ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6797-9397
Current Organisation
Australian National University
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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Date: 05-2023
Abstract: The Chinese American skater Nathan Chen and the Japanese skater Yuzuru Hanyu have demonstrated what we call a ‘hyperathletic-artistic turn’: recognizing an almost superhuman, quad-jumping ability along with an equally developed artistic side. This article closely analyses their 2018 Olympic season performances exploring costuming, music, dance choreography, and jumping ability. While Chen's balletic and dancerly choreography – a ‘return of the dancer’ aesthetic – maintains an in idualistic maverick instead of commercially recognisable macho hypermasculinity, Hanyu's ‘soft masculine queer turn’ draws from the queer costuming and mannerisms of Johnny Weir and the confidence of Evgeni Plushenko. Through their performances and choreography, we argue that Chen and Hanyu importantly carve out emerging artistic forms of East Asian and Asian-American masculinities in the predominantly white sport of figure skating. These skaters are part of a driving force in an East Asian turn in men's figure skating.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 09-2021
DOI: 10.1017/S1054204321000320
Abstract: William Forsythe’s screendance Alignigung (2016) depicts two male dancers, one fair- and the other brown-skinned, in hyperflexible and intimate configurations that vacillate between object and human. Alignigung engages with an egalitarian ethos along the same lines as contact improvisation but further demonstrates an alternative masculinity through movement qualities by reimagining the stereotypical brown body.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-08-2020
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 04-2023
DOI: 10.1017/S0149767723000177
Abstract: Director Luca Guadagnino's film Suspiria (2018) depicts the dancer Susie Bannion joining a dance academy secretly run by a coven of witches in Berlin during the German Autumn of 1977. This article analyzes how Mary Wigman's Hexentanz II , contemporary dance, and horror film practices inform Susie's neo-expressionist movement form, which is also steeped in the discourse surrounding the RAF (Red Army Faction), the West German far-left militant organization, and fascism. I argue that “historical breathing”—breaths and sighs—takes on a sensorial mode by surveying the past and current situation of the dance school. By inhaling, Susie embodies the dance Volk (1948) and can feel its vexed choreographic history—its occult origins and Ausdruckstanz practices. Furthermore, her dance futilely attempts to comes to terms with the Nazi past but inevitably replicates the violence of the RAF.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Date: 09-2021
Abstract: Le présent article analyse le film Moi, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2018) en se penchant particulièrement sur la technique théâtrale d’adresse directe à la caméra. Cette méthode crée un mode d’agitation qui fluctue entre l’effet de distanciation de Brecht et l’empathie. L’utilisation de gros plans faciaux, de zooms et de travellings dans des espaces intimes suscite des émotions chez l’auditoire à travers un récit alternatif de Tonya Harding. Cependant, les scènes sapent continuellement la confiance ainsi développée à travers le témoignage contradictoire et la figure de Tonya désignant le téléspectateur comme étant son « agresseur ». Moi, Tonya s’attaque de façon agressive aux répercussions sociales et politiques à plus grande échelle de la violence conjugale dans les ménages de faible statut socioéconomique aux États-Unis, la consommation médiatique dénuée de toute critique et les structures capitalistes.
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2021
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 12-01-2023
DOI: 10.1177/01634437221140522
Abstract: In sport and sport media, figure skating is often perceived as ‘feminine’ and male skaters frequently occupy an ambiguous position, especially for Asian (American) athletes in a historically White-dominated sport. Based on discourse analysis, this article compares how English- and Japanese-language news narratives represent elite male figure skaters Nathan Chen and Yuzuru Hanyu, who are close rivals and skate for the United States and Japan respectively. We demonstrate how English-language media reinforce (U.S.) nationalism by portraying ‘Quad King’ Chen as hypermasculine for his athleticism and ‘Ice Prince’ Hanyu as feminized for his exceptional artistry. Despite being pitted against each other, we argue that in Japanese media narratives, their convivial rivalry and sportsmanship reveal what we call ‘Asian sporting masculinities’, alternative constructions of masculinities complicating monolithic stable understandings of masculinity in or congruous with the West. This study advances critical media and cultural studies by rethinking masculinities in Asian sporting bodies.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 04-2018
DOI: 10.1017/S0149767718000037
Abstract: This article analyses Thierry De Mey's screendance One Flat Thing, reproduced based on William Forsythe's dance of the same name. The filmmaker creates a heightened atmosphere of otherworldliness by drawing on the choreographer's own conception of it: from romantic ballet and the technique of disfocus. In addition to filming Forsythe's main dance, the screendance includes five movement sequences that do not appear in the original choreography. Their interspersion into the filming of the main dance contributes strikingly to the alien landscape: (1) the architectural composition of the tables, (2) the dancers’ exaggerated, disjointed movements, (3) the filmic editing through juxtaposing cuts, and (4) the close-ups for intimacy and deterritorialization. By more prominently integrating Forsythe's deconstructive aesthetic, De Mey creates an enhanced otherworld through the medium of screendance that is not possible to achieve with live dance.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GEQU.12260
Abstract: This article analyzes the staging, costuming, make‐up, and gestural semiotics of Zeremonienmeister and Persisches Lied , two 1929 photographs of the German Expressionist dancers Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi, while reflecting upon the affordances of still photography as a medium for the representation of their movement‐based art form. In these staged photographs, Kreutzberg and Georgi present their distinctive brand of modernist movement aesthetics, which both Orientalized and queered the dancing body. In cultivating a queer indeterminacy, these dancers embraced the emancipatory ethos of Weimar modernism, but by treating the East as an amalgamized, exotic source for civilizational regeneration, they exploited non‐white cultures and became vulnerable to, and later complicit in, the instrumentalization of their dance aesthetics by the Nazi regime.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2016
Publisher: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co, KG
Date: 09-2013
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Date: 06-2019
Abstract: At the 1987 World Figure Skating Ch ionship, Katarina Witt skated to instrumental music from West Side Story playing the role of Maria. But how could her performance to Broadway show tunes be in line with SED ideology? Through histoire croisée— establishing multiple intersections with different cultures and tracing their continuing effects—this article examines how Witt’s, her coach Jutta Müller’s and choreographer Rudy Suchy’s privileged exposure to Western culture through dance, music, film, experiences abroad, and other skaters’ choreography and costuming inspired reappropriated manifestations through an East German lens into the packaging of Witt’s skating programs in the 1980s. Using television broadcasts, I analyze the gradual to overt Americanization of her programs as her government loosened its grips by granting her more artistic freedom.
Publisher: Project MUSE
Date: 2015
Publisher: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Date: 05-2017
Abstract: Klaus Mann’s knowledge of writing and staging plays led to interest in exploring dance. His novel Der fromme Tanz (1925) and the dance-pantomime libretto Die zerbrochenen Spiegel (1926) deal specifically with this movement medium. This article first addresses Mann’s experience of watching Weimar dance performances, which developed his idea of “erschütternde Anmut,” and explores its connection with his conceptualization of spirituality. The novel’s protagonist, Andreas Magnus, desires to break away from his bourgeois home and embark on a “pious dance” in Berlin. In the pantomime, the main character, Prinz Narzissus, lives a decadent, self-absorbed existence, dancing ecstatically between three mirrors, but gives no regard to an impending mass of workers. I argue that, for Mann, dance serves predominantly as a solitary spiritual guide that celebrates the body and the carnal. This self-absorbed model, however, does not fit into the changing society of the workers’ demonstration and demands social awareness.
No related grants have been discovered for Wesley Lim.