Early Modern Depictions of Dancing Others and What We Can Infer of Their Viewers’ Emotional Response, Associate Professor Alessandro Arcangeli (The University of Verona)

Date: Monday 10 October, 2016
Time: 6:15pm‒7:45pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre C, Old Arts Building, The University of Melbourne
Registrations: Online here

In a forthcoming article and book project, ‘The savage, the peasant and the witch’, Alessandro Arcangeli takes these three figures as examples of meaningful ‘dancing others’ in the European tradition. He analyses the extent and way in which dance has been a contributing component of cultural stereotypes ‒ in particular hetero-stereotypes, depicting (by words and images) a variety of ‘others’ as significantly characterised by dancing. Dancing can project judgementally charged connotations on the represented groups and on dance itself as their specific attribute. The emotional aspect is a significant part of the story, for such images contribute to the definition of cultural identities. Dancing is able to give bodily and visible expression to felt emotions and thereby assists perceptions of inclusion in ‒ and exclusion from ‒ complex and multiple communities, through feelings of attraction and repulsion, as well as a mix of aesthetic judgements concerning the value and function of dancing habits and performances.

Alessandro Arcangeli is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Verona and the current Chair of the International Society for Cultural History (http://www.culthist.org). He is the author of Cultural History: A Concise Introduction (Routledge, 2012) and has published widely on dance (Davide o Salomè? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima età moderna (FBSR-Viella, 2000)) and leisure (Recreation in the Renaissance: Attitudes towards Leisure and Pastimes in European Culture, 1425‒1675 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). In a forthcoming article in the Rivista Storica Italiana he discusses how cultural history and the history of emotions have been mutually redefining each other over the past generation, to such an extent that the one has become inseparable from the other.

“About Music: Manuscripts and Music: the Sydney Spanish Liturgical Chant Manuscript Collection”, Dr Jane Morlet Hardie (University of Sydney)

Date: 10 October, 2016
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Recital Hall West, The Sydney Conservatorium of Music
More information: Christa Jacenyik-Trawöger (scm.research@sydney.edu.au)
Register: Free entry, registrations required. Information on how to register: http://music.sydney.edu.au/events/about-music-jane-hardy-10-10-2016

Over the last ten years the University of Sydney has been building a collection of Spanish Liturgical Chant Manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 18th centuries. While on the surface these books seem to present just a collection of often barely decipherable dots on parchment they all originally had lives of their own, and hidden within them are stories, contexts and meanings. Today, as we take a journey from manuscripts to meanings, with some side trips along the way we will rediscover some music of earlier centuries as we interrogate some of these unique artefacts and uncover
some of their secrets.

Jane Morlet Hardie PhD, FAHA is a musicologist and librarian has published extensively on Spanish sacred polyphony of the Early Modern period. Following postgraduate study in the United States, she taught at the Universities of Michigan and Sydney and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Harvard where she wrote a book on Spanish sources and music. She is now an elected member of the Directorium of the International Musicological Society, a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and attached to the Medieval and Early Modern Centre at the University of Sydney.