Noise + Speed: A Comtemporary Dance

Review of “Noise + Speed” by Deborah Jowitt, originally published in the Village Voice, May 20, 2008

Hilary Easton + Company
Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, NYC
May 8 – 10, 2008

Hilary Easton approaches contemporary horrors by devising movement structures that mirror social disintegration. In Noise + Speed, she revisits the Italian Futurists, who, between two world wars, preached the violent disruption of art traditions, embraced technology, and glorified combat. Making use of texts such as F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909) and seasoning their rants with Doris Humphrey’s prescriptive The Art of Making Dances, Easton attempts to show how oversimplification and institutionalization can corrupt theories so gradually that we fail to notice the malignancy. Noise + Speed may be her most complex and ambitious piece, and, engrossing as it is, it sometimes has a hard time conveying all that it must through dance.

Three of Marinetti’s artworks, enlarged, show black-painted words and letters exploding. Actor Steven Rattazzi delivers the texts, fairly screaming Marinetti’s call to destroy museums and libraries. The choreography focuses on conformity, erosion, and limited violence. Wearing drably handsome gray costumes by Madeleine Walach and eloquently lit by Carol Mullins, Easton’s expert dancers (Alexandra Albrecht, Michael Ingle, Joshua Palmer, Emily Pope-Blackman, and Sarah Young) often pause to check one another, very aware of any deviations from an apparently decreed pattern. Thomas Cabaniss’s terrifically effective original score for string ensemble, keyboard, and percussion underlines the tensions.

In the beginning, confined to corridors of light, the five performers wheel, lunge, and twist in shifting contrapuntal patterns. Everything looks deliberate, except the casual lifting of one person by another that presages more vicious handling. Rattazzi and Easton arrive together—he to articulate Luigi Russolo’s enthusiastic “The Art of Noise” (1913), she to dance. She’d like Rattazzi to understand her, to imitate her bold, sensate movements, and he—nimble, though clearly not a dancer—obliges fitfully. Later, Humphrey’s ideas about well-made dances inhibit Albrecht, Young, and Pope-Blackman—the first two usually in synch and Pope-Blackman exploring new territory. When Young thinks to join the latter, Albrecht calls her to order with an “Ahem!”

The dancing gradually becomes more distorted. The performers wiggle and shake. They turn on one another, and in the appalling duet that accompanies Valentine de Saint-Point’s 1912 manifesto on the righteousness of lust, Palmer attacks Albrecht and hauls her around in painful ways. After this, Easton stares sternly at Rattazzi, like a mother expecting an explanation from an errant child. She demonstrates some curious, wobbly movements, along with echoes of bold affirmative ones. Rattazzi tries to duplicate this deteriorated version of something that was once brave and new. In the end, drums are heard, and the dancers march, although not in lockstep. Marinetti, it must be remembered, embraced fascism. What “ism” do we dance to now?

full text

Traveling 2009 Futurism Exhibit Italy-Paris-London

Futurismo
20 February – 24 May 2009
Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Manifesto – published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 – the Scuderie del Quirinale, in conjunction with the Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and with the Tate Modern in London, is planning to devote a major exhibition to Futurism to celebrate the movement’s historical and international role.

The exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale will be bringing together a remarkable number of works from the early Futurist period, weaving a path around a central core consisting of a careful and accurate reconstruction of the famous Futurist exhibition held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912. That spectacular exhibition caused quite a stir in its day, particularly on account of the striking contrast between the works on display there and everything else going on in the art world at the time. Indeed, it was only a matter of time before the notions of ‘speed’ and ‘dynamism’ spread to other countries and other continents, helping to reformulate the vocabulary of art and pegging it to a resolutely modern vision.

The Scuderie exhibition will also be shining the spotlight on the extraordinary cultural ties and the close formal relationship between Cubism and Futurism, with a wide selection of Cubist paintings bearing witness to the complex game of similarities and differences between the two artistic movements, right up to and including their formal cross-contamination and the development of Russian Cubo-Futurism and British Vorticism.

The coordinator for the Italian exhibition is Ester Coen, while Didier Ottinger will be coordinating the exhibition in Paris (October 2008 – January 2009) and Matthew Gale will be coordinating the event in London (June – September 2009). This unprecedented example of close cooperation among cultural institutes of such immense prestige and tradition is designed to underscore the thoroughly European cultural importance of this celebration. The Scuderie del Quirinale exhibition will be opened by the President of the Republic on 20 February 2009, thus marking in appropriately grand style the anniversary of the Futurist Manifesto 100 years after its first publication.

Prize Winner for Futurism and the Radio

American Academy in Rome Prizes 2008-2009

Paul Mellon Post-Doctoral Rome Prize in Modern Italian Studies

MARGARET FISHER

Video Director and Publisher, Second Evening Art / BMI
Through the eyes of children: a re-assessment of the role of futurism in the development of early Italian Radio under Fascism

Italian futurists who broadcast and theorized about radio from 1929 to 1941 are often credited with an historic role in shaping the style and character of early Italian Radio. Children’s programs offer a stunning view of the progressive agenda of early Italian Radio before futurist involvement with broadcasting, and an excellent vantage point from which to open new lines of inquiry into futurist radio activity and writing. To establish the condition of Italian Radio before the futurists, I will examine Italian Radio’s pioneering phase which partnered children with technology. I will compile a data base of broadcast activities and texts related to both groups, children and futurists, and publish a bi-lingual sourcebook of previously unavailable texts and scripts. With this foundation in place, I will continue with a critical overview and essays on special topics: child protagonists in futurist radio dramas; government policy and futurism; the global vision of early Italian Radio as one prototype for the Internet; and a survey of the embrace of futurism by early Italian Radio to the present day.

Spring ’09 course on Futurism at Wesleyan

Spring 2009 Semester
Graduate Level course at Wesleyan University

“Fascism, Futurism, Feminism: Forces of Change in 20th.-c Italy”

tought by Prof. Ellen Nerenberg

This course investigates three forces at work in Italy in the first half of the 20th century. We explore Italian Fascism, Futurism, and Feminism through a variety of media, including literary, cinematic, and artistic expressions and consider each movement in its socio-historical context. How does the radical annihilation of standard mores and culture proposed by the Futurists help pave the way for Italian Fascism? How does feminism in the first half of the century offer examples of resistance to both Fascism and Futurism? The texts we will consider include the paintings, sculpture, manifestoes and poetry of Futurism; Sibilla Aleramo’s early feminist novel Una donna as well as the writings of other Italian feminists resistant to the ultra violence and misogyny of Futurism and the instrumentalization of gender under Italian Fascism. We explore similarly varied texts representative of the Fascist era: examples of rationalist architecture and urban planning, Alberto Moravia’s novel of social mores during Fascism, Gli indifferenti, selections from political prisoner of the Regime Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere and Lettere dal carcere, and at least one film made under the conditions (economic, industrial and propagandistic) of Fascism. Our goal is an understanding of the ideological dis/connections between Fascism, Futurism and Feminism in the Italian collective unconscious in an historical juncture of profound social, economic, and political transformations. By focusing on the interconnections of these forces we strive for a panoramic understanding of Italy as it moves to embrace modernity in the first half of the last century

link

Reading Dedicated to Mayakovsky

Night Wraps the Sky: A Reading Dedicated to Vladimir Mayakovsky

Museum of Modern Art, New York
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
6:30 p.m.

Reading at the MoMA in Tribute to a Russian Futurist Romantic Poet hosted by the filmmaker Michael Almereyda — who edited Night Wraps the Sky — and featuring readings by and about Mayakovsky, read by Ethan Hawke and others, as well as a screening of a short silent film directed by the poet.

Says L Mag contributor David Varno in his review of the new anthology Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky:

In a decade when few prominent artists or writers are truly engaged in politics, particularly in this country, it is difficult to imagine a poet so much at the center of things as Vladimir Mayakovsky was during the Russian Revolution. It was a time of intense literary and artistic production, and as leader of the second wave of Futurism, Mayakovsky worked to change the way people created, understood and participated in art. But he was an ever-contradictory figure, one who would embrace Pushkin while also calling to destroy the static art of the past, and his poems’ lyricism and unapologetic internationalism — with nods to Whitman and Rimbaud — set him well beyond the polemical.

link to L Magazine Blog post

‘Beyond Futurism’ Symposim – Columbia University 2009

Beyond Futurism: F.T. Marinetti, Writer

For the Centennial Anniversary of the Italian Avant-garde

Columbia University – Department of Italian and Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America

November 12-13, 2009

Futurism, thanks to its irreverence and its lack of interest in puristic distinctions, including its capacity to find redeeming value in banality, will survive the process of “touristicization” and fetishization that characterizes a good part of the current approach to this avant-garde movement. But the victim of this process has paradoxically been its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who has been even too successful in confusing metonymically the movement as a whole and his own oeuvre. The time has come to begin to redress such a confusion, concentrating on the still imperfectly known writings of Marinetti – one of the most remarkable post-symbolist poets and narrators in twentieth-century Italian, and European, literature.

The centennial anniversary of the foundation of the Italian avant-garde movement, which was famously inaugurated by Marinetti in the French paper Le Figaro in 1909, is an auspicious occasion for a renaissance of futurist studies, contemplating the figure of Marinetti as a writer. This two-day symposium will bring together a variety of international critical perspectives. Our admittedly ambitious aim is to begin a general process of redefinition and rediscovery of the Italian Novecento on an international scale, going beyond defeatist clichés.