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As contemporary theatre and new production models are now being evaluated with more regard to community empowerment, the importance of proper tools for evaluation of the process has increased. The article explored the community youth theatre practices of the Community Youth Cultural Centre (CYCC) of the National Commission on Culture (NCC) in Ghana. We examined the role of the youth theatre at CYCC in the light of community empowerment. Using the qualitative case study design, six artists with a minimum of five years and a maximum of thirty years of work experience with the CYCC were interviewed. Performance activities and documents of the CYCC were also observed and analysed. The findings revealed four themes: Objectives of the centre; Youth theatre practices; Abibigoro/puppetry theatre models; and non-formal and cultural education. It was found that staff and artists at the CYCC employed diverse theatrical modes to facilitate community empowerment processes. The study recommends that cultural and creative centres in Ghana should harness the potentials of the community youth theatre, develop community-specific and context-driven performance models to support artistic- aesthetic-cultural and non-formal education processes to enhance our collective strive for community empowerment in Ghana.

The implementation of tourism activities not only has a purpose for traveling or entertainment. In education, tourism can have a function as a learning activity carried out by someone in their visit to a tourist attraction location. This study aims to determine the effect of organizing an art education tour on the interest in learning art for high school students. This study uses a quantitative research approach with a sample of 84 students who took part in an art education tourism program held at UPI (Indonesian University of Education). This study took a sample using total sampling techniques in which all respondents were taken into consideration the analysis of research data. Data collection used in this study is to use a closed questionnaire in the form of a scale. Research data analysis uses simple regression test data analysis techniques to find out whether there is an influence of art education tourism activities on high school students’ interest in learning art at school. The results of the study can be concluded that educational tours have an influence on high school students’ interest in learning art; this is indicated from the results of the coefficient of determination (R Square) of 0.479, which implies that the influence of educational programs on the dependent variable (interest in learning art) is 47.9%. The results of the analysis show how much the independent variable (X) can affect the dependent variable (Y).

Oobleck is two things: a non-Newtonian fluid, a mixture of cornstarch and water showing properties of both a liquid and a solid; and an invention by Dr. Seuss, an odd green weather occurrence who’s fluid, adhesive, and elastic attributes manage to threaten the entire state apparatus of the “Kingdom of Didd.” Re-viewing the children’s book Bartholomew and the Oobleck, and in light of its starch-and-water namesake, I argue that we can learn an insurrective strategy of political resistance from its performativity.

My project in this paper is to make a perverse, post-human, and even queer return to Arendt’s thinking on the ontological foundation of rights, to ask: What is left of rights? Could the challenge of encompassing and representing non-human entities re-energize the political pursuits that have hinged on rights thinking? Post-humanist proponents of critical race theory, indigenous studies, disability and queer studies have thoroughly problematized the givenness of the liberal rights-bearing subject, and the attributes of sovereignty, autonomy, motility, reason, self-possession, intention, speech, and efficacy that have qualified it, defining the parameters of the human in the process by disqualifying bodies (the woman, the slave, the refugee, the disabled) deemed different. But they have, largely, stopped short of inquiring into a concept of rights that embraces a radically non-human subject, limiting themselves instead to arguing either for a continual expansion of the domain of the human beyond its foundational exclusions, or for an abandonment of rights altogether. But how might conceptualizing rights away from inherited presumptions about how a rights-bearing subject acts, manifests, or appears help us reclaim what was politically generative about the project of rights in the first place? Ultimately, do rights retain any validity if they do not also embrace the non-human? How might performance help us imagine non-human rights—help us figure, speak with and for, non-humans in the domain of the political? And what insight might we gain from revisiting Arendt in the light of post-humanist thought?

Object-Oriented Ontology presents stark implications for the process of the artist. If all matter is alive, then all things are co-performers, and all art becomes performance. How does one work with the presence of the non-human, and what are the ethical implications of attempting to attune to its needs? Beginning with the object of a table, and considering it within both Graham Harman's discussion of "The Third Table" and the thing as a performing object, Meghan Moe Beitiks analyzes the presence of the non-human in performance and asserts a need for awareness, consideration and love in the creative process.

The paper uses tropes culled from several of Hannah Arendt's works, as well as Rebecca Schneider's performance-theoretical considerations on "reenactment", to analyze the work of artist Miriam Shenitzer, specifically a show of drawings, captions, and objects called "A Putative Life of Hannah Arendt." The essay probes this "putative life" as construed from the artist's own memory fragments (including the memories of others that have become the artist's own), as well as from faux-artifacts that constitute a "collection" (à la Benjamin) without claim to representing an actual past. With access to history denied and a heritage claimed "without testament," the artist opens a space "between past and future," a moment of contemplation on the borders between private and public lives.

This article examines how spectators describe their expectations of contemporary dance by referring to action. Through discussing a qualitative audience study, the article argues that spectators always have an expectation of being affected by performances they attend. This expectation can guide their interest in attending performances of certain genres instead of other possible ones on offer. Additionally, the article points out how spectators can actively manage their expectations in order to be affected. The study is based on 21 in-depth interviews with spectators at a dance venue, a company and a festival in Finland. The analysis of the interviews combines thematic analysis with metaphor analysis. Employing the paradigm of enaction and the concept of affordances, this article approaches expectations as embodied and dynamic, created in interactions between artists, producers and spectators. The analysis shows that when speaking about their expectations of performances spectators use bodily and spatial metaphors. Focusing on metaphors reveals how, for the spectators, performances afford a possibility for action that affects them. The interviewed spectators describe that contemporary dance is “not set in its ways”, therefore it keeps them “awake” and their thoughts do “not fossilize”. This way, they understand contemporary dance as a genre that affords a possibility to be affected by allowing a freedom of own interpretation and surprising experiences if they desire such. Concentration on the metaphors of language offers a deeper understanding of the active nature of spectators’ expectations. Understanding how spectators describe their expectations by referring to action that enables the shaping of their emotions and thoughts can help the development of arts marketing and audience engagement. Purpose–This article examines how spectators describe their expectations of contemporary dance by referring to action. Through discussing a qualitative audience study, the article argues that spectators always have an expectation of being affected by performances they attend. This expectation can guide their interest in attending performances of certain genres instead of other possible ones on offer. Additionally, the article points out how spectators can actively manage their expectations in order to be affected. Design/methodology/approach–The study is based on 21 in-depth interviews with spectators at a dance venue, a company and a festival in Finland. The analysis of the interviews combines thematic analysis with metaphor analysis. Employing the paradigm of enaction and the concept of affordances, this article approaches expectations as embodied and dynamic, created in interactions between artists, producers and spectators. Findings–The analysis shows that when speaking about their expectations of performances, spectators use bodily and spatial metaphors. Focusing on metaphors reveals how, for the spectators, performances afford a possibility for action that affects them. The interviewed spectators describe that contemporary dance is“not set in its ways”, and therefore it keeps them“awake”and their thoughts do“not fossilize”. This way, they understand contemporary dance as a genre that affords a possibility to be affected by allowing a freedom of own interpretation and surprising experiences if they desire such. Originality/value–Concentration on the metaphors of language offers a deeper understanding of the active nature of spectators’ expectations. Understanding how spectators describe their expectations by referring to action that enables the shaping of their emotions and thoughts can help the development of arts marketing and audience engagement. Keywords: Expectations, Affordances, Enaction, Metaphor analysis, Contemporary dance, Qualitative audience research

Following bell hooks’ submission that theory making is “a location for healing” (2017, 59) “The Shape of Humidity: Performing Black Atlantic Theory Making” riffs upon the historically critical and widely circulated subject of the black body politic and Atlantic waters informing but non-exclusive to performance, art history, and visual cultural discourses. The theory making performed here alternatively frames the black Atlantic body in relation to humidity, illustrating what Deleuze and Guattari might call the “possibles” evoked through “a contraction of earth and humidity” (Deleuze 1994, 76–78). The theory is shaped upon a discussion of Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899), included in Kara Walker’s cultural-political opus, Kara Walker: After The Deluge (2006), mounted at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Theory making confronts the painting’s adherence to the hegemonic tradition of rendering the black Atlantic body as a perennial form in peril, whose destiny in this instance is as matter consumed by the thermodynamic sublimity of the waters. Alternatively, the action of theory making here collapses space-time separations among black Atlantic flora, the healing processes of artists Lygia Clark and Wangechi Mutu, and modes of breath activation, to access states of limitlessness actualized through bodily openness to humidity’s grace.

Nature relative to subjectivity is an under theorized area of performance philosophy, one that we ignore at our peril. There is such a thing as nature. It encompasses all that humans are not, and suffuses all that we are and do. It is not merely a social or cultural construction, as we consider in this essay. In order to speak more definitively of nature and the body, we employ the phenomenology of Paul Ricoeur and reach back to the lifeworld (lebenswelt) philosophy of Edmund Husserl. Some read Husserl as an essentialist, but there are other readings, such as the one developed here. One of Ricoeur’s major works, Freedom and Nature: the Voluntary and the Involuntary, concerns motives and values at the organic level, studying how habits inform individual habitus and become embodied as nature in flux. Accordingly, this essay explores subjectivity, intentionality and nature in performance using examples from butoh relative to metamorphosis, a ubiquitous process in the rhythms and multi-tiered rhizomes of nature. Through Sartre and Ricoeur, the text also considers lived values of freedom relative to intention. In this light, readers are invited to explore their own porousness and evaporations via Freedom in Plasma, a butoh to do at the end of the essay.

This paper approaches Badiou’s essay, ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought,’ on its own terms, considering its stated approach and central claims. This is in order to avoid the indignant tone of some responses from the field that desire other approaches to philosophy’s engagement with dance. Badiou’s project in ‘Dance as a Metaphor for Thought’ is antithetical to my own current, advocatory research, thus offering an adversary of sorts. If it is the case that dance is ‘instrumental’ for the art-philosophy schema that Badiou is formulating, that is, being ‘incorporated’ into the strategies of a philosophy of art, what’s in it for dance? Can Badiou’s project be repurposed for our own disciplinary concerns? For instance, if his conception of dance (drawn from past philosophical accounts and for his own purposes) is seen as lacking from a disciplinary perspective, then what is the idea of dance that positions his as ‘wrong’?

This research is situated within an Islamic philosophical paradigm, with a series of experiments in studio art practice. In my investigation of Mulla Sadrā’s theory of systematic intensification, I was led towards Ta’wil, a unique method of interpretation, that is primarily used for interpreting the verses of the Quran. I extract this traditional Quranic method of interpretation, Ta’wil and translate it into a visual and collective dialogue, for a practice-oriented research. Keeping in view the traditional association of the method of Ta’wil towards the Quran, I suggest there is evidence that Ta’wil is a method that can be practised outside the interpretation of the text. It is a unique method of interpretation that performs in both physical and metaphysical worlds. Ta’wil is both a noun, as an object or happening in the physical, and a process of carrying a perceptible image (for example text of the Quran) towards higher and deeper understandings. I start my writing with a brief overview of my research area, moving towards Ta’wil in creative art practice.

The fabrication of underwater devices is necessary for the exploration of water environments and interactions in the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) field. However, there are fewer approaches to support prototyping used in water environments. The existing prototype methods lack systematic waterproof treatments and provide insufficient software for balance and buoyancy analysis. To address these limitations, we present ElectroPaper, a new approach for the design and fabrication of prototypes used in water environments (surface or beneath) with paper-based electronic interfaces with a crease layer, hardware distribution layer, and hollow-out layer to support physical properties, such as waterproofing, foldability, and conformability. The approach includes a computational design tool for assisting in balance analysis, three-dimensional (3D) model unfolding, and circuit drawing. We describe the design and fabrication process and provide several example applications to illustrate the feasibility and utility of our approach. ElectroPaper provides an inexpensive and effective medium for the fabrication of customized digital prototypes for water environment use.

The embodied creative practice of dance facilitates a particular kind of awareness or attunement which can inform both the therapeutic and the intellectual work of the Health Humanities. This paper therefore considers dance as a way of ‘doing’ Health Humanities in two interlinked ways: dance as a way of healing and dance as a way of knowing. In bringing together carnal and the creative dimensions of human experience, dance offers us a way of making sense of our place in the world that provides us both with much needed existential security (tethering) and much needed epistemological freedom (untethering).

Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human–technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human–technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human–technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms.

In my article I focus on the connection between the artistic and social spheres, the transcendence of art education into therapy and I will briefly mention the structure of art education with a focus on theatrical pedagogy in the Czech Republic. I divided the article into theatrical pedagogy in practice for younger school age, teenage and youth, adults and seniors, and the following areas: a) Theatrical pedagogy in the structure of the Czech educational system and as a part of leisure activities and Drama education as a subject for future teachers. In this part I shortly present what drama education / theatrical pedagogy in the Czech school system means and I draw the introduction on the studies and ideas of prof. Mgr. Jaroslav Provazník, who leads the Department of Drama in Education at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague; b) The potential of nonverbal theatre techniques in communication with specific groups and theatre pedagogy in the context of integration and inclusion; c) Pedagogy of substitute subjects – performativity of objects. In this section I present a personal description of one five-year cycle with “object workshops” – drama education: empirical research, comparison, development of methodology of working with the subject in the context of drama education.

The advent of the digital age has given new forms and new connotations to artistic creation, and more and more digital media technologies have entered the stage of artistic creation and exhibitions. At present, holographic projection technology has become a hot application technology in the field of digital media art. The purpose of this paper is to explore the technical principles of holographic projection technology and its application in the field of digital media art, so as to provide suggestions for the application and promotion of holographic projection technology and the development and innovation of digital media art. First of all, this article understands the technical principles of holographic projection and its application status in various fields, especially in the field of digital media art, through relevant literature research. Then, this article introduces the digital holographic technology, virtual imaging technology, and computer simulation technology used in the realization of holographic projection technology. Then, based on the advantages of holographic projection technology in three-dimensional image recording and reproduction, this paper proposes to introduce holographic projection technology to digital art museums, digital art exhibitions, and other digital media art applications and to study the effect of holographic projection technology on art through simulation experiments, the effect of recording and reproducing the image of the work. Finally, the three-dimensional reconstruction image of the digital holographic projection experiment on the artwork is compared with the simulated image of the Contour GT profiler to verify the feasibility of applying the holographic projection technology to art exhibitions and the effect of three-dimensional image recording and reproduction. Research shows that the holographic projection technology can achieve 93.34% of the simulation effect of recording and reproducing 3D images of artworks. It is also found that 59.86% of the audience who pay attention to the art experience strongly support the application of holographic projection technology in digital media art fields such as digital art gallery. This fully proves the feasibility of applying holographic projection technology to digital art exhibitions and provides a full range of artistic experience for audiences who cannot be present.

The article is devoted to the problem of forecasting the career and competence indicators of a social worker in the context of digital transformations of the society. The paper analyzes the social and historical context of the formation of social workers’ career competence indicators. The article compares the analogue and digital system of career competence indicators of a social worker.

This paper presents a theoretical framework of the circular shift network coding system through the study of nonmultiple clustered interval music performance style conversion and the analysis of music conversion by using circular shift topology, and a series of basic research results of circular shift network coding is obtained under this framework. It reveals the essential connection between scalar network coding based on finite domain and cyclic shift network coding, designs a solution construction algorithm for cyclic shift network coding under multicast network, and portrays the multicast capacity of cyclic shift network coding. It overcomes the problem that the piano roll-curtain representation cannot distinguish between a single long note and multiple consecutive notes of the same pitch, describes musical information more comprehensively, extracts musical implicit style from the note matrix based on autoencoder, and better eliminates the potential influence of musical content on musical performance style. A two-way recurrent neural network based on the gated recurrent unit is used to extract a sequence of note feature vectors of different styles, and a one-dimensional convolutional neural network is used to predict the intensity of the extracted note feature vector sequence for a specific style, which better learns the intensity variation of different styles of MIDI music.

This article examines Kabosh Theatre Company’s production of Dominic Montague’s A Queer Céilí at the Marty Forsythe, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during its first run in March 2019. Based on archival research and personal accounts of a weekend surrounding the October 1983 National Union of Students Lesbian and Gay Conference in Belfast, the play depicts a moment of lesbian and gay activism largely neglected in critical and popular historical accounts of the period known as the ‘Troubles’ (1968–98). Through observation of rehearsals and performances as well as in-depth interviews with audiences and artists, we argue that the play’s situation in the venue, where many of the events portrayed originally took place, and the use of archival and found photographic imagery as key scenic elements create a sense of ‘collapsed time’ that brings the past into dialogue with the present and future, particularly regarding the relationship of LGBTQ+ rights to societal reconciliation.

This case study examines a joint project in performer training and rehearsal conducted between Coventry University (UK) and Tampere University (Finland) using a variety of telepresence and app-based technologies. In this project, two identical spaces, equipped with rear projection screens and linked by videoconferencing technology, were created in both institutions. This study reports on the adaptation of the pedagogical practices to a digital setting.

This paper looks at three short dramatic scenes by Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats and Samuel Beckett which all pick up that most conventional of theatrical themes, thwarted love, only in a disturbing way, by shifting the focus from the torments of the soul to the painful embodied experience of sexual frustration, and by having it performed not by youthful “star-crossed lovers”, but by ambiguously incarnated revenants, or by decrepit, nearly dead old people. I first suggest that a certain filiation, conscious or not, runs from one of Verlaine’s most famous poems, “Colloque sentimental”, through the dance of the ghosts in Yeats’s “play for dancers” The Dreaming of the Bones, to the “love scene” played out by Nagg and Nell out of their respective dustbins in Beckett’s Endgame. More importantly, I argue that the three pieces ask uncomfortable questions about the ethics of spectatorship and invite us to think critically about the conceptualising of theatre as a “face-to-face encounter with the Other”, a notion inspired by Levinas which has gained currency since the “ethical turn” hit theatre studies in the mid-2000s. This paradigm, I further suggest, is applied inaccurately to the theatrical encounter, especially in such contemporary productions as Milo Rau’s 2019 show Orestes in Mosul, which rather rests on a problematic ethics of empathy, a notion foreign to Levinas. The three scenes by Verlaine, Yeats and Beckett, on the other hand, offer an alternative model of unempathetic spectatorship which, paradoxically, may go further towards allowing the presence of radical Others on the stage. Cet article lit en parallèle trois extraits dramatiques d’œuvres de Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats et Samuel Beckett qui sollicitent l’éternel trope théâtral de l’amour impossible, mais de manière insolite, en insistant moins sur les tourments de l’âme que sur l’expérience douloureusement corporelle de la frustration sexuelle, et en mettant en scène non l’habituel couple de jeunes premiers, mais des spectres ambigus ou des personnages vieux, décrépits et déjà à moitié morts. Je montre d’abord qu’une filiation, consciente ou non, relie le dialogue du « Colloque sentimental » de Verlaine, la dance des spectres dans The Dreaming of the Bones de Yeats et la « scène d’amour » qui se joue d’une poubelle à l’autre entre Nagg et Nell dans Fin de Partie (Endgame) de Beckett. Mon hypothèse est que les trois passages, qui mettent tous en scène un spectateur involontaire, interrogent le rôle éthique du spectateur de théâtre. Depuis le « tournant éthique » des études théâtrales dans les années 2000, il est devenu courant de concevoir la représentation théâtrale comme le lieu d’une rencontre avec le Visage de l’autre, au sens où l’entend Lévinas ; toutefois, cette lecture est contestable, et recouvre trop souvent la notion, étrangère à Lévinas, d’empathie. Prenant pour exemple le spectacle de Milo Rau, Orestes à Mossoul (2019), je montre en quoi un théâtre qui en appelle à l’empathie du spectateur est potentiellement problématique. Les trois scènes évoquées plus haut de Verlaine, Yeats et Beckett proposent un contre-modèle de spectateur résolument dénué d’empathie, qui permet peut-être paradoxalement de faire sur scène une place à l’Autre dans toute son irréductible étrangeté.

Choreographer George Balanchine was known for rejecting the premise that his ballets were abstract. Yet, a closer look into his comments on abstraction reveals a greater degree of ambivalence toward the concept than previously noticed. His influential words found response in dance critical writing, where the term &ldquo, &rdquo, continued to circulate, but was often applied in vague ways, such as &ldquo, so-called abstraction.&rdquo, This and other softened terminological variations formed an ambiguous collection of abstractive terms, like a vague word cloud around the dance concept. This article explores abstraction in Balanchine&rsquo, s particular ballets, and makes a two-fold argument. On the one hand, by emphasizing the visual aspects of Balanchine&rsquo, s compositions, we may uncover ways to untangle his dilemma about dance abstraction. Visual theories of &ldquo, semantic abstraction&rdquo, by Harold Osborne, and of &ldquo, the gesture of abstraction&rdquo, by Blake Stimson, may help us to understand the abstractive modes in several of Balanchine&rsquo, s black-and-white ballets. On the other hand, whether discussed or not, Balanchine&rsquo, s abstractive gestures have created powerful representational shifts in some cases. In particular, by examining the interracially cast duet from the ballet Agon (1957) as a visual case study, we may see how Balanchine&rsquo, s rejections of the concept, amplified by critics&rsquo, vague terminological invocations of, or silence about, abstractive choreographic gestures, occluded the work&rsquo, s participation in the discourse of abstraction. Simultaneously, unnoticed yet potent choreographic gestures of semantic abstraction may have promoted whiteness as a normative structure, one that relies on a hegemonic &ldquo, bodily integrity&rdquo, (as discussed by Saidiya Hartman). Such an analysis leads to a recognition that Balanchine&rsquo, s abstraction could have been a subversive form of dissent similar to Kobena Mercer&rsquo, s concept of &ldquo, discrepant abstraction.&rdquo, However, I posit that, as a result of the Balanchine dilemma and its influence, the interlinked gestures of an abstract nature that have not been recognized as such promoted the self-regulative structure identified by Bojana Cvejić as &ldquo, white harmony.&rdquo, Ultimately, a more specific and clear application of the term &ldquo, in ballet is needed, as it can help to dismantle or disrupt the system of white supremacy operative in dominant ballet structures.

This editorial outlines the scope of this special issue on puppetry. The issue editors introduce articles that theorize the use of puppets for a purpose and present dialogues with practitioners working in the field. The authors emphasize the power of puppetry within contemporary cultural systems and the plethora of diverse practices comprising applied puppetry. The lively and developing field of applied puppetry is presented as involving new thinking and methods that have been adopted globally. The editorial argues that applied puppetry, as well as being a set of practices that can affect the lives of participants, is also a robust academic field. The authors hope for a reconsideration of objects in applied theatre practice generally, as a way to further understand networks in socially engaged performance practices.

This article draws on the dialogue between puppetry and applied drama that arose from the AHRC Objects with Objectives Research Network in 2017‐18 to explore a tentative theory of applied puppetry. A range of theoretical approaches to applied drama are examined in the light of practical examples of applied puppetry using case studies from Northern Ireland, South Africa and Australia. Morton (2013) highlights how, in performance ‘tension between the material puppet and the imagined puppet’ gives rise to a kind of ‘double vision’ (Tillis 1992), a concept that the article considers alongside Gallagher’s (2005) distinction between body image and body schema, Brecht’s (1974) V-effekt, Meyerhold’s (1998) distinction between the materiality and agency of the actor and Boal’s (1992) idea of metaxis. The article concludes that the distancing and conductive qualities of applied puppetry often work in parallel and that the puppet can be seen as the site of metaxis when used in an applied context.

This essay treats two innovative site-specific sequences produced by women in the first decade of the twenty first century. Both are explicitly interested in the relationship between geometry, writing (as material and political practice) and geo-cultural space, a relationship each finds inflected to some extent by gender emphases. Starting from the premise that any piece of writing is itself a place, the essay considers the self-conscious textualities of its primary texts&mdash, one concerned with Exmoor, the other with a sheep-farm in rural mid-Wales&mdash, in the light of their different, if similarly rural and relatively remote, contexts. Presley&rsquo, s &lsquo, Stone Settings&rsquo, explores the relationship between some of the quasi-geometrical Neolithic stone arrangements dotted across Exmoor, and the mediation of their apparently Euclidean sometimes barely visible forms in/as text. Watts&rsquo, work-in-progress Zeta Landscape mobilises in the &lsquo, analytical&rsquo, or &lsquo, projective&rsquo, (ie non-Euclidean) geometry of its title the complex weave of routine care-giving and accountancy charging the contemporary (Michel Foucault&rsquo, distributive&rsquo, ) pastoral. Both sequences wryly suggest that poetic form can finally no more adequately figure place than the abstractions of mathematical discourse can utter the cultural ecology of any environment, however concrete-seeming. Aided by Jacques Derrida&rsquo, s powerful essay &lsquo, White Mythology&rsquo, the account comes to rest on the equally equivocal recognition of the in/effectuality of metaphor in any kind of address, critical or creative.

The Broadway musical, balancing as it does artistic expression and commerce, is regularly said to reflect its sociocultural surroundings. Its historiography, however, tends for the most part to emphasize art over commerce, and exceptional productions over all else. Broadway histories tend to prioritize the most artistically valued musicals, occasional lip service, too, is paid to extraordinary commercial successes on the one hand, and lesser productions by creators who are collectively deemed great artists on the other. However, such a historiography provides less a reflection of reality than an idealized and thus somewhat warped portrait of the ways the commercial theater, its gatekeepers, and its chroniclers prioritize certain works and artists over others. Using as examples Ain&rsquo, t Supposed to Die a Natural Death (1971), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Carrie (1988), and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark (2011), I will suggest that a money-minded approach to the study of musicals may help paint a clearer picture of what kinds of shows have been collectively deemed successful enough to remember, and what gets dismissed as worthy of forgetting.

This article examines the grassroots artistic initiative al-Fann Midan (Art is a City Square) in Cairo and a contrasting approach to street art organizing in Alexandria to demonstrate how each enacted a different relationship to ‘the political’ in a revolutionary moment. Extending sociologist Asef Bayat’s concept ‘quiet encroachment’, it analyzes these contrasting approaches through the sonic metaphor of ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’ politics. As a spectrum, this framework highlights how the everyday, the gestural, and the affective on the one hand can exist simultaneously, and at times in tension with, larger, more representational political expressions on the other. It thus avoids fetishizing creative ‘resistance’ or ‘dissent’, while nonetheless analyzing art in a revolutionary moment, by grounding creative expression more historically and with analytical attention to how it reanimates long-standing debates among Arab intellectuals regarding the role of the ‘artist’.

There seems to be an inherent tension between intoxication and critique. We tend to associate intoxication with immersion, participation, and proximity, while critique is usually connected to the distance, separation, and an outsider-perspective. In this article I want to analyze this tension, but I also want to explore the possibilities, with the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin as my guide, of a critical intoxication and/or intoxicated critique. What would be the social, political and aesthetic implications for such juxtaposition for both of these categories?

This article looks at the &lsquo, public&rsquo, &lsquo, place&rsquo, of drama in Britain at present by offering an analysis of a contemporary version of an ancient Greek play by Aeschylus, entitled The Suppliant Women, written by David Greig, directed by Ramin Gray, and first performed at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh in 2016. Following an agonistic (Chantal Mouffe), rather than a consensual (J&uuml, rgen Habermas) model of the public sphere, it argues that under globalisation, three cumulative and interwoven senses of the public sphere, the discursive, the spatial, and the individual and his/her/their relation to a larger form of organisation, despite persisting hegemonic structures that perpetuate their containment, have become undone. This is the kind of unbounded model of public sphere Greig&rsquo, s version of Aeschylus&rsquo, The Suppliant Women seems to suggest by precisely offering undoings of discourses, spaces, and individualisations. In order to frame the first kind of undoing, that is, the unmarking of theatre as contained, the article uses Christopher Balme&rsquo, s notion of &lsquo, open theatrical public sphere&rsquo, and in order to frame the second, that is, the undoing of elements &lsquo, in&rsquo, Greig&rsquo, s version, the article utilises Greig&rsquo, s concept of &lsquo, constructed space&rsquo, The article arrives then at the notion of the open constructed public sphere in relation to The Suppliant Women. By engaging with this porous model of the public sphere, The Suppliant Women enacts a protest against exclusionary, reductive models of exchange and organisation, political engagement, and belonging under globalisation.

This article reconsiders Josephine Baker&rsquo, s legacy for the field of dance by emphasizing the principles of abstraction that she developed through performance. Although she is considered to be a modernist, Baker is rarely discussed as an abstractionist. Doing so requires a rethinking of the relationship between race and abstraction, a conversation revived by choreographer Miguel Gutierrez in 2018. Audiences in 1920s Paris described how Baker confounded identity categories to produce something new for the stage, but critics and scholars since have continued to define her by those very categories. Baker&rsquo, s dancing prioritized the expression of kinesthetic energy over representation or narrative, clearly fitting within the purview of abstract dance. In building upon the work of Brenda Dixon Gottschild, I argue that Baker demonstrates how abstraction is not in opposition to Africanist dance aesthetics, but rather is a constitutive part of it.

This article is aimed at exploring the political characteristics of the drama space, which reflects, juxtaposes, and opposes particular sites in a participant&rsquo, s everyday life, such as the school. By putting spatial theories to work, this article investigates the drama space belonging to an all-girls community group in Sweden, participation in which is voluntary and where the artistic work produced relies on a democratic process, with the girls&rsquo, input being vital. I conceptualise the drama room as a heterotopia that functions as an exclusive and excluding space as a well as a space of resistance. Based on interviews with the girls, this ethnographic study challenges the conventional notion that applied drama is only an interrelational matter between the drama participants. By examining the drama room&rsquo, s role as the &lsquo, other place&rsquo, in the girls&rsquo, everyday lives while being connected to &lsquo, everyday&rsquo, places, this article demonstrates the drama room as an important space for the girls to have agency, there and elsewhere. When placing space and place in the foreground, a &lsquo, dramaspaceknowledge&rsquo, emerges, the influence of which stretches beyond the drama room. This article argues that the girls&rsquo, dramaspaceknowledge is utilised when creating a performance and while challenging structures and norms elsewhere, such as in their schools and communities.

The essay employs the concept of the 'semantic image' as articulated by Czech aesthetician Otakar Zich in his book The Aesthetics of Dramatic Art in order to outline how theatre publicity relates to theatre production and performance. Theatre graphics, posters, and other promotional materials contain images that substitute or compensate for what is not to be seen and heard onstage in form of 'technical images'; thus, these graphics condition the 'representational images' of dramatic locations.1 Publicity images can be also used to manipulate imagery associations related to actors as well as dramatic characters in order to facilitate their desired reception. This article focuses on the posters produced for Prague's National Theatre opera production of Tramvestie (2019) and two stagings of Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973, 2007) along with Alphonse Mucha's posters for Sarah Bernhardt.

Finding tools that stimulate creativity, empathy and self-confidence is one of the core challenges of the 21st century. Performative education being one of them, a need for developing convincing performative concepts arises (Jogschies, Schewe & Stöver-Blahak 2018). The improvisational role-playing technique edu-larp constitutes one such tool, combining the training of social and personal skills with the exploration of various themes. An adaptation of this format to institutional settings coined STARS (STudent Activating Role-playing gameS, Geneuss 2019) has been applied in several schools in Bavaria. To ascertain the students’ perspective on their perceived learning, data from 161 quantitative surveys were further augmented by feedback-talks. To gain insight into the teachers’ perspective on how the tool can be implemented in German lessons, which general skills can be trained and what challenges might arise when applied in formal education, we applied a qualitative design grounded upon 7 interviews. It emerges that applying edu-larp in classrooms is perceived as a meaningful tool to treat curricular topics. It also contributes to train social and personal skills, which in turn can lead to self-confident face-to-face interaction. Yet, multiple challenges keep educators from applying the technique.

British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children (2016) tackles the imaginative challenge of depicting environmental crisis, in particular the risks of nuclear destruction and climate change. With questions of intra- and intergenerational justice being at the heart of the dramatic text, this article draws on conceptions and insights from cultural risk theory to argue that human risk behaviour and decision-making is the play’s main focus and determines characterisation as well as structure. Interrogating the tension between aesthetic form and content, it shows how The Children naturalizes the (post-)apocalyptic condition and strives for a balance of scales with regard to collective and personal crisis. Characteristic of the rapidly growing corpus of contemporary “cli-fi” drama, and in accordance with many of the strategies proclaimed by climate communication theory, the play stages the catastrophic implications of environmental destruction predominantly as collective risk management and in a predominantly realist manner, discarding formal experimentation as well as futurist setting. Yet this article argues that it remains ambiguous what kind of risk management is proposed and whether we should read it as a call for action or as an imaginative means of accepting finitude.

Almost 50 years ago, in the events that happened during the so-called Bloody Sunday (Derry 1972, 30th January), 13 Catholic civilians were killed because of the actions of the British army during a civil rights march against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Other 13 civilians were injured. While the circumstances were unclear, these civilians were considered to be terrorists, which seemed to justify the gunfire. The findings on Bloody Sunday from two Tribunals of Inquiry (1972 and 1998-2010), and the reactions that their resulting reports raised are an excellent example of cultural impregnation in law. In this regard, it is possible to find a general notion of justice as truth. Guaranteeing such notion (or, at least, the willingness to ensure it) seemed to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland. Under the light of these events, the following pages aim to analyse how that legal culture of justice as truth is displayed in the two Bloody Sunday Tribunals of Inquiry as well as its contribution to the contestation of the British legal system or its legitimacy. This paper starts by reviewing previous studies about the conceptual framework of the analysis — it examines the concept of “legal culture” and the understanding of justice as truth, as well as the definition of Tribunal of Inquiry. Next, it argues cultural perceptions regarding Bloody Sunday Inquiries. The conclusions exposed reveal that the legal culture of justice as truth is also embodied in legalism and colonialism.

In Dinner with Friends (1999), which received the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2000, Donald Margulies stages two couples – one of them impacted by the other’s divorce – and he uses food to evaluate the characters’ response to a marital breakup. Sociologically, food and eating rituals help characterize communities and identities, and in Dinner with Friends, the characters’ culinary choices become revelatory features of their bourgeois community. In the midst of a friendship crisis, Margulies uses culinary talks to examine East Coast intelligentsia. Beyond their specific approach to ethnic food, he sheds some light on the invisible consequences of their expertise as foodies, bearers of inflexible norms, who resort to soft power to assert their immutable principles. Viewed through the lens of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism, the enactment of eating strategies – not to mention people’s capacity to cook a good meal – will serve to analyze connections between food and power. Beyond thematic aspects illustrating a crisis, Margulies’s dramatic use of food may reveal his aesthetic strategies in performing crisis.

A tendency in psychodrama research is the focus on proving effectiveness. This article in the Zeitschrift für Psychodrama und Soziometrie aims to propose arts-based research (ABR) methodology through a theoretical approach by a brief literature review of psychodrama research, a glimpse into discourses in applied theatre research and an introduction to arts-based research (ABR) methodology. How moments of participation and self-identified significant experiences by the participants from a psychodrama group can be investigated through ABR methodology will be exemplified through performative inquiry (Fels 2012), inspired by poetic inquiry (Faulkner 2018). In this way, the article aims to shed light on the question:How might arts-based research methodology in combination with qualitative research methodology contribute to the psychodrama research field?The article also presents empirical and ontological perspectives relating to the pilot study and give a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of applying ABR methodology exemplified in the article. This way, the paper aims to illuminate how ABR methodologies can be applied together with qualitative research methodology to contribute to psychodrama research.

This paper proposes a New Drastic Musicology based on the ludomusical premises of play, multimediality, and interactivity. Ludomusicology offers the exciting perspective of going beyond even the pioneering historical and technological overviews, case studies, and explorations of genre conventions that the study of game music has produced over the last decade. It necessitates innovations in three levels: (1) musical analysis, (2) musicological research themes and (3) musicological critical theory. Ludomusicology revolutionises the score analysis that musicologists have employed since the late nineteenth century. Since the concept of a score is obsolete in game music, ludomusicology must, rather, analyse the factors cooperating in the musical underlining of game plot and gameplay. I identify these as musical affect (connotation and identification), musical literacy (habituated signification), and musical interaction (play). The integration of these three factors into musical analysis leads to the genesis of entirely new musicological research fields. How does musical literacy in games relate to that in other multimedial genres? How does musical play in games relate to music-historical notions of play and performance? These new research questions, finally, evoke meta-critical reflections. Ludomusicology, with its pervasive attention to multimedial and interactive performativity, necessitates a rethinking of Abbate’s notion of “drastic” musicology. Ludomusicology can alter an entire discipline. Innovating the discipline on the levels of object analysis, research themes as well as critical reflection, ludomusicology can engender “The New Drastic”.

The remarkable coordination displayed by animal groups—such as an ant colony or a flock of birds in flight—is not just a behavioral feat; it reflects a fullfledged form of collective cognition. Building on work in philosophy, cognitive approaches to literature, and animal studies, I explore how contemporary fiction captures animal collectivity. I focus on three novels that probe different aspects of animal assemblages: animals as a collective agent (in Richard Powers's The Echo Maker), animals that communicate a shared mind through dance- like movements (in Lydia Davis's The Cows), and animals that embrace a collective “we” to critique the individualism of contemporary society (in Peter Verhelst's The Man I Became). When individuality drops out of the picture of human‐animal encounters in fiction, empathy becomes abstract: a matter of quasi‐geometric patterns that are experienced by readers through an embodied mechanism of kinesthetic resonance. (MC)

According to the Freudian psychoanalytic theory, earlier traumatic experiences highly influence the psychological development of personality. Freud also affirms that the earlier years of childhood development play a crucial role in the formation of personality. He states that all normal infants go through specific stages of psychosexual development that are naturally progressive, namely: oral, anal and phallic stages. Any disruption of or delay in the progress of any of the psychosexual stages or failure to cope with them causes the fixation of the libido at a particular stage. Martha, the central figure in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, suffered from painful emotional experiences during childhood which gave her an unbalanced personality and a fragile ego. She lived a lonely and troubled childhood because she was abandoned and rejected by her father, a matter that has left a deep scar on her psyche. Martha also has a phallic fixation owing to the unresolved sexual conflicts during the phallic phase of the psychosexual development, a matter that negatively influences her personality. Applying Freudian psychanalytic theory, the aim of this study is to investigate the influence of past traumatic experiences of childhood on Martha’s behaviour and her psychological wellbeing. The study also seeks to uncover the impact of the unresolved Electra Complex on the development of Martha’s personality and her sexual maturity.

The aim of this report is to provide an overview of the history and current state of ‘performative arts and pedagogy’ in the United Kingdom (UK) and, in doing so, identify key terms that have been dominant in the associated discourse. In compiling the report, there are clear challenges that need to be acknowledged. The first of these is the danger of making over-generalised statements without acknowledging the diversity of contexts, for example: different sectors (school, higher education, community), different phases of schooling (pre-school, primary, secondary), different countries within the sovereign state of the UK (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland). Any statement about drama practice in a country can easily mislead if it is assumed to apply equally in all contexts. One possible solution would be to avoid too much speculation and attempt to stick to empirical data, numbers of drama courses in schools and colleges, numbers of trained drama teachers, etc. However, even the reporting of facts involves some selection, and therefore has the potential for bias. Moreover, the avoidance of opinion and analysis can sacrifice insight for a form of bland neutrality. The dangers of over-generalisation in part determined the approach to the structure of this report, with ...

This research explores the role of the writer in interactive transmedia production through a research project that has been primarily designed to take place within contemporary Northern Ireland. Red Branch Heroes was created, in association with Bellyfeel Productions1, as a prototype for a more extensive fictional interactive web series that will be known as The Eleven. The author developed a game-like scenario where, through their play, the audience influenced and developed character and story elements. The research asks if interactive forms such as transmedia offer any new storytelling potentials to the people of Northern Ireland and how such projects can contribute to debates about e-politics and e-democracy in post-conflict societies. Evidence is presented in this article to suggest that the ‘negotiated narratives' formulated in this prototype offer further creative community-building possibilities, in neutral spaces that can facilitate discourses about the future.

This article contributes to discussions about the role of music and song in the audience reception of the “verbatim musical” London Road (Taylor 2013; Zavros 2018). It uses Brechtian philosophy to assess the audience reception, and shows how London Road can illuminate the resonance of Brechtian philosophy with contemporary docu-musical. The first section analyses Brechtian class representations in London Road, with a particular focus on the dialectics and the Gestic role of the music and song. The second section explores how the adaptation from stage to screen further affected the dialectics of the musical and, paradoxically, further served key Brechtian aims. I consider the audience’s reception of both productions. I include my own reception, because I have seen both the stage and screen versions. I focus on two dramaturgical changes in the adaptation from stage to screen: the chronological order of the narrative and the alternation of interview sections and dramatised sections, which resembles the structure of the popular drama-doc genre. Given that reordering and restaging the original verbatim numbers could affect audience reception, I analyse the way the meaning is affected through the Brechtian notions of alienation and the gestic character of music. Throughout, I discuss class representations and relevant dialectical implications.

This article reports the findings of a qualitative study based on a long-term application of a theater content-based methodology for L2 learning, supported by professionals in theater and in foreign languages, in The E Theater: an English as a foreign language theater interdisciplinary group at Universidad Nacional de Colombia that has been active since 2008. The data were collected through a longitudinal semi-structured survey, interviews of the participants of the event, and a focus group. As a result, participants stated lowering their affective filter and benefits in their production and comprehension of L2 skills, their intercultural competence, and their cognitive processing of the language derived from the methodology carried out. Este artículo reporta los hallazgos de un estudio cualitativo a largo plazo, basado en la aplicación de una metodología de contenido desde el teatro, y apoyada por profesionales en teatro y en lenguas extranjeras, en The E Theater, un grupo interdisciplinario de teatro en inglés que opera en la Universidad Nacional de Colombia desde 2008. Los datos se recolectaron mediante una encuesta semiestructurada longitudinal, entrevistas a los participantes y un grupo focal. Como resultado, los participantes señalaron una reducción del filtro afectivo, además de beneficios en sus habilidades de comprensión y producción en L2, su competencia intercultural y su procesamiento cognitivo de la lengua.

Although the Feldenkrais method is quite well-known and used in relation to dance, music, and acting, it is rather uncommon to associate it with animation theatre. The puppeteer’s art is a profession that requires motor skills and sustained physical effort, which demands that the animating actor has an extended consciousness of oneself and of the space. Therefore, the Feldenkrais method can be a useful instrument in the puppeteer’s education and training, as the placing of the body in a relaxed stance, one which helps in the management of pain and effort, facilitates the conscious and creative learning of animation techniques, with an emphasis on the coordination and fluidity of movement. These are learning principles of the art of animation that are successfully used by Nicolas Gousseff, an artist that was formed at ESNAM (École Supérieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette de la Charleville-Mézières), and who has specialized in handheld puppets and using the actor’s body as a performative space for this type of animation.

A future-less orientation, as defined in this article, explores approaches to education within the context of precarious, shifting, labour markets and the uncertain future of employment trends. A future-less orientation questions the validity of traditional views of education: as a means of preparing students for an imagined future career; one which may never happen. DiY (Do-it-Yourself) culture has a long tradition of finding innovative solutions to problems which institutions have failed to supply. In this article we explore the potentials of a DiY pedagogy based on a decentralised and transdisciplinary approach which emphasise diversity and community as a strategy to surviving a precarious future.

This article brings into relation critical perspectives and practical tactics from a range of different fields—performance studies, visual art practice, pedagogy and educational theory, and activism and community organising—in order to create some space for re-imagining what might be possible within the dynamics of the Higher Education classroom. It proceeds through a series of speculative modes: ‘what if we think of the classroom as a market?’, which for many is the currently dominant metaphor under neoliberalist economies; ‘what if we think of the work of art as a classroom?’, which traces the recent ‘pedagogical’ or ‘educational’ turn in visual art practice; and finally, ‘what if we think of the classroom as a work of art?’, in which the creative impulses and tactics drawn from performance practices, activism and community organising, and socially engaged art are speculatively applied to the arts and humanities classroom.

The paper aims to utilise chaos theory as a methodology and perspective to analyse Shelagh Stephenson’s science drama An Experiment with an Air Pump thematically and structurally. It is highly pertinent to mention here that the discovery of the DNA structure in 1953 by Watson and Crick coincided with the development of a new paradigm shift in science, chaos theory. The discovery of the DNA structure, on the other hand, led to the birth of the science of genetics which reached its peak in the late 1990s when Human Genome Project was completed. Theatre did not stand aloof from this radical shift. Mapping human genome might lead to appalling ethical dilemmas. Topics related to the cold war and nuclear-bomb were replaced with ones quoted from biology, genetics and cloning. Stephenson’s play brings to light the danger of turning from natural to artificial selection as science, now, has access not only to the DNA structure but also how to manipulate it. The drama’s extensive debate focuses mainly on the risk of genome-related discrimination.

Mi experiencia teatral condicionó mi acercamiento a la antropología. Habituada al enfoque dramatúrgico en el estudio de la vida social, esta circunstancia promovió la articulación de mi experiencia teatral y antropológica en las escenificaciones. Este artículo expone cómo y por qué esta herramienta es válida para la antropología y asimismo, para el estudio performativo del sistema de género y la apreciación sobre el papel de la normatividad y la estructura social en su representación. El proceso de construcción de una lógica dramatúrgica y antropológica para las escenificaciones lo he experimentado y expresado como un ejercicio autobiográfico. Las teorías sociales que me han afectado han sido el situacionismo dinámico, el interaccionismo, y las teorías constructivistas que tratan al cuerpo como ficción social. Con todo ello he elaborado una estrategia interpretativa para la descripción, percepción, y el análisis de la realidad. Publicarla es compartirla y someterla a evaluación.

Nuestra investigación analiza las características definitorias de un formato teatral alternativo, surgido en Chile tras el término de la Guerra del Pacífico, paralelo al de los circuitos obreros y de sectores aristocráticos Invisibilizado en su época, sin estar sujeto a presiones comerciales, o a la observancia de la crítica, su importancia debe dimensionarse tanto en su connotación testimonial, como por su aporte a la renovación de las artes escénicas nacionales Estas se expresaron en el desarrollo de nuevas técnicas de representación y, en particular, en una profunda innovación a partir de la escenificación de lo cotidiano, sentando las bases del teatro social chileno.