Harlequinade

Harlequinade is a British comic theatrical genre, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "that part of a pantomime in which the harlequin and clown play the principal parts". It developed in England between the 17th and mid-19th centuries. It was originally a slapstick adaptation or variant of the Commedia dell'arte, which originated in Italy and reached its apogee there in the 16th and 17th centuries. The story of the Harlequinade revolves around a comic incident in the lives of its five main characters: Harlequin, who loves Columbine; Columbine's greedy father Pantaloon, who tries to separate the lovers in league with the mischievous Clown; and the servant, Pierrot, usually involving chaotic chase scenes with a policeman.

Originally a mime (silent) act with music and stylised dance, the harlequinade later employed some dialogue, but it remained primarily a visual spectacle. Early in its development, it achieved great popularity as the comic closing part of a longer evening of entertainment, following a more serious presentation with operatic and balletic elements. An often elaborate magical transformation scene, presided over by a fairy, connected the unrelated stories, changing the first part of the pantomime, and its characters, into the harlequinade. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, the harlequinade became the larger part of the entertainment, and the transformation scene was presented with increasingly spectacular stage effects. The harlequinade lost popularity towards the end of the 19th century and disappeared altogether in the 1930s, although Christmas pantomimes continue to be presented in Britain without the harlequinade.

Harlequinade (1930 Graham ballet)

Harlequinade was a solo modern dance by Martha Graham set to music by Ernst Toch. The work premiered on January 8, 1930, at Maxine Elliott's Theatre in New York City. The performance was part of a concert staged by the Dance Repertory Theatre, a group that included dancer/choreographers Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and Helen Tamiris. Their stated goal was "to give annually a season of continuous dance programs which will be representative of the art of dance in America and will give native artists an outlet for their creative work." Other new Graham works on the evening's program were Lamentation and Prelude to a Dance.

Synopsis

Harlequinade was divided into two sections, Pessimist and Optimist. The biting portrait of the Pessimist and subtle portrayal of the Optimist were intended as symbols of all the tragedy and comedy in the world. The accompanying orchestra consisted of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, trumpet, drums and voice.

As with much of her early work, little is known about the choreography. Barbara Morgan's photographs of Graham dancing in the Harlequinade costumes are virtually all that is known about the piece. The two outfits were also described in The Christian Science Monitor's 1938 review of a Boston performance. "Here the artist's own costuming - horizontal stripes for the former, billowing black taffeta, with a large red property handkerchief, for the latter, are punctuation marks."

Hamming space

In statistics and coding theory, a Hamming space is usually the set of all binary strings of length N. It is used in the theory of coding signals and transmission.

More generally, a Hamming space can be defined over any alphabet (set) Q as the set of words of a fixed length N with letters from Q. If Q is a finite field, then a Hamming space over Q is an N-dimensional vector space over Q. In the typical, binary case, the field is thus GF(2) (also denoted by Z₂).

In coding theory, if Q has q elements, then any subset C (usually assumed of cardinality at least two) of the N-dimensional Hamming space over Q is called a q-ary code of length N; the elements of C are called codewords. In the case where C is a linear subspace of its Hamming space, it is called a linear code. A typical example of linear code is the Hamming code. Codes defined via a Hamming space necessarily have the same length for every codeword, so they are called block codes when it is necessary to distinguish them from variable-length codes that are defined by unique factorization on a monoid.

Code (album)

Code (stylized as C O D E) is an album by British electronic band Cabaret Voltaire. The track "Don't Argue" was released as a single, as was "Here To Go".

The lyrics (and title) of "Don't Argue" incorporate verbatim a number of sentences from the narration of the 1945 short film Your Job in Germany, directed by Frank Capra. The film was aimed at American soldiers occupying Germany and strongly warned against trusting or fraternizing with German citizens.

Track listing

Personnel

Code (law)

A code is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the code was enacted, by a process of codification. Though the process and motivations for codification are similar in different common law and civil law systems, their usage is different. In a civil law country, a Code typically exhaustively covers the complete system of law, such as civil law or criminal law. By contrast, in a common law country with legislative practices in the English tradition, a Code is a less common form of legislation, which differs from usual legislation that, when enacted, modify the existing common law only to the extent of its express or implicit provision, but otherwise leaves the common law intact. By contrast, a code entirely replaces the common law in a particular area, leaving the common law inoperative unless and until the code is repealed. In a third case of slightly different usage, in the United States and other common law countries that have adopted similar legislative practices, a Code is a standing body of statute law on a particular area, which is added to, subtracted from, or otherwise modified by individual legislative enactments.