbas is the reformer of the Ukrainian theater; his theatrical ideas demonstrate a new understanding of the synthesis of the arts. He concentrated his creative aspirations not only on acting, but also on all components of the performance, in particular on music. The paper examines methodically the application of the basic principles of Les Kurbas Theatre – the co-authorship of the director and composer – in Kharkiv theatre. The article also studies the works by H. Frolov – talented Kharkiv composer. The critical legacy dedicated to the works of Les Kurbas does not fully illuminate the uniqueness of his views regarding directing and the originality of the musical language in the genre of dramatic performance (CherkashynaHubarenko, 2002; Hordieiev, 2003; Yermakova, 2012; Labinska, 2012). There are a number of works devoted to the issues of music in theater (Kurysheva, 1984; Kozyurenko, 1986; Tarshis, 2010; Matsepura, 2013; Lesakova, 2017; Oseeva, 2019; Kovalchuk, 2017; Nurtazin, 2013; Spagnolo, 2017). The novelty of our research. The paper investigates musical component in the current practice of Shevchenko Kharkiv Academic Ukrainian Drama Theatre and creative method of its leading composer H. Frolov. The aim of the article is to reveal the interconnection of music with the stage elements of the performance. The study of the stage play “Suicide” in Kharkiv Drama Theater required the implementation a number of scientific approaches: historical and genetic, studying the modern function of music in the analyzed dramatic performance in Kharkiv Drama Theater, the origins of which go back to Kurbas “Berezil”; a comparative analysis, revealing the ways of preserving old traditions in modern performance; genre analysis, investigating the embodiment of the comedy dell arte in the musical scenes; stylistic analysis, revealing the composer’s thinking in making the director’s decision regarding stagecraft. The presentation of the main material. The article analyzes a musical component in the stage performance “Suicide” based on the play by Nikolay Erdman (1928), reinterpreted by our contemporaries – the stage director Stepan Pasichnyk and the composer Henadii Frolov. The work reviews the production itself and the acting troupe. The article outlines the inheritance and development of the traditions in Les Kurbas Theatre regarding the mutual work of the composer and director, aimed at the organic fusion of the stage action and musical accompaniment of the performance. Conclusions. Dramaturgical and genre-compositional analyzes of the performance detected such distinctive features of the individual style of H. Frolov as: musical organization of the stage with one intonation, which, depending on the drama, can be flexible and transformative, acquiring new meanings and qualities and thus making the musical development monothematic; unity of the figurative and semantic layers of music with the director’s concept of the performance; transformation of genre features of tragic farce and commedia dell’arte.

Creative principles of Mykola Manoilo’s vocal pedagogy

Statement of the problem. The article is devoted to the outstanding figure of vocal art of Slobozhanshchyna Mykola Fedorovych Manoilo (1927–1998), the opera singer, who was awarded the title of “People’s Artist of the USSR” (1976) for impeccable performance of baritone parts of the classical repertoire on the stage of Kharkiv Theatre of Opera and Ballet, as well as of the chamber repertoire compiled of Ukrainian folk songs and works by Ukrainian composers. Based on his own experience of studying in the class of solo singing of M. Manoilo (1988), the author of the article offers the experience of scientific and methodological generalization of creative principles of vocal pedagogy of the teacher, while emphasizing the role of Manoilo as a unique singer. The relevance of the topic and its practical significance are stipulated by the urgent need of vocal pedagogy to form a tradition of scientific reflection on the specialization of the vocalist, the representation of classical guidelines and methods in the modern dimension, establishing creative contacts of different generations. The purpose of the article is to reveal the pedagogical principles by M. Manoilo as an outstanding representative of the Kharkiv vocal school, genealogy and dominant features of his performing creative work. Analysis of recent research and publications. The creative figure of M. Manoilo has not yet received serious coverage in the domestic musicology yet. Existing sources are brief biographic descriptions in reference books and encyclopaedias, the anthology “Ukrainian singers in the memoirs of contemporaries, compiler I. Lysenko (2003), or mentions of his name in books on the artistic life of Kharkiv (O. Chepalov, 2012; Tsurkan, 2013). The methodology contains a number of interrelated approaches to the study of the phenomenon of the singer’s artistic personality: historiographical, biographical, performing, and phenomenological. Presentation of basic research material. M. Manoilo inherited the principles of vocal pedagogy from P. Golubev, who taught at the Kharkiv Conservatory (1930–1953) and was the successor of the classical school of Italian bel canto singing, as a student of F. Bugamelli, which was involved by I. Slatin in teaching vocals at the Kharkiv Music College (1901–1918). The creative principles of the artist-interpreter M. Manoilo are a compendium of his mastery: ● orientation on the generally accepted standard of sounding of a voice (bel canto); ● persistent search for individual reading of the role on the path of constant musical and intellectual self-growth; ● word culture; ● unity of sound-forming technology and artistic and aesthetic principles of a musical work, due to its genre and stylistic nature; ● psychological authenticity (own experience of “entering” the image and its “living-through”) and the singer’s ability for self-analysis; ● mental and psychological signs of artistic personality – great persistence and strength of character, the desire to reach the highest point (acme) of creative self-representation. The “denominator” of M. Manoilo’s performing skills is the style – the performer’s orientation for the accuracy of the composer’s text. The results obtained. The principles of M. Manoilo’s vocal pedagogy were based on the basis of generalization of own scenic experience as a system of generally acquired and personality-oriented principles: – sound culture (uniformity of construction of the singing range; flexibility, strength, flight of voice, use of mixed register, rounding, covering); sound word culture; attention to diction; – author-centrism of the singer’s interpretation of the vocal-stage image; – high artistic taste, which is formed through the education of musicality, diverse repertoire, and a sense of performance drama; – high artistic taste, which is formed through the education of musicality, diverse repertoire, and a sense of performance drama; – trust in intuition, which the singer should constantly “check” with his/her own intellect according to the composer’s text. Conclusions. As the heir of the Italian tradition of singing, in all genres of performance M. Manoilo represented such qualities as: proper breathing (free passage of all resonator zones), beautifully designed, high-quality singing tone, theatrical voice, which was overlapping the sound of the orchestra, sonority, flight, equality of the whole range. From the domestic singing paradigm one should add to Manoilo’s artistic portfolio the following: ● recitative-speech cut of vocal intonation (melodic nature of singing is enriched by the relief of declamatory vocalization); ● clear diction of the word being sung to reach the minds and hearts of listeners and establish a dialogue with the author; ● cordocentrism – a particularly intense intra-emotional tone of performance as a personification of the Ukrainian “philosophy of the heart” (Н. Skovoroda); ● integrative type of performing thinking – the unity of poetic-intonation and stage-artistic image of the singer. If a super-goal of music is, according to Aristotle, the entelechy, then singing technique is a way to achieve it. Such was the universal basis of M. Manoilo’s requirements of to himself, as well as to the students of his solo singing class

Editorship and History Making: On Historicizing Modern Editions of Tiruniḻalmāla

In the following essay I am going to comment briefly on the intersection between literary and performative genres that originated in early modern Kerala and to some extent continue till date. More specifically, on their relationship with the rich tradition of representing the past through producing works that follow recognizable patterns of composition and conventions of presentation. This more general consideration shall appear here as a backdrop to a study on contemporary editions of an early Malayalam work named Tiruniḻalmāla. The editions follow the relatively recent discovery of the work in question and its subsequent reinstatement in the history of Malayalam literature. I shall argue that the specific ways this reinstatement was presented by the editors, including a particular place they claimed for this work within the formation processes of Malayalam literature, constitute competing acts of general history writing concerned with the ongoing debate on how should the cultural identity and regional history of Kerala be best represented.

Textuality in a Jazz Aesthetic: Textual Rituals for Transformation in Sharon Bridgforth’slove conjure/blues

AbstractTermed a “performance novel” in the introduction to the Redbone Press edition and a “text installation” in its performance iteration, Sharon Bridgforth’s love conjure/blues (2004) is performance literature that also offers a heightened textual experience within the jazz aesthetic’s performance tradition. Through its intricate lineation, syntax, typography, orthography, punctuation, and onomatopoeia, as well as through the representation of text in ritual settings, Bridgforth’s textuality does its own performance work on the page, twining literature, orature, bodily, and spiritual experience tightly together as it affirms multiple literacies, building on queer, trans, African American, Yoruba, jazz, and southern histories. In Bridgforth’s counterintuitive interest in and commitment to textuality within a performance genre, we see the values of the theatrical jazz aesthetic itself: here, invention and multiplicity are borne out by its groundedness in text and performance at once, in textual and embodied language together. In this way Bridgforth’s textuality serves the text’s rituality and the jazz aesthetic’s own goals. By focalizing textuality’s materiality, love conjure/blues claims ritual textuality as a tool with distinctive affordances within the jazz aesthetic tradition. This highly physicalized, ritual textuality acts as an instrument of conjure and contributes to the text’s representational and spiritual goals while expanding our concept of what innovative poetic texts might look like and accomplish.

“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.