The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia

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Irina Sirotkina (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia) Roger Smith (Lancaster University, UK, and Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)

The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde

Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia

Irina Sirotkina (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia), Roger Smith (Lancaster University, UK, and Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)

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English

Methuen Drama
20 April 2017

Dance

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.

By: Irina Sirotkina (National Research University Higher School of Economics Russia), Roger Smith (Lancaster University, UK, and Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia)
Imprint: Methuen Drama
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 138mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 417g
ISBN: 9781350014312
ISBN 10: 1350014311
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 20 April 2017
Audience: College/higher education , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

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).

Reviews for The Sixth Sense of the Avant-Garde: Dance, Kinaesthesia and the Arts in Revolutionary Russia

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. * CHOICE *