Body Awareness in Performer Training: The Hidden Legacy of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984)

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Loukes
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Psychiatric Patients ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
Early Career ◽  
The Body ◽  
Expressive Movement ◽  
Movement Training ◽  
Human Functioning ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many

Explaining this work is like trying to explain how a strawberry tastes to someonewho has never tasted a strawberry.Gertrud Falke-Heller 1980This statement may resonate with many who practice, teach, or write about dance and movement training and performance, but it is particularly apt in relation to the work of Gertrud Falke-Heller (1891–1984). Her extraordinary career spanned almost sixty years, and she worked with some of the most influential figures in European modern dance and performance, including Rudolph Laban, Mary Wigman, and Kurt Jooss. The training she developed, based mainly on the work of German body awareness pioneer Elsa Gindler (1885–1961), did not have a name, and little documentation about it exists. After an early career as a performer in Hamburg, Falke-Heller taught this form of training for Ballet Jooss at Dartington Hall in the 1930s. She developed her work after World War II with psychiatric patients in a variety of hospitals in England and Scotland and died at her home in London in 1984. In an interview given four years before her death, Falke-Heller lists the following questions and concerns that underpinned her work in the many different contexts to which it has been applied:The body awareness in the sitting, standing, walking, lying down in all human functioning. What is expressive movement? Where does it start to be really interesting? And where is it empty? Then also the space—the dynamic in the room. That's what I was always interested in from the beginning. (Falke-Heller 1980)

Investigation of Body Awareness Level and Performance Emotional Status of Athletes in Different Branches of Sports

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
Arzu Erden ◽  
Murat Emirzeoğlu
Keyword(s):  
Normal Distribution ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Distribution Data ◽  
Emotional Status ◽  
Basketball Players ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Sports Clubs ◽  
And Performance

Context: The level of body awareness, performance emotional state (PES), and demographic characteristics in different sports are subjects to be investigated. It is important to examine the concepts of PES and body awareness to better understand the body–mind relationship in different sports. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate the level of body awareness and PES of athletes. Design: In this cross-sectional study, the independent variables are groups (4 different sports), and the dependent variables are body awareness and PES. Participants: The study was conducted on 188 licensed athletes (85 footballers, 36 basketball players, 34 handball players, and 33 swimmers). The mean age of the participants was 14.64 (1.89) years, mean height was 172.44 (11.03) cm, and mean body weight was 62.35 (13.12) kg. Settings: Four sports clubs and 2 high schools were the intervention facilities. Intervention: Body Awareness Questionnaire and Continuous Optimal Performance Emotional Status Scale-2 were used for data collection. Sociodemographic information was recorded. Main Outcome Measures: One-way analysis of variance was used for analysis of normal distribution data in 4 different groups, and the Kruskal–Wallis test was used for the analysis of data that did not show normal distribution. Results: There was no difference in body awareness among the branches (P = .17). The PES of the footballers was better than that of other athletes (P = .01). The correlation between body awareness and PES was medium (r = .47, P < .01), and the correlations between body awareness and age, licensed year, and number of weekly training sessions were weak (r = .22, P < .01; r = .19, P < .01; r = .15, P = .03). Conclusions: The body awareness of athletes may not differ among different sports, but PES is related to many factors such as mood, age, license years, and number of training sessions. In rehabilitation and training, body awareness and PES should be evaluated together.

Priming the Body: Breath as a Foundation for Exploring Ethical Performance Practice

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-21
Author(s):  
Leena Rouhiainen
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
Teaching Experiment ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Psychotherapy ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Critical Skills ◽  
Theatre Pedagogy ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Performance Project

Abstract This article contemplates how the cultivation of breath through specific body awareness techniques might be understood to support a dialogical and ethical relatedness between collaborators constructing a performance through an open-ended process. The article introduces a teaching experiment based mainly upon exercises drawn from strands of body psychotherapy that took place within a larger experimental and cross-artistic workshop and performance project. This project aimed at enhancing the collaborative, creative, and critical skills of MA students in dance and theatre pedagogy of the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. The article discusses the overall artistic project as well as the kind of bodywork the teaching experiment involved, and it makes a phenomenologically oriented reading of the written interview material gathered from the students. The specific theoretical perspective taken on the topic draws from two phenomenologically inspired thinkers, namely, Luce Irigaray’s and Timo Klemola’s views on the influence that cultivation of breathing can have on subjectivity. The article suggests that exploring and cultivating breathing through compassion can support the evolution of ethical collaboration in open-ended performance processes.

Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living on after the End of the World

10.1068/a391 ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Considerable Effect ◽  
The Body ◽  
Primary Role ◽  
American Social Science ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many

This paper offers a sustained reflection on the nature of corporeal vulnerability as an inherent and noneliminable aspect of corporeal existence. One of the many remarkable things about the recent interest in embodiment, emotion, practice, and performance, in the body-in-action, in the social sciences is the general lack of thought that has been given to the fact of vulnerability. The paper suggests that thinking through the nature of vulnerability could have a considerable effect on how we think about embodiment as well as on wider processes of subjectification, signification, and sociality. However, because of the persistence of a primary role being given to intentional or auto-affective action in the theorisation of embodiment across a number of theoretical perspectives, vulnerability remains largely unthought of within much current work on the body within Anglo-American social science. Drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and reflecting on experiences of corporeal expropriation such as insomnia and exhaustion, I suggest how we may begin to think sensibility and the sensuous beyond their almost exclusive interpretation in terms of comprehension, purpose, or intention while retaining the irreducibility of corporeal life to a matter of social construction or contextual epiphenomenon. Thus, the paper develops an account of corporeal life as inherently susceptible, receptive, exposed, as inherently open beyond its capacities, and reflects on the implications of this realisation for thinking about the genesis of meaning and signification and the social relation.

scholarly journals Of Vessels, Conduits and Instruments: Reflections from the Bodies as Media Working Group

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-115
Author(s):  
Nelesi Rodríguez ◽  
Eugenia Manwelyan
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Working Group ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Pedagogical Tool ◽  
Community Of Learning ◽  
Working Together ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Individual

In the fall of 2016, a group of artists and educators met regularly over the course of three months to explore the many ways in which the human body mediates experience and knowledge. In their time working together, the Bodies as Media Working Group (BaM) explored the ways in which the (human) body comes to know, understand, and communicate ancestry, memory, ecology, emotionality, creativity, and even death. This working group was created as part of the School of Apocalypse (SoA), a NYC-based community of learning that examines connections between creative practice and survival.  The BaM working group encapsulated its learning process by designing and producing a resource in the form of a deck of cards containing instructions and prompts meant to be activated as a ritual that aims to “turn on” people’s body awareness and to prepare their bodies to learn. In designing a pedagogical tool for the body, BaM aims to reconstitute the individual and social body contained most commonly in the classroom as open, trusting, and alert. The tool thereby redesigns the space within which learning takes place without making any physical alterations to it, but rather by reconfiguring the group’s relationship to it and within it.

Representing utility and deploying the body

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Spurrett
Keyword(s):  
Functional Activity ◽  
Degrees Of Freedom ◽  
The Body ◽  
Target Article ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
The Many

Abstract Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.

John Cranko's Antigone (1959): A Ballet Lost and Found

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Henrietta Bannerman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Jean Racine ◽  
World War ◽  
Martha Graham ◽  
Detailed Consideration ◽  
Lost And Found ◽  
The Many ◽  
Tragic Drama ◽  
The Relationship

John Cranko's dramatic and theatrically powerful Antigone (1959) disappeared from the ballet repertory in 1966 and this essay calls for a reappraisal and restaging of the work for 21st century audiences. Created in a post-World War II environment, and in the wake of appearances in London by the Martha Graham Company and Jerome Robbins’ Ballets USA, I point to American influences in Cranko's choreography. However, the discussion of the Greek-themed Antigone involves detailed consideration of the relationship between the ballet and the ancient dramas which inspired it, especially as the programme notes accompanying performances emphasised its Sophoclean source but failed to recognise that Cranko mainly based his ballet on an early play by Jean Racine. As Antigone derives from tragic drama, the essay investigates catharsis, one of the many principles that Aristotle delineated in the Poetics. This well-known effect is produced by Greek tragedies but the critics of the era complained about its lack in Cranko's ballet – views which I challenge. There is also an investigation of the role of Antigone, both in the play and in the ballet, and since Cranko created the role for Svetlana Beriosova, I reflect on memories of Beriosova's interpretation supported by more recent viewings of Edmée Wood's 1959 film.

‘Man Is Ill Because He Is Badly Constructed’: Artaud, Klossowski and Deleuze in Search for the Earth Inside

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Dolphijn
Keyword(s):  
Performance Art ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
The Body ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Performance

Starting with Antonin Artaud's radio play To Have Done With The Judgement Of God, this article analyses the ways in which Artaud's idea of the body without organs links up with various of his writings on the body and bodily theatre and with Deleuze and Guattari's later development of his ideas. Using Klossowski (or Klossowski's Nietzsche) to explain how the dominance of dialogue equals the dominance of God, I go on to examine how the Son (the facialised body), the Father (Language) and the Holy Spirit (Subjectification), need to be warded off in order to revitalize the body, reuniting it with ‘the earth’ it has been separated from. Artaud's writings on Balinese dancing and the Tarahumaran people pave the way for the new body to appear. Reconstructing the body through bodily practices, through religion and above all through art, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, we are introduced not only to new ways of thinking theatre and performance art, but to life itself.

ARTISTIC AND AESTHETIC EDUCATION AND MUSICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY OF A SPECIALIST’S TRAINING

2020 ◽  
Vol 384 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232
Author(s):  
P. V. Menshikov ◽  
G. K. Kassymova ◽  
R. R. Gasanova ◽  
Y. V. Zaichikov ◽  
V. A. Berezovskaya ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Piano Music ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Native Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Many ◽  
Special Meaning

A special role in the development of a pianist as a musician, composer and performer, as shown by the examples of the well-known, included in the history of art, and the most ordinary pianists, their listeners and admirers, lovers of piano music and music in general, are played by moments associated with psychotherapeutic abilities and music features. The purpose of the study is to comprehend the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities (using pianists as an example). The research method is a theoretical analysis of the psychotherapeutic aspects of performing activities: the study of the possibilities and functions of musical psychotherapy in the life of a musician as a “(self) psychotherapist” and “patient”. For almost any person, music acts as a way of self-understanding and understanding of the world, a way of self-realization, rethinking and overcoming life's difficulties - internal and external "blockages" of development, a way of saturating life with universal meanings, including a person in the richness of his native culture and universal culture as a whole. Art and, above all, its metaphorical nature help to bring out and realize internal experiences, provide an opportunity to look at one’s own experiences, problems and injuries from another perspective, to see a different meaning in them. In essence, we are talking about art therapy, including the art of writing and performing music - musical psychotherapy. However, for a musician, music has a special meaning, special significance. Musician - produces music, and, therefore, is not only an “object”, but also the subject of musical psychotherapy. The musician’s training includes preparing him as an individual and as a professional to perform functions that can be called psychotherapeutic: in the works of the most famous performers, as well as in the work of ordinary teachers, psychotherapeutic moments sometimes become key. Piano music and performance practice sets a certain “viewing angle” of life, and, in the case of traumatic experiences, a new way of understanding a difficult, traumatic and continuing to excite a person event, changing his attitude towards him. It helps to see something that was hidden in the hustle and bustle of everyday life or in the patterns of relationships familiar to a given culture. At the same time, while playing music or learning to play music, a person teaches to see the hidden and understand the many secrets of the human soul, the relationships of people.

Statistical Data as a Source of Information on the Great Patriotic War

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 105-113
Author(s):  
T. G. Nekhaeva
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Information Sources ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Logical Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
Information Warfare ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
Historical Truth ◽  
Great Victory

The article examines publication of statistical data commemorating the anniversaries of the USSR Victory in the Great Patriotic War as the most important information sources for an objective analysis of historical events. The reason for writing this article was the release of the statistical handbook of Rosstat, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Great Victory. In the introduction, the author argues the current urgency of issues addressed in the article caused by information warfare aimed at distorting the historical truth about the role of our country in the anti-Hitler coalition and the defeat of fascism in the World War II. The body of the article describes the concept and content of the anniversary edition. An important point of the article is the analysis of data sources used in the preparation of the handbook. The author reviews the anniversary handbook structure that includes a preface and the following sections: Population, Economic, Living conditions, Mobilization of population, Partisan movement, Evacuation during the war, Casualties and losses during the war, Military memorials and cemeteries, State awards, References. It is noted that the handbook maintains the tradition of previous statistical publications dedicated to the anniversaries of the Great Victory. Lastly, the author substantiates the novelty of data presented in the anniversary handbook and the logical structure of statistical materials in it. The author draws conclusions about the paramount importance of, and need to continue popularization of data on the great exploits of the Soviet people during the war and to introduce new statistical information into scientific circulation, which is causing further comprehension of primary information sources about the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.

Choir

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Pryce
Keyword(s):  
Formal Group ◽  
Body Awareness ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Contemplative Practice ◽  
Ritual Action ◽  
Important Relationship ◽  
Positive Knowledge

Expanding on the notion of “keeping intention,” introduced in Chapter 2, Chapter 5 shows how contemplative Christians refine their capacity to “keep attention” and cultivate “contemplative senses” through formal group rituals, body awareness techniques, and the construction of aesthetic environments. It notes the contemplative Christian concept of the Body of Christ in which individual bodies and the collective body are perceived as interconnected entities with expandable and contractible boundaries. The chapter describes the monastic Daily Office and how non-monastic contemplatives adapt monastic rites to their lives outside monasteries. Introducing the important relationship between agency and habitus in contemplative practice, the chapter also develops a model that explicates the process of changing perception, called “contemplative transformation,” as an ever-moving ritualization between “posture” (intentional cataphatic ritual action and positive knowledge) and “flow” (apophatic, ambiguous “inner gestures” and “unknowing”).

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