Sophie Benn, a PhD candidate in musicology, will present at the next Graduate Student Work-in-Progress lecture, titled “La Méthode Graphique: Musical Anatomies and Scientistic Ruptures in Stepanov Dance Notation.”
The event, sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, will be held Thursday, Feb. 21, from noon to 1 p.m. at Clark Hall, Room 206.
About the lecture
How can a performing art form be recorded on paper? In this presentation, Benn will examine one possible answer to this question found in a treatise on dance notation from the brink of 20th-century modernism, Vladimir Ivanovich Stepanov’s Alphabet Des Mouvements Du Corps Humain (1892). Stepanov suggests the solution may lay in the latest developments of science, including:- A turn toward graphical representation championed by Étienne-Jules Marey;
- Experimental psychology’s burgeoning interest in kinesthesia; and
- Problems raised by Jean-Martin Charcot concerning research in neurological pathology.
