The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia
- Author: Sirotkina, Irina
- Author: Smith, Roger
This volume examines kinesthesia-the sense of movement-as a foundation of personal knowledge and cultural innovation, claiming primacy of kinesthesia over the other senses in that it affords...
The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia
- Author: Sirotkina, Irina
- Author: Smith, Roger
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This volume examines kinesthesia-the sense of movement-as a foundation of personal knowledge and cultural innovation, claiming primacy of kinesthesia over the other senses in that it affords...
About
The touch and movement senses have a large place in the modern arts. This is widely discussed and celebrated, often enough as if it represents a breakthrough in a primarily visual age. 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.
Contents
- 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
Awards and reviews
This volume examines kinesthesia-the sense of movement-as a foundation of personal knowledge and cultural innovation, claiming primacy of kinesthesia over the other senses in that it affords unmediated contact with the world. Grounding their analysis of this "sixth sense" in historical context, Sirotkina and Smith reference the attraction of late-19th-century Europeans to ancient Hellenic life, citing a joyful universalism that particularly appealed to late czarist and revolutionary-era Russians. Evidencing the spirit of "exuberant modernism," movement-particularly dance-is seen as central to avant-garde culture, infusing poetry, mysticism, literary analysis, graphic art, and theater. Andrei Bely's acute sensitivity to gesture becomes his verse, and Vladimir Mayakovsky is seen to compose "posters, like poems, with his whole body." The celebrated artistic union of Sergei Yesenin and Isadora Duncan comes to life as a shining instance of the primacy of movement across the arts, and Vsevolod Meyerhold develops his biomechanical exercises for training actors. The concluding chapter projects the avant-gardists' primacy of movement to present-day validation of kinesthetic experience as a vital source of knowledge. The translation is labored in places, but the extensive notes and suggestions for further reading compensate and make the book invaluable. Summing Up: Recommended
