The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia

Irina Sirotkina, Roger Smith (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

232 Seiten

2018
Methuen Drama (Verlag)
978-1-350-08740-8 (ISBN)

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This book turns to history to show just how significant movement and the sense of movement were to pioneers of modernism at the turn of the 20th century. It makes this history vivid through a picture of movement in the lives of an extraordinary generation of Russian artists, writers, theatre people and dancers bridging the last years of the tsars and the Revolution. Readers will gain a new perspective on the relation between art and life in the period 1890-1920 in great innovators like the poets Mayakovsky and Andrei Bely, the theatre director Meyerhold, the dancer Isadora Duncan and the young men and women in Russia inspired by her lead, and esoteric figures like Gurdjieff.

Movement, and the turn to the body as a source of natural knowledge, was at the centre of idealistic creativity and hopes for a new age, for a ‘new man’, and this was true both for those who looked forward to the technology of the future and those who looked back to the harmony of Ancient Greece. The book weaves history and analysis into a colourful, thoughtful affirmation of movement in the expressive life.

Irina Sirotkina is a lecturer at the Institute for the Theory and History of the Humanities, The Research University – Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russian Federation. She is a cultural historian who has published on the history of psychiatry and on the history of free dance. Roger Smith is Emeritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster University, UK and Associate Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russian Federation. He is an internationally well known historian and philosopher of psychology and the human sciences, the author of standard texts in the field as well as specialist studies relating to the history of mind and brain and the understanding of ‘being human’, including Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), and The Norton History of the Human Sciences (1997).

List of illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Note on text/translation

List of abbreviations

Introduction: Movement and exuberant modernism

Chapter 1 The sixth sense
The senses
Muscular feeling and kinaesthesia

Chapter 2 Search for deeper knowledge
The kinaesthetic intellect
‘The higher sensitivity’
Kinaesthesia and synaesthesia

Chapter 3 Expression in dance
The new dance
The Russian Hellenes
‘Ach, the devil take it, they’re dancing here again’

Chapter 4 Speaking movement
The perfect language: Andrei Bely on gesture
The dance-word: the creative union of Esenin and Duncan
Word plasticity: the budetliane and the bare-footed

Chapter 5 By ‘the fourth way’
The mystic arts
From Dalcroze to Gurdjieff
‘Presence’

Chapter 6 Thinking with the body
Mayakovsky dances the fox-trot
Brik-dance
Who thought up biomechanics?

Chapter 7 Art as bodily knowledge
Technique
Kinaesthesia in culture

Further reading
Notes
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	28.12.2018
Zusatzinfo	15 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Gewicht	290 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport ► Tanzen / Tanzsport
ISBN-10	1-350-08740-8 / 1350087408
ISBN-13	978-1-350-08740-8 / 9781350087408
Zustand	Neuware