Suchergebnisse

The question of rhythm is a social, a cultural, and a political question. How to find a rhythm? And, more importantly, how can the economy find a rhythm, without tending towards the mastering of chaos and the prediction of unexpected events?

This response experiments with the practice of the interval, in order to performatively write in the little perceptual and cognitive gaps opening between the act of reading Erin Manning's article 'Wondering the world directly', and the gesture of looking at the sky. The idea of the interval is in fact taken directly from Manning's piece, together with Whiteheadian concepts such as 'prehension', 'superject', 'nexus', 'eternal object' and 'society'. The aim is to respond to the way Manning's writing amplifies the experience of cloud watching by proposing an elision of consciousness from the experience itself, and by replacing subjectivity with the more-than-human magic of 'wondering the world'. It is, therefore, thanks to the reading of Manning's article, that the experience of looking can reveal itself as a 'becoming-cloud'. This response tries to also give something in conceptual exchange.

This article will test the functioning of topology in the analysis of a particular choreography by Anglo-Indian kathak dancer Akram Khan and French ballet dancer Sylvie Guillem, titled Sacred Monsters, a dance performed between classical traditions and contemporary styles. In particular, we will draw on Alfred N. Whitehead's "mereotopology," a topology of "regions" (rather than "points") where the ontological relation between A and B as perceivable and thinkable "regions" allows us to bypass the infamous dualism of body and mind (or the topological aporia between process and point). The final aim will be to isolate from the choreography of Sacred Monsters some gestures as mereotopological invariants or perceivable movement sections, simultaneously abstracting them from their physical and cultural dimensions and revealing them as "virtual movement-objects" to be differently actualized: rather than an ethnographic analysis of the performed dance in its physico/cultural peculiarities, a mereotopological, abstractly empirical study of its space and time.