Gesture Studies

“‘The Underlying Gesture’. Towards the Notion of Gesture in Jean d’Udine and Sergei Eisenstein”. In: Rossella Catanese, Francesca Scotto Lavina, Valentina Valente (eds.), From Sensation to Synaesthesia in Film and New Media. Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2019, 102-115.

This thesis analyses the function of gesture in film through three films directed by Nicolas Roeg. The thesis has the following three corresponding aims; first to define gesture and discuss gesture types and categories; second to combine gestural studies with semiotics and psychoanalysis; and third to apply these theories to Performance (Cammell and Roeg, 1970) The Man Who Fell to Earth (Roeg, 1976) and Bad Timing (Roeg, 1980) to show how gesture can be related to film studies as a way to highlight and analyse themes, character types and feelings. Semiotics is applied to study gestures as signs that can be decoded to reach new levels of meaning. Psychoanalytic theory is used to study how a character’s psyche might have led them to choose a certain gesture, or vice versa how a gesture might hint at a person’s emotions, intentions or inner desires. The three selected films are analysed with one chapter each, the structure based on binary oppositions between themes and characters. Within these contrasts significant gestures are analysed, mainly by categorising them in accordance to functions and categories proposed by the two linguistic scholars Adam Kendon and David McNeill. The function of specific gestures and the importance of studying them as carriers of meaning are illustrated with examples and images from the films.

Vera Kotelevskaya’s Review of Susanne Strätling’s Book "Die Hand am Werk: Poetik der Poiesis in der russischen Avantgarde". München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2017, 531 S., ISBN: 978-3-7705-6092-9

Ключевые слова: Велимир Хлебников; Всеволод Мейерхольд; Сергей Третьяков; русский авангард; русский формализм; русский конструктивизм; биомеханика; показ/рассказ; гаптическая поэтика; поэтология; карпалистика; жест; рука; интермедиальность

Keywords: Russian avant-garde; Russian formalism; haptic poetic; poetology; gesture; hand; Daniil Kharms; Alexey Gastev; Velimir Khlebnikov; Petr Miturich; Vsevolod Meyerhold; Sergey Tret’iyakov

Schlagwörter: Russische Avantgarde; Russischer Formalismus; haptische Poetik; Poetologie; Geste; Hand; Daniil Charms; Alexey Gastev; Welimir Chlebnikow; Petr Mituritsch; Wsewolod Meyerhold; Sergey Tret’ijakov

E. Grishina. Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO): Studying Emotions // 7th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation LREC’2010, Valetta, Malta (workshop 23/05/10 Corpora for Research on Emotions and Affects) http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/index.html

"The paper introduces the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO), which has been created in the framework of the Russian National Corpus (RNC). The MURCO provides the users with the great amount of phonetic, orthoepic, intonational information related to Russian. Moreover, the deeply annotated part of the MURCO contains the data concerning Russian gesticulation, speech act system, types of vocal gestures and interjections in Russian, and so on. The access to The Corpus is on free access. The paper describes the main types of annotation and the interface structure of the MURCO.

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In the last few years, affect has entered the field of politics through both the media and political actors themselves. This article is based on the hypothesis that the images of affect that illustrate contemporary political narratives in the media reflect different visual motifs which are linked to an iconographic tradition that began in the art world. Through the iconographic analysis of images published in the three newspapers in Spain with the largest general readership (El País, El Mundo, and La Vanguardia) from 2011 to 2017, this article identifies three visual motifs of affect: the handshake, the hug, and the kiss. The study of these motifs highlights the survival of certain forms of emotion that are easily recognisable and engage with a longstanding iconographic tradition. At the same time, the article inquiries into the meanings derived from these iconographies and their implications on the representation of politics and of political leaders. The proliferation of motifs of ...

Our experience of physical matter provides a firm experiential basis for the conceptual organization of language and its functional uses in narrative and argumentative contexts. Nouns typically denote UNITS OF THOUGHT AND EXPERIENCE – the THINGS we perceive, the THINGS we have in mind, the THINGS that we talk and reason about. “Ontological metaphors” (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999) and “conceptual reification” (Langacker 2000, 2008) accordingly play a central role in human cognition. They are essential components of semiotic expression, in all its verbal, written or gestural manifestations. Gesture research, in particular, confirms that reflection is physically and metaphorically enacted as a type of OBJECT MANIPULATION that gives visibility and substance to invisible thoughts (Lapaire 2016). That is why our experience and understanding of MATTER matters so much; why THINGS, not just our HANDS, “help us think” (Goldin-Meadow 2003).

An increasing number of today's consumer devices such as mobile phones or tablet computers are equipped with various sensors. The extraction of useful information such as gestures from sensor-generated data based on mainstream imperative languages is a notoriously difficult task. Over the last few years, a number of domain-specific programming languages have been proposed to ease the development of gesture detection. Most of these languages have adopted a declarative approach allowing programmers to describe their gestures rather than having to manually maintain a history of event data and intermediate gesture results. While these declarative languages represent a clear advancement in gesture detection, a number of issues are still unresolved. In this paper we present relevant criteria for gesture detection and provide an initial classification of existing solutions based on these criteria in order to foster a discussion and identify opportunities for future gesture programming languages.

El área de los estudios sobre gestualidad tiene importantes implicaciones para la perspectiva descriptiva de la lengua, entre ellas, que gesto y habla (o gesto y señas) forman una unidad esencial para la expresión lingüística en todos los niveles y, por lo tanto, habría que reconsiderar la adecuación descriptiva de los recursos conceptuales que asumen la división entre estos dos componentes de la comunicación. En el presente artículo, se propone la revisión de la contribución metodológica de los estudios gestuales, para presentar un breve análisis de la llamada 'marcación de tópico' en la LSM que muestra las ventajas de aplicar esta perspectiva y nos permite reevaluar el análisis de los recursos comunicativos de esta lengua. / The fast growing area of gesture studies has shown important implications for the perspective used in the description of language, among them, the fact that gesture and speech (or gesture and sign) form an essential unit for linguistic expressions on every level. Because of this, we must look closely at the descriptive adequacy of the conceptual notions that assume the split between this fundamental components of communication. In this paper, an overview of the methodological contribution of gesture studies is presented to set things up for a brief but concise analysis of so called 'topic-marking' in LSM that shows the advantages of assuming this perspective and allow us to reassess the analysis of the communicative resources of this language.

Streszczenie Gesty mogą wydawać się przypadkowymi ruchami rąk, które pomagają mówiącemu w formułowaniu wypowiedzi. Jednak bardziej szczegółowa analiza pokazuje, że nie są to zupełnie przypadkowe ruchy, a forma, przynajmniej niektórych z nich, jest dość określona i powtarzalna. O takich powtarzalnych ruchach rąk używanych w trakcie wypowiadania zdań przeczących traktuje ten artykuł. W pierwszej jego części znajdziemy opis tzw. gestów negacji (zarówno emblematów jak i gestów związanych z mową) spotykanych u użytkowników języka hausa. W drugiej części artykułu cztery typy gestów związanych z mową: gest kiwania palcem, gest nożyc, gest " czyszczenia dłoni " i gest " umywania dłoni " zostają poddane wnikliwej analizie. Pozwoliła ona na ustalenie, które znaczenia lub funkcje negacji, takie jak: zakaz, odmowa, odrzucenie, zaprzeczenie, nieistnienie są związane z danym gestem.

Gestures, at first glance, look like spontaneous movements of hands that help the speaker to produce the utterance. A more detailed analysis shows that these movements are strictly associated with certain concepts, and rather than being random, they are meaningful and systemic. The first part of the paper contains an overview of gestures of negation used by Hausa speakers (both emblems and co-speech gestures). In the second part, four types of co-speech gestures are scrutinised: shaking the index finger sideways, hand scissors, brushing the palms against each other and brushing the back of the hands. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the gestures in question co-occur with the specific markers of negation and emphasize one of the meanings or functions of the negation, such as prohibition, refusal, rejection, denial, nonexistence and totality.

This article contributes to the scholarly discussion of the relationship between cinema and dance using Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of dance as gesture. To render Agamben’s critical framework operative, however, one needs to consider his reference to the concept of phantasmata (images) taken from Domenico da Piacenza’s Renaissance treatise on choreography. Agamben returns to this treatise to support his argument that dance is concerned first and foremost with time and memory rather than space and the present. To notate dance as a sequence of moving images is not simply to make visible on screen a series of bodily movements in space. Rather, it means acknowledging that dancing is primarily a mental activity. Taking Agamben’s reflections on dance and using Maya Deren’s work on screen dance as a case-study, this article discusses how cinema and dance together prompt us to undo the economy of bodily movements, restoring the body to us transfigured.

This article argues that Giulietta Masina’s hyperbolic physicality in Nights of Cabiria (Le notti di Cabiria; Federico Fellini, 1957) intervenes in earlier representations of wartime suffering. With Bazin’s theories of Chaplin’s slapstick at hand, Masina’s comedic gestures can be seen as exposing the subjective and geopolitical limits of how postwar Italian neorealism made history with bodies.

Questo contributo intende fornire argomenti utili per comprendere l’efficacia cognitiva dei gesti nella didattica delle lingue. Muovendo dall’influenza dei gesti su processi cognitivi quali i processi attentivi, la memoria, il problem solving e il ragionamento, si giungerà a mostrare le funzioni che i gesti possono svolgere nell’educazione linguistica. Il fine è quello di evidenziare l’esigenza per i docenti L2 di diventare sempre più consapevoli dell’uso strategico dei gesti nella didattica.
Parole chiave: gesti; attenzione congiunta; processi cognitivi; funzioni dei gesti; didattica delle lingue.

1. The first essay aims at clarifying the relation holding or not holding between deixis and indexicality, and then elaborating a new model based on the Danish semiotic enunciation theory that could also account for reference. The semiotic ‘mystery’ in question is the mysterious fact that the intersubjective aspect of deixis has to constitute the referential anchoring of signified meaning in the extra-communicational world. The model proposed may lay the ground for a new understanding of signs as such.
2. The second essay aims at clarifying the relation holding or not holding between deixis and indexicality, and then elaborating a new model based on the Danish semiotic enunciation theory that could also account for reference. The 'mystery' in question is the mysterious fact that the intersubjective aspect of deixis has to constitute the referential anchoring of signified meaning in the extra-communicational world. The model proposed may lay the ground for a new understanding of signs as such.

The spontaneous gesticulation that accompanies speech is an integral part of the linguistic system. Movements of the body are made in conjunction with speech to produce meanings and perform a num- ber of essential discourse functions. Gesture is ‘gestural action’ and gesture symbolism is dynamic, schematic and imagistic. Gestures don’t just ‘depict’ but actually ‘do things’: they shape ideas and fuel thought; they describe or report scenes; they give directions; they expose, report, and sum up argu- ments; they achieve textual cohesion and regulate communicative interaction. Gestures are a window into the mind. As gestures are made, visible kinetic form is given to invisible mental representations and hidden cognitive mechanisms. As hands move within the gesture space, objets of conception are created, and cognitive processing is ‘acted out,’ using symbolic acts of pointing and manipulation. Key cognitive abilities are revealed in the process: the ability to construe ideas and events as objects and substances (conceptual reification); the ability to form image-schematic representations of ‘things’ and movements, and to use these iconically or metaphoricially; the ability to make symbolic uses of space. Gestures are also found to play a central role in the expression of grammatical meanings and mecha- nisms. Thus grammar and gesture are clearly integrated in the expression of temporal dimensions, aspectual notions and modal stances. Gesture activity is also shown to be involved in the expression of concession and comparison. Finally, technical and methodological dimensions of gesture-analysis are discussed. The case is made for a new, creative approach to gesture watching – the ‘language and gesture workshops’ – where students may observe and physically explore co-speech gestures, develop their own choreographic variations, and work on sound, gesture and meaning correspondence.

Quando la gente parla, fa gesti. Nonostante questo semplice fatto sia stato spesso ignorato negli studi sul linguaggio, oggi sappiamo che i gesti non sono solo un paralinguaggio utile a veicolare emozioni o ad “abbellire” l’esecuzione verbale, ma svolgono un ruolo fondamentale sia a livello linguistico sia a livello cognitivo. A partire dagli anni Ottanta del Novecento, infatti, gli studi sul gesto si sono moltiplicati fino ad assumere una dimensione interdisciplinare, che spazia dalla psicolinguistica all’antropologia, dalle neuroscienze alla semiotica e alla psicologia dello sviluppo. Tuttavia, i non specialisti ancora faticano a riconoscere uno status alla disciplina, continuando a considerare i gesti un fenomeno
esotico o curiosità aneddotiche. Il volume fornisce un’introduzione all’argomento agile e allo stesso tempo dettagliata, per andare oltre gli stereotipi sui gesti e per aiutare chiunque voglia accostarsi all’argomento
in modo scientifico.

This MA study is the first of its kind since it brings together and analyses the types of variations found within the British Sign Language (BSL) cardinal number system. The study is not a complete representation of the various systems that exist in the UK as there are still many left undocumented. However, as an MA study it provides a starting point to understanding some of the variations that do exist and what appear to be the rules that
govern these systems.

Overall, this research demonstrates that there is more to BSL numbers than mere handshapes. From analysing the different phonological parameters (movement, internal movement, location & orientation) one can appreciate the complex laws that are
embedded in BSL cardinal numbers.

Old master paintings speak their own language, which is not conveyed by vocal words but mainly by meaningful hand gestures. Painters used them to transmit theological concepts, popular customs, scientific ideas, political values, emotional states and social identities. Despite the importance of the pictorial codified gestures in art history, noteworthy but only partial studies have been dedicated to this subject so far. The aim of this book is to propose an extensive and unifying study of the genealogy and the particularities of the language of hands in art, as well as to establish clear definitions of each one of the main pictorial chirograms (graphical representation of a hand sign). Thanks to their flexibility, the hands are able to form signs of multiples shapes and to cover a vast range of conceptions. Nevertheless, the pictorial chirograms are fundamentally different from real life gestures – they are frozen signs. Painters took advantage of this problem and created a unique well-structured and long-term communicative system. It is based on the combination of complementary signs (forming chirographic accords), the clarity of gestures shared by numerous cultures (such as the deictics), as well as the popularity of the iconographic models. The meanings of the chirograms were deciphered here using a vast repertoire of sources, mainly from social and artistic contexts of the 17th and 18th century, such as art theory, everyday life customs, liturgical rituals, theater, dance, oratory, anatomical studies, physiognomony, monastic sign language, sign language of the Deaf, etc. Around 160 gestures from different fields are addressed in the book and listed in an index. The study of chirology during the Early Modern period does not only reveal the multiple conceptions related to the hands, but also the rich iconography of drawings and engravings, illustrating this knowledge. In painting, some gestures are commonly used and widespread in Europe, while others are extremely rare. The most frequent pictorial chirograms are studied in separate chapters, including: pointed forefinger; joined palms; intertwined fingers of both hands; thumb, forefinger and middle finger raised (benedictio); raised palms; finger on the mouth (signum harpocraticum); hands crossed on the chest; extended open hand; head leaning on the hand (melancholy sign); finger of one hand touching or holding a finger of the other hand (comput); thumb inserted between the forefinger and middle finger bent (fig sign); forefinger and little finger extended (horns); fist; little finger raised; hand shake (dextrarum junctio) and self-holding hands. In addition, some rare pictorial chirograms are also presented in separate chapters, including: joint thumb and forefinger (ring gesture); thumb up or pointing thumb; hand underneath the chin; hand in the elbow (manichetto) and tense extended arms. The study of hands language in art reveals how those frozen signs relate to living cultures and contributes to the conservation of the European gesture heritage.

Gesture controlled mouse is a gadget where we can move the mouse by provide the guidance from our wrist. With the improvement in innovation, the association among human and computerized world is expanding every day. At the point when PCs appeared, we utilize wired mouse by putting it on surface, on unpleasant surface territories the working of the wired mouse is exceptionally extreme. At present, we are utilizing remote mouse which is better that past however it likewise has it results. Portable innovation has gone in a different direction from button keypads to contact screens; Still PCs need to work on a mouse utilizing a cushion. We expect to make an interface gadget that can be connected to any PC and be utilized as a signal based intuitive gadget, it is an inventive better approach to cooperate with innovation. The execution was finished utilizing MPU6050, and Arduino Pro Micro. By this, we found that it was progressively helpful in gaming, planning and gadget control. The innovation utilized here is IOT. It very well may be utilized at numerous spots and furthermore be the piece of things to come. The motion will be fundamental part as the developments of our body will assume the significant job for tasks.

La langue est par nature un phénomène vocal et gestuel : tout « sujet parlant » articule corporellement ses messages, en vocalisant, en grimaçant et en gesticulant. Il est donc paradoxal que le corps ait tant de mal à trouver sa place en classe de langues. Entreprendre un travail corporel sur la langue suppose donc qu'on s’éloigne d’un environnement qui est matériellement et culturellement hostile au mouvement, pour se rendre dans un espace plus dégagé, où pourront être développées d'autres postures d'enseignement et d'apprentissage. Nous abordons ici une forme particulière de pratique corporelle, que nous conduisons actuellement aux deux extrémités du spectre éducatif, en milieu scolaire et universitaire. Il s'agit d'ateliers croisés « grammaire et danse » au cours desquels les formes grammaticales et leur usage social sont explorées au travers de mouvements, de déplacements et d’interactions gestuelles entre participants

The music-related gestures of la danse grotesque in Rameau’s Les Sauvages
Nowadays many of us agree that a historically informed performance, HIP, is not an objecti ed, historical truth about the music of previous centuries. Even so, we still need to reflect upon the many possibilities of how we actually embody historically informed performing knowledge in practice.

In this article I will explore the music-related movements of la danse grotesque in Jean- Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The article deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble and orchestra as part of the opéraballet Les Indes galantes.

One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.

By positioning ourselves in the dialectical space between history and the musical material, we process and modify it. As a result we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities. These alternatives are much more historically informed than we might think at  first, because our own, temporal position in the historical continuum is comprehended as a part of it.

Keywords: baroque, la danse grotesque, embodiment, historically informed performance, musical gestures, music-related movements, performance practice, practice-based research, rhetorical actio.

About the Author: Assi Karttunen DMus is a harpsichordist specialized in performing and researching Baroque music. She also performs in interdisciplinary groups with experimental and contemporary repertory. Karttunen works as a musician-researcher at DocMus, Doctoral school of the Sibelius Academy, and teaches harpsichord playing and basso continuo at the Early music faculty, Sibelius Academy. She has recorded solo albums (Alba, Divine Arts), has played in several orchestras and ensembles, and is currently working in her Elysian Fields Workshop.

Human communication is inherently multimodal. Whenever people communicate face-toface, they do not just rely on language, but also use gestures, stance as well as facial expressions to communicate their wants, intentions as well as information. In this contribution, I will illustrate how the most successful cognitive theory of language, Construction Grammar, can explain the creative online processes that underly our ability to communicate multimodally.

German film director Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger (June 2, 1899 – June 19, 1981) is one of the most influential women directors because of her contributions to silhouette ani- mation as well as to silent film. One of Reiniger’s favourite activities in her childhood was to perform shadow plays for her family and friends. Back then she did not realize that this art would lead her to the theatre of Max Reinhardt, who collaborated with the famous German dramatist Paul Wegener.
From the time Reiniger was fifteen years old, she aspired to be an actress, as she admired theatre performances directed by Paul Wegener. The famous artist was intrigued by Reiniger’s silhouette paper cut-outs of the performers from the theatre of Max Reinhardt. The actors from Paul Wegener’s play received them as free gifts, and this led to the foundation of Wegener and Reiniger’s future cooperation; mainly she did set design and acted as an extra. In the fifty films Reiniger produced throughout her life, her paper-cut characters fulfilled her dream of being more than a supporting actress. By cutting paper into pieces and reconstructing them, Reiniger acted as a variety of characters, from a Prince (The Adventures of Prince Achmed/ Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed, 1926) to a Doctor (Dr. Dolittle and his Animals/ Dr. Dolittle und seine Tiere, 1928); from a magician boy (Ten Minutes of Mozart/ Zehn Minuten Mozart, 1930) to a bird hunter (Papageno, 1935). Even if these characters were male figures, they trans- mitted the reflection of a pioneer actress and artist.
Reiniger’s second silent feature film Dr. Dolittle and his Animals was not appreciated by the public, as it ignored the oncoming tide of sound film, but this animated work, inspired by Hugh Lofting’s novel of the same title, used gestures of animated characters to vividly speak with another kind of “sound”. While the first
several of Reiniger’s films were lost or damaged in World War II, The Adventures of Prince Achmed and Dr. Dolittle and his Animals were restored by the British Film Institute in accordance with Reiniger’s handbook from 1925. The pace and the running time differ from the originals though. Most of her work that we are discussing has actually lost much of the finer details, especially in the backgrounds. In the words of film historian William Moritz: let’s hope that a more authentic restoration becomes available soon1.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed is thought to be one of the oldest surviving feature-length animated films and is also considered to be the first avant-garde full- length animated feature. In fact, the first feature-length animated film was created by Argentinean artist Quirino Cristiani, but unfortunately, his works are lost. A similar debate is conducted in regard to the question of the first animated documentary, con- sidering The Sinking of the Lusitania (dir. Winsor McCay, 1918, USA) which was a work of anti-war propaganda2. The Adventures of Prince Achmed paved the way for usage of a multiplane camera, ten years earlier than its use in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, dir. David Hand, USA), produced by Walt Disney. The entire film is animated in the silhouette technique which employs movable cardboard and metal cut-outs posed in front of illuminated sheets of glass. This special form glorifies the romantic fantasy of Prince Achmed who sets off on an adventure with a magical flying horse, and falls in love with Princess Peri Banu, becoming a new sparkling “star” in the mysterious sky of “The Arabian Nights”.

Черновой вариант статьи. В статье исследуется соотношение слова и жеста в стандартных и наиболее частотных конструкциях отрицания предиката. В пер-вом разделе рассматриваются фразы с отрицательной конструкцией «не + предикат» и анализируются закономерности, характерные для выбора отрицательных жестов «качать головой» и «отрезать рукой». Во втором разделе описаны конструкции с глубинным отрицани-ем — контексты, которые не содержат отрицательной конструкции на поверхностном уровне, но, тем не менее, сопровождаются от-рицательными жестами. Был рассмотрен довольно большой массив данных, на котором установлены корреляции между лингвистиче-скими признаками конструкций с наличием или отсутствием же-стикуляционного отрицания. Получены некоторые статистические закономерности употребления основных отрицательных жестов, которым дана содержательная интерпретация.
The article focuses on the topic of correlation between a word
and a gesture in standard and the most frequent constructions with
negation of a predicate. The article consists of two parts. The first part discusses negative constructions “ne [not] + predicate” and analyzes consistent patterns typical for choosing negative gestures. The second part describes constructions with deep negation, i.e. contexts without
a negative construction on the surface, but accompanied with negative gestures. The research has been conducted using the Multimodal Russian Corpus (MURCO). The research procedure is based on defining linguistic features in negative constructions and constructions with deep negation: a) semantics of lexical units related to gestural negation, b) syntactic structures, c) morphological components d) rhythmic features. Thus we assign every sample from the gestural database with a number of its linguistic characteristics in an utterance accompanying the gestures or the lack of such. With the help of statistical parameters, we determine which linguistic characteristics are essential for the presence or the lack of gestural negation and its quality (the body organ that performs it), and interpret all the statistical consistencies.

Gesture and second language teaching: a theoretical framework and some possible applications in Italian as a foreign language
Abstract:  Recent studies confirm that gesture and speech are two complementary aspects of the same cognitive process (McNeill, 1992, 2005). This finding suggests that gesture must play a more important role in the didactics of a second language. But how? In this contribution we introduce a theoretical framework to address this question in the context of Italian as a second language classroom, that can also be applied to other languages. We will start with the definition of emblems and co-speech gestures, and then we will focus on some key concepts extracted from recent gestures studies, paying special attention to those related to the role of co-speech gestures in second language acquisition and the effect of pedagogical gestures in second language teaching and learning.

Catalogue of the Musée de la danse exhibition dedicated to the "Gestures of Contact Improvisation" revisting the history and practice of a danceform born in the US in 1972. The exibition showcased drawings, photographs, and videos by Contact Improvisation historical dancers such as Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Lisa Nelson, and offerred parallels with key figures of the contemporary American movement and artistic culture (such as works from musician John Cage, choreographer Yvonne Rainer, and anthropologist Ray Birdwhisttel).
The catalogue documents the visit through the museum in seven gestures: not-doing, weighing/lifting, falling, playing, speaking, watching and touching as windows through the inner sensations of Contact Improvisation practionners.

One of the markers of orality in the ḥadīth literature is the gesture (ishāra pl. ishārāt). In 1886, Ignaz Goldziher observed that the muḥaddithūn (teachers of ḥadīth) performed gestures while transmitting ḥadīth on various topics. The following article picks up the thread of Goldziher’s unique inquiry, characterizes gestures in the ḥadīth and groups them into categories.  The gestures related to the transmission of aḥādīth al-ṣifāt, namely the traditions about divine attributes (ṣifāt Allāh), form a separate category because they entailed doctrinal and theological implications. This article spotlights the preservation and interpretation of one specific gesture which appears in a ḥadīth attributed to the ṣaḥābī Abū Hurayra. According to this ḥadīth, the Prophet placed his thumb on his ear and his forefinger on his eye to demonstrate that God “hears all and observes all” (Qurʾān 4:58). Does this gesture denote the attributes of God’s hearing and seeing, or God’s eye and ear? Was this gesture perceived as a metaphoric gesture representing an abstract concept, or was it understood as an iconic gesture displaying a concrete scene? The article considers the several possible interpretations of this gesture through the writings of the ultra-traditionalistic scholar Abū Saʿīd al-Dārimī (d. between 280-282/893-895) and the Ashʿarī theologian Ibn Fūrak (d. 406/1015).

La propiedad de los gestos de ser deícticos refiere a su capacidad de señalar en alguna dirección, a algo o a alguien: con el índice extendido, la mano, la mirada, la barbilla, los labios, la cabeza, etc. La variedad de formas que tenemos a nuestra disposición (y que usamos) para señalar hacia algo concreto o abstracto es considerablemente amplia. Sin embargo, parafraseando a Haviland (2000, p. 14), podría parecer que ‘señalar’ es un proceso simple en el que uno extiende su dedo índice (u otro articulador gestual) y refiere ostensivamente al objeto, lugar o persona del que se quiere decir algo. Nada podría ser más fácil de comprender y, no obstante, nada más alejado de la descripción de cómo funciona la deixis gestual.

كتاب ينقسم في ثلاثة محاور:
1. سيمياء اللباس (الأسئلة المرتبطة باللباس وأساليبه وظروف لبس كل منها)
2. الهيئات وما يرتبط بها من التحيات والاستقبال
3. الإشارات والإيماءات (الأوامر والطلبات، المشاعر والاحاسيس، الصفات والأحوال)
The book is in three chapters:
1. Semiotics of clothing
2. Postures
3. Gestures and NVC