Rishita Chaudhary

A few weeks ago, the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died, aged 96. His best known work, After Virtue , is an extraordinary book. Despite its considerable impact over the past few decades (it was published in 1981), it still reads as a startlingly original, radical critique of modern society, and of moral philosophy itself.... See more

For all of the political and philosophical wisdom she draws from it, Augustine’s Confessions is animated by his experience of personal love — that eternal force that governs the Sun and the Moon and the stars of our interior lives, reflected and codified in our cultural and social structures.

This middle step is sometimes called a “liminal phase,” and, in turn, the before and after are sometimes called the pre-liminal and post-liminal phases. Liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold. So ritual is a portal into another world. This is just as true for rituals that happen once a year—say, decorating the Christmas tree—as those that

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The making of performance can be engaged with ‘in progress’, constantly rewriting itself, each airing allowing for new conjugations of ideas and possibilities of meaning-making. What remains unresolved today might find new definition tomorrow; the notion of the creative ‘process’ suggests the passing of time; it hints at decisions made, unmade and... See more

For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone.

7. Stories trump information

Stories have closure. This is what sets them apart from ‘“information’, which is by its nature partial, incomplete, fragmentary. Susan Sontag argues this is the ‘moral obligation’ of a writer: to tell stories, because stories will hold our attention and allow us to make moral judgments—not just about what is better ,... See more

We relate to each other through the digital interface, and yet there can be discomfort and anxiety around how technology intersects with dance. This happens particularly when technology is read as a replacement for embodied knowledge, for muscle memory, for the body becoming an archive of practice. If you could record what you have learned, does... See more