Funk Lessons Essay

From 1982 – 84 Adrian Piper (Born 1948) an American conceptual artist and philosopher whose works address ostracism, otherness, racial passing and racism staged large and small collaborative performances entitled Funk Lessons. These Funk Lessons consisted of a sequence of participatory social events that aimed to teach white people about black funk music and how to dance to it. ‘Funk’, which has morphed into From 1982 – 84 Adrian Piper (Born 1948) an American conceptual artist and philosopher whose works address ostracism, otherness, racial passing and racism staged large and small collaborative performances entitled Funk Lessons. These Funk Lessons consisted of a sequence of participatory social events that aimed to teach white people about
This can be understood if we look at the different social norms regarding dance in both black and white culture during the 80’s. Achievement, social grace, competence and spectator orientated entertainment were the main features that make up social dance in white culture. In African-American culture, there is more emphasis on collective participation as a means of self transcendence and social union. (Bishop, 2006) The main emphasis is on everyone participating and enjoying themselves, there is no emphasis placed on how a person looks or how graceful or ‘cool’ their dance movement is to others. It is more of a collective and enjoyable experience and this would be especially true with the genre of
In order to understand the transformation these classical values that begin to take place with the dawning of the 20th century: most notably marked with Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring debut in 1913: the work of Richard Wagner and Fredrich Nietzsche will need to be explored. Being of the most influential 19th century opera composers and men of theatre, Wagner wrote a significant amount of philosophical essays covering a wide range of topics ranging from music to drama theory, social to political