The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde_ Irina Sirotkina

Introduction: Movement and Exuberant

But the leap questions these categories: the woman feels with the body and there is knowledge. (2)

The woman has a public. Yet the image still has the power to undermine and to transcend description. 

Kinaesthesia, the sense of movement, as both a source of personal knowledge and a resource for innovation in the arts and wider culture. 

The flexibility and nuance of language matches the variability and delicacy of awareness. As a result, there has long been, and still is, large debate about proper description of mental states. 

subjective experiences are tactile-kinaesthetic experiences. They are experiences of one's own body and body movement; they are experiences of animate form. All these activities presuppose some sense and knowledge of movement. Language referring to the body and embodiment is everywhere, from cognitive neuroscience to film theory. What is perhaps not so widely appreciated is that this cultural life takes for granted the existence of movement sense. 

 

The essence of modernism was abstraction, understood as a move away from embodied forms of representation. kinesthetic awareness was a cultivated skill with particular meanings and techniques.

Kinesthetic semiotics. nouns to verbs, mimesis to kinesis, the textualized space to co-experienced time. 

New understanding of the relationship between body and place - dwelling body

theorize anew, through kinaesthesia, the relation of aesthetics and politics. ~ James Loxely (...) it is well placed to insist on the importance of these other, marginalized, "nonserious" modes of experience, modes whose marginality is a function not of their insignificance but of their repression. 

By capturing the experiential component of living process, performance studies may open up a novel epistemology, new ways of sensing and knowing both the world and ourselves. 

 

Communication, he claimed, introduces 'vulnerability and self-disclosure' ~ exemplified by the performance of movement. (Conquergood) This is knowledge that is anchored in practice and circulated within a performance community, but is ephemeral. ~ The feeling of one's body moving in a free and creative way. 

 

And as we discuss in connection with the place of movement in esoteric practices, there is considerable interest in the notion of 'presence', a special state in which the human person as observing subject comes to feel, and perhaps to be, one with the world. 

 

In the opening chapter, we point out that, by the early nineteenth century, there was a literature differentiating touch and movement senses. It then became a standard feature of discussions to claim that the sensory couple, movement and resistance to movement, gives an unmediated sensory awareness of 'the real'. 

Bodily feelings in general in creating knowledge of self and other. 

In chapter 2, we introduce the ideal of 'higher sensitivity' and its exemplification in Kandinsky's abstract art and the combination of the senses, even synaesthesia, that this involved. 

Then we turn, in chapter 3, to the art most obviously and directly expressive of the movement sense, dance, and inthe light of the impact of Isadora Duncan in Russia, sketch in the origins of free dance and, most specifically, a distinctively Russian tradition of what was, and still is, called musical movement. 

The next chapter then takes up the movement that is gesture and language, first in the mobile body and language of the poet Andrei Bely. dance movement to the poetry of the Futurist avant-garde. 

This is also evident in chapter 5, where we show the place of dance and movement exercises in Georgy Gurdjieff's esoteric circle, which owed much to what Aleksandr and Jeanne Salzmann brought from the theatre and from Dalcrozian rhythmics. 

In the last two chapters, we make explicit what is implicit throughout, the word of practices of thinking with the body. Biomechanics passed from being a medical science into Meyerhold's theatre and to Shklovsky's experiments with breaking the automatism of conventional language. 

 

1. The Sixth Sense

The senses

Muscular Feeling and kinaesthesia

 

2. Search for Deeper Knowledge

The kinaesthetic intellect

'The higher sensitivity'

Kinaesthesia and synaesthesia

 

3. Expression in Dance

The new dance

The Russian Hellenes

'Ach, the devil take it, again they're dancing here'

 

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

 

5. By 'the fourth Way'

the mystic arts

From Dalcroze and Gurdjieff

'Presence'

 

6. Thinking with the Body

Mayakovsky dances the foxtrot

Brik-dance

Who thought up biomechanics?

 

7. Art as Bodily Knowledge

Technique

Kinaesthesia in culture

 

 

 

cf. Biomechanics and Mayakovsky's theatre

https://thedramateacher.com/meyerholds-biomechanics-for-theatre/

Meyerhold's Biomechanics for Theatre | The Drama Teacher