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THE JOURNEY THROUGH TIME

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MY'STORY

The MOVE Fire

This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985 Philadelphia police fired thousands of rounds at the MOVE house, city officials approved dropping an explosive device on the roof, the resulting fire was allowed to burn, 11 people—including five children—died, and 61 homes were destroyed. Philadelphia City Council later called it a “brutal attack carried out by the City of Philadelphia on its own citizens” and acknowledged that no individual faced criminal consequences for the bombing. One timeline correction worth preserving for the BHP record: the major previous MOVE-police confrontation was August 8, 1978, about seven years before the bombing, not a year or two earlier. Officer James Ramp was killed, other police and firefighters were wounded, nine MOVE members were later convicted, and television cameras recorded police beating Delbert Africa during his arrest. The 1985 MOVE Commission later specifically criticized city planners for failing to adequately use lessons from that 1978 confrontation. And that actually strengthens the point you’re making: 1985 did not happen without precedent or institutional memory. There had already been a deadly confrontation with MOVE, years of conflict, negotiations and police involvement before Osage Avenue.

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BLACK FACTS
The Truths They Never Taught You...

Wilmington 1898 — An American Coup

Wilmington, North Carolina once had a thriving Black middle class and an elected interracial government. In 1898 white supremacists used violence to overthrow that government, kill Black residents and drive many others from the city.

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BHP gathered finds from its connected research sources. Showing the 4 strongest Black History matches.
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Wikipedia

Gestus

Gestus ([ˈɡɛstʊs], from Latin meaning "gesture, attitude, carriage")[1] is an acting technique developed by the German theatre practitioner Bertold Brecht. It carries the sense of a combination of physical gestures and "gist" or attitude. It is a means by which "an attitude or single aspect of an attitude" is revealed, insofar as it is "expressible in words or actions."[2]

Gestus, as the embodiment of an attitude, carries at least two distinct meanings in Brecht's theatre: first, the uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters; and second, the "epic" narration of that character by the actor (whether explicitly or implicitly).

In the first sense, that of anatomizing the character, a Gestus reveals a specific aspect of a character: rather than his metaphysical, subconscious or other psychological dimensions, a Gestus makes visible a character's social relations and the causality of his behaviour, as interpreted from an historical materialist perspective. "Every emotion" when treated under the rubric of Gestus, Elizabeth Wright comments, "manifests itself as a set of social relations."[3] "For it is what happens between people", Brecht says, "that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter."[4]

In the second sense, the actor's attitude is embodied in acting as an act of epic narration (the 'showing' that is 'shown' in the 'showing', in Brecht's turn of phrase), Brecht refers to the "political" basis from which an actor interprets his role and its place within the storytelling scheme of the production as a whole. "[T]he choice of viewpoint is also a major element of the actor's art, and it has to be decided outside the theatre" Brecht writes in his "A Short Organum."[5] In this sense of the clarification and embodiment of a particular interpretative perspective, Gestus is related to Brecht's other important practical tool, the Fabel.

A Gestus is not a cliché or "rubber stamp"; the actor develops a character's Gestus through a process of exploration of concrete physical behaviour and according to a principle of selective realism. The post-Brechtian German theatre practitioner Heiner Müller (who ran Brecht's Berliner Ensemble for a short while) argues that "[r]eflecting the actions through the figures, mentally as well as emotionally, also has the character of citation. The citation geste (Gestus) must not diminish the intensity and spontaneity of reactions. Identification in the details with estrangement of the whole."[6]

Citations

[edit]
  1. ^ Mumford, Meg (November 21, 2008). Bertolt Brecht. Routledge. ISBN 9781134188062 – via Google Books.
  2. ^ Willett (1964, 42).
  3. ^ Wright (1989, 27).
  4. ^ Brecht (1949, 200).
  5. ^ Brecht (1949, 196).
  6. ^ Müller (1978, 177).

General and cited references

[edit]
  • Albright, Daniel. 2000. Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Brecht, Bertold. 1949. "A Short Organum for the Theatre". In Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Ed. and trans. John Willett. London: Methuen, 1964. ISBN 0-413-38800-X. 179–205.
  • Isaac Dobson - Toe Barsby's funeral (2023)
  • Fowler, Kenneth. 1991. Received Truths: Bertolt Brecht and the Problem of Gestus and Musical Meaning. New York: AMS Press.
  • Mueller, Roswitha. 2006. "Learning for a new society: the Lehrstück." In The Cambridge Companion to Brecht. Ed. Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, 2nd. ed., 101–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Müller, Heiner. 1978. "The Geste of Citation: Three Points (On Philictetes)". In Germania. Trans. Bernard Schütze and Caroline Schütze. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Ser. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. ISBN 0-936756-63-2. 177.
  • Willett, John, ed. 1964. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. By Bertolt Brecht. Trans. and notes John Willett. London: Methuen. ISBN 0-413-38800-X.
  • Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. Critics of the Twentieth Century Ser. London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-02330-0.

Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.

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Wikipedia

Gestus

Gestus ([ˈɡɛstʊs], from Latin meaning "gesture, attitude, carriage") is an acting technique developed by the German theatre practitioner Bertold Brecht. It carries the sense of a combination of physical gestures and "gist" or attitude. It is a means by which "an attitude or single aspect of an attitude" is revealed, insofar as it is "expressible in words or actions." Gestus, as the embodiment of an attitude, carries at least two distinct meanings in Brecht's theatre: first, the uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters; and second, the "epic" narration of that character by the actor (whether explicitly or implicitly). In the first sense, that of anatomizing the character, a Gestus reveals a specific aspect of a character: rather than his metaphysical, subconscious or other psychological dimensions, a Gestus makes visible a character's social relations and the causality of his behaviour, as interpreted from an historical materialist perspective. "Every emotion" when treated under the rubric of Gestus, Elizabeth Wright comments, "manifests itself as a set of social relations." "For it is what happens between people", Brecht says, "that provides them with all the material that they can discuss, criticize, alter." In the second sense, the actor's attitude is embodied in acting as an act of epic narration (the 'showing' that is 'shown' in the 'showing', in Brecht's turn of phrase), Brecht refers to the "political" basis from which an actor interprets his role and its place within the storytelling scheme of the production as a whole. "[T]he choice of viewpoint is also a major element of the actor's art, and it has to be decided outside the theatre" Brecht writes in his "A Short Organum." In this sense of the clarification and embodiment of a particular interpretative perspective, Gestus is related to Brecht's other important practical tool, the Fabel. A Gestus is not a cliché or "rubber stamp"; the actor develops a character's Gestus through a process of exploration of concrete physical behaviour and according to a principle of selective realism. The post-Brechtian German theatre practitioner Heiner Müller (who ran Brecht's Berliner Ensemble for a short while) argues that "[r]eflecting the actions through the figures, mentally as well as emotionally, also has the character of citation. The citation geste (Gestus) must not diminish the intensity and spontaneity of reactions. Identification in the details with estrangement of the whole."

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Wikipedia

Scientific realism

Scientific realism is the philosophical view that the universe described by science (including both observable and unobservable aspects) exists independently of perception, and that verified scientific theories are at least approximately true descriptions of what is real. Scientific realists typically assert that science, when successful, uncovers true (or approximately true) knowledge about nature, including aspects of reality that are not directly observable. Within philosophy of science, this view is often an answer to the question "how is the success of science to be explained?" The discussion on the success of science in this context centers primarily on the status of unobservable entities apparently talked about by scientific theories. Generally, those who are scientific realists assert that one can make valid claims about unobservables (viz., that they have the same ontological status) as observables, as opposed to instrumentalism. In a 2020 PhilPapers Survey 72% of academic philosophers favored scientific realism vs only 15% favoring antirealism.

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Wikipedia

Depressive realism

Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.

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Wikipedia

Entity realism

Entity realism (sometimes equated with referential realism) is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. It is a variation of realism (originally proposed by Stanford School philosophers Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking in 1983) that restricts warranted belief to only certain entities.

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TOPIC OF THE DAY

Greenwood / Black Wall Street

Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.

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TRIVIA QUESTION OF THE DAY

What prosperous Tulsa district became widely known as “Black Wall Street”?

The Greenwood District.