Chemosensory communication as a form of time-based performing art has occurred in form of ideas in literary fiction and in occasional concepts of art or entertainment in the past. The history of patents on devices for such purposes since the beginning of the 20th century is full of failures and abandoned approaches, mainly because of chemical, technical, social, or cultural misunderstandings. With the project Smeller, we started to realize an artistic performative practice of storytelling with distinct and rapid sequences (...) of scents and smells, of and on during some thirty-five years. Only since 2012 could we introduce this practice with our novel technology Smeller 2.0 in public performances and enhance its possibilities ever since. Perfumistic algorithms can now generate endless variations of olfactory signals and smells, electronically controlled, and digitally composed for collective experience on a larger scale: Osmodrama. The practical application has soon ignited collaborations of neuroscientific research and therapeutical implementation with surprising discoveries. This essay is a personal review of the genesis and emergence of Osmodrama. (shrink)

En focalisant notre attention sur l'atelier comme lieu de formation des improvisateurs et improvisatrices de théâtre, cet article vise à réintroduire le Théâtre d'Improvisation dans le processus d'apprentissage qui l'accompagne. Dirigé par un·e chef·fe d'atelier chargé·e de la gestion des exercices, des consignes ainsi que des retours, l'atelier se construit comme un jeu interactionnel et discursif visant à transmettre des compétences à improviser. Ce processus suppose des modalités d'ajustements collectifs et de compréhension mutuelle entre les comédien·ne·s qui s'exercent et le·la (...) chef·fe d'atelier qui prend le rôle de conseiller·ère, d'évaluateur·rice et d'enseignant·e. En ce sens, le travail d'atelier relève d'une dynamique particulière en tant que performance avant la performance publique, impliquant d'élargir la notion d'exercice à ses débordements interactionnels. Au sein de ce cadre pédagogique, le retour, moment d'échanges en aval de l'exercice, devient un phénomène primordial. S'il recouvre différentes fonctions telles que l'évaluation, la critique ou le conseil, le retour offre aussi la possibilité de déréférencer le propos de l'exercice en question pour traiter du Théâtre d'Improvisation comme pratique. Le retour dans sa dimension épisémiotique permet dès lors de saisir le passage de l'exercice, comme phénomène éphémère et localisé à la pratique du Théâtre d'Improvisation, comme discipline stabilisée et collective. (shrink)

This chapter explores the notion of territory in the works of both Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger. It examines whether race and its minor theatre want a dwelling place and investigates whether there is a political potential within the body without organs which offers a resistance to the homely conception of dwelling. It provides a contextualisation of this future theatre in the Deleuzo-Guattarian project of minor literature as a whole and questions the practicality of the schizo-stroll and the BWO. It (...) also discusses the notion of Heideggerian deterritorialisation. (shrink)

This paper analyzes from a pragmatic postphenomenological point of view the performative practice of CREW, a multi-disciplinary team of artists and researchers. It is our argument that this company, in its use of new immersive technologies in the context of a live stage, gives rise to a dialectics between an embodied and a disembodied perspective towards the perceived world. We will focus on W (Double U), a collaborative interactive performance, where immersive technology is used for live exchange of vision. (...) By means of a head mounted omni-directional camera and display the fields of vision of two participants are swapped, which enables the participants to perceive the world through another person’s point of view. This intermedial experience brings a classic dichotomic perception of space to falter: material reality as a ‘live’ condition can no longer be opposed to a virtual mediated reality. In the shifting moment between the embodied and the perceived world, on the fracture between what one sees and what one feels, the distinction between live and mediated is blurred, moreover, can no longer be made. The perception of the body is pushed to the extreme, causing a most confusing corporal awareness, a condition that intensifies the experience and causes an altered sense of presence. In a dynamic cognitive negotiation, one tends, however, to unify the divergent ontologies of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ to a meaningful experience. In this respect, we refer to recent neurological experiments such as the ‘rubber hand illusion’ in order to clarify the spectator’s tendency to fuse both ontologies and to embody a coherent image-world. (shrink)

Who is the 'I' that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how (...) a sense of self is manifested through musical performance has been neglected. The authors of 'Voices, Bodies, Practices' are all musician-researchers: the book employs artistic research to explore how embodied performing "voices" can emerge from the interactions of individual performers and composers, musical materials, instruments, mediating technologies, and performance contexts. (shrink)

In the context of the blurring of boundaries between club and theatre, game and theatre, and party and theatre, experiential spectatorship is spilling into the mainstream. This article starts from the recognition of the rapid rise of the experience economy as a turning point in consumer culture towards a specific appeal to the sensory body. The definition of experience in this analysis is key and a distinction is made between experience as it passes moment by moment, erlebnis, and experience as (...) something that is cumulatively built up over time, erfahrung. This paper asks, in a society defined by the crisis of experience, does this rise of the experiential in theatre simply reflect the reduction of experience to a series of consumable sensory moments or is there a mode of experience modelled through performance interaction which moves both beyond this established mode of experience and also beyond the notion of experience as cumulatively formed wisdom? Drawing a parallel between established popular cultural practices of the body and those of the spectator in spectacular promenade performance, Fuerzabruta is used as an illustrative example of popular experiential performance and Hwang’s The Road as an example of experiential performance in which a transformative aesthetic is made possible. (shrink)

In technology research, much has been achieved in the field of visual and auditory analysis as compared to the perception of smells. This article discusses the latest advances in the field of electronic (E-nose) used to recognize the olfactory code. All studies can be conditionally divided according to the goals into: 1. Research aimed at the practical application of electronic systems in areas such as food industry, medicine, the environment, etc. 2. Research aimed at cognitive processes and psycho-emotional reactions of (...) a person during olfactory experience, as well as the ability of a machine to predetermine human reactions to various smells. In this case, an important role is played by language, which acts as a representation of olfactory sensations. The methods of conceptual and semantic analysis are becoming more and more in demand in studies devoted to machine recognition of the olfactory code. (shrink)

It is the thesis of the paper that the arts of the twentieth century have gone much further in the criticism of customary modes of thought than have both the sciences and the various critical philosophies which exist today. Moreover, they have not only developed an abstract principle of criticism, they have also studied the psychological conditions under which criticism can be expected to become effective. Some plays and the theoretical essays of Ionesco are analysed as an example. It is (...) pointed out that Ionesco resembles Bacon in that he believes in an unchangeable basis of humanity from which all ideologies proceed. An attempt is made to free Ionesco from these dogmatic elements, theoretically, as well as practically (i.e. as regards the performance of his plays) and to utilize to the full his contributions to a theatre that is free of prejudice, and fully critical. (shrink)

'Thinking Through Dance' explores important philosophical questions raised in and by dance. Its themes include the embodiment and personhood of dancers; issues of dance work ontology and performance identity; how dance is perceived and understood; the relevance of philosophy to dance as an artform; and whether dance itself, or its associated practices, are themselves philosophical in any significant sense. Individual essays draw on different philosophical traditions, including analytic, phenomenological and poststructuralist, and the primary focus is on theatre dance in the (...) Western tradition, although the issues discussed have a much broader sweep. The volume poses fundamental questions about what it means to be or witness a dancer moving, about the nature of choreography, dance works and performances, and about the interest and value of a dialogue between philosophy and dance. The philosophy of dance is a burgeoning field of enquiry and this volume seeks to represent something of the breadth of international research currently underway. It draws together contributors who are professional philosophers, dance scholars and dance practitioners, from Britain, continental Europe, the USA and South Africa. As the first anthology of essays about philosophy and dance to be published in English for some time, the aim is to provoke debate and develop the existing reflection on dance, but in new and invigorating directions. The Editors: The editors are colleagues at University of Roehampton, London: Jenny Bunker teaches aesthetics on the philosophy programme of the Department of Humanities; Anna Pakes and Bonnie Rowell are from the Department of Dance, and have a longstanding interest in the application of analytic philosophy to dance, as well as the intersections between this and other philosophical traditions and dance studies. (shrink)

John H. Muse's Microdramas: Crucibles for Theatre and Time examines the production of short plays across the history of Western theatre practice, from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary performance. Categorizing plays shorter than twenty minutes as microdramas, Muse does not insist on a new term for a theatrical subgenre, but provides an ideal working title for the study of brief theatre: a study which, until now, has been largely overlooked in literary theoretical analyses on theatre. Muse shows us how (...) the study of plays by playwrights who consciously choose brevity as a form, provides a platform for examining the evolution of theatre's structural practices. Identifying how short plays expose traditional... (shrink)

In the pursuit of a dramaturgy of telematics as a compositional practice, the author builds a position on technology as externalized technique, develops a dramaturgic strategy with notions of an extended theatre practice and reports on a realized telematized performance where a practical implementation was explored. The theatrical site is viewed as a construct of attention, generated by the performers through the performance composition. The composition determines the audience experience, orchestrated by how the construction of the site manages (...) their perspectives, and how the performers are situated in the consciousness site of the audience. In the performed event the performers articulate as a collective extended entity, incorporating the transformation of the performance site via the articulation strategies implemented in the staging. Telematics is argued to be a technology facilitating specific modes of thinking, generating specific modes of actions and presence, which enable new performance sites and new modes of situating performance. (shrink)

Theatre has been used in psychological intervention and as a metaphor for social life, tendencies that affect the self, highlighting how influential theatrical performance can be for individuals. Their limitations – in terms of the empowerment of the self and its authenticity, respectively - can be overcome by treating theatrical performance as a leisure experience, which considers that freedom and satisfaction play a central role in a more comprehensive understanding and development of the self. With this in mind, we present (...) the conceptual and empirical bases of the leisure experience as an alternative conception of theatrical performance. To do so, we organised a 20-hour theatre exercise workshop with 16 university students (15 women, one man), aged between 18 and 21 years old (M = 19.06 years; SD = 1.06). Qualitative instruments used were: the Time Budget Technique (questionnaire about the activities carried out in the workshop, valued in relation to two items: perceptions of freedom and satisfaction); the Twenty-Statement Test (where people list characteristics of themselves – self-descriptions – related in this case to the theatrical exercises); and, as a third instrument, a combination of the other two – specifying which exercises were more closely related to the self-descriptions. The results showed that group discussion was the activity with the highest perception of freedom, followed by obstacle exercises; as regards the perception of satisfaction, the highest value was observed in the relaxations. In the case of the self-descriptions, the acquisition of practical and intellectual skills was significant, as well as emotional outlook and the expression of self-esteem. In sum, this empirical support - using qualitative instruments that invite an exploration of the self - revealed, on the one hand, which specific characteristics of the self are manifested by doing theatrical exercises and, on the other hand, which exercises – when experienced as leisure – have a more decisive impact on the self. Thus, this paper shows what aspects must be taken into account when deciding which activities to include in a psychosocial intervention addressed to the development of the self from the standpoint of theatrical performance as a leisure activity. (shrink)

Performance Generating Systems (PGS) are rule- and task-based approaches to improvisation on stage in theatre, dance, and music. These systems require performers to draw on predefined source materials (texts, scores, memories) while working on complex tasks within limiting rules. An interdisciplinary research team at a large Western Canadian university hypothesized that learning to sustain this praxis over the duration of a performance places high demands on executive functions; demands that may improve the performers’ executive abilities. These performers need to continuously (...) shift attention while remaining responsive to embodied and environmental stimuli in the present, they are required to inhibit automated responses and impulses using the rules of the system, and they strive towards addressing multitasking challenges with fluidity and flexibility. This study set out to test the mentioned hypothesis deductively and identify mediating processes inductively, using mixed empirical methods. In a small sample experiment with a control group (28 participants; 15 in intervention group, 13 in control group), standardized quantitative tests of executive functions (D-KEFS) were administered before and after an eight-week intervention. Participant-reported qualitative observations from the praxis were also collected throughout the intervention for grounded analysis. Within the limitations of small sample data, we found both statistically significant and trending effects on inhibition, problem-solving initiation, fluidity, and cognitive flexibility. Examining the mediating process, we found that participants experienced significant challenges sustaining the practice halfway through the intervention. The participant-reported solutions to these challenges, which emerged as the strongest behavioural patterns when coding the qualitative data to saturation, were strategies of problem-solving and of re-directing attention. These strategies support and advance our understanding of the effects measured in the standardized tests. In terms of application, our results identify characteristics of PGS that could potentially maintain and strengthen executive functions over and above less demanding performing arts interventions. The results also deliver new insight into how PGS works, which may contribute to the development and teaching of this artistic practice. (shrink)

Theater rehearsals are (usually) confronted with the problem of having to transform a written text into an audio-visual, situated and temporal performance. Our contribution focuses on the emergence and stabilization of a gestural form as a solution for embodying a certain aesthetic concept which is derived from the script. This process involves instructions and negotiations, making the process of stabilization publicly and thus intersubjectively accessible. As scenes are repeatedly rehearsed, rehearsals are perspicuous settings for tracking interactional histories. Based on videotaped (...) professional theatre interactions in Germany, we focus on consecutive instances of rehearsing the same scene and trace the interactional history of a particular gesture. This gesture is used by the director to instruct the actors to play a particular aspect of a scene adopting a certain aesthetic concept. Stabilization requires the emergence of shared knowledge. We will show the practices by which shared knowledge is established over time during the rehearsal process and, in turn, how the accumulation of knowledge contributes to a change in the interactional practices themselves. Specifically, we show how a gesture emerges in the process of developing and embodying an aesthetic concept, and how this gesture eventually becomes a sign that refers to and evokes accumulated knowledge. At the same time, we show how this accumulated knowledge changes the instructional activities in the rehearsal process. Our study contributes to the overall understanding of knowledge accumulation in interaction in general and in theater rehearsals in particular. At the same time, it is devoted to the central importance of gestures in theater, which are both a means and a product of theatrical staging. (shrink)

This book, the first of its kind, surveys the career of the renowned Australian-German theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky. Its nine chapters provide multidisciplinary analyses of Barrie Kosky’s working practices and stage productions, from the beginning of his career in Melbourne to his current roles as Head of the Komische Oper Berlin and as a guest director in international demand. Specialists in theatre studies, opera studies, musical theatre studies, aesthetics, and arts administration offer in-depth accounts of Kosky’s unusually wide-ranging (...) engagements with the performing arts – as a director of spoken theatre, operas, musicals, operettas, as an adaptor, a performer, a writer, and an arts manager. Further, this book includes contributions from theatre practitioners with first-hand experience of collaborating with Kosky in the 1990s, who draw on interviews with members of Gilgul, Australia’s first Jewish theatre company, to document this formative period in Kosky’s career. The book investigates the ways in which Kosky has created transnational theatres, through introducing European themes and theatre techniques to his Australian work or through bringing fresh voices to the national dialogue in Germany’s theatre landscape. An appendix contains a timeline and guide to Kosky’s productions to date. (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

Cutting-edge scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, psychology, philosophy and sport science is brought together to ask: What do individuals bring to and do in collaborative embodied performance? How do group members with distinct capacities complement each other in skilled action? Innovative methodological approaches are applied to detailed case studies from martial arts, tango, social interaction, English Restoration Theatre, Body Weather, traditional and digitally-informed experiences of music composition, and failing at handstands. Each investigation exposes performance and theory as (...) mutually revealing, informative and captivating. Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring embodied coordination, cognition, and collaboration, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each brings to light different facets of the performance ecology present in the collaborative moment, equipping performance makers, students and researchers with theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wonder, Imagination, and the Matter of Theatre in The TempestMary MooreAriel occurs. Recounting his performance of "the tempest" in Act I, scene 1 of The Tempest, he presents himself as being and action, fracturing grammar, spatial and temporal logic in ways that amaze and confound:I boarded the King's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide, And (...) burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join...(1.2.195–201) 1"I flamed" means that Ariel emits or is flames, which in the normal order of things would consume him. His very narration, however, proves his survival, evoking wonder through the utterance itself. Forceful and compacted syntax, a recognized source of wonder in Classical and Renaissance accounts of style (Biester, pp. 14; 35–40), magnifies this effect. 2 Shakespeare's transitive use of the usually intransitive verb flame reflects a not uncommon practice, as E. A. Abbott shows; 3 but this syntactic device also reflects The Tempest's own logic. Ariel crosses boundaries between [End Page 496] deed and being, verb and noun, subject and object, matter and spirit: he both is and does flames. What could be more jarring to syntax and semantics than a singular subject whose utterance claims that he can flame, divide, meet and join? Just as "a" fire consists of many flames yet functions grammatically as a singular substance in English, just as the Christian Trinity is both singular and multiple, Ariel burns in many places at once. Meanwhile, this extraordinary language seems belied by the actor's very embodiment. Ariel cannot have done what he claims; yet the prior scene has represented the very storm in which Ariel flamed. In that sense, the actor's embodiment represents what we imagine to be matter's intractability, while Ariel's claims, coupled with the storm we have just witnessed, reveal matter's fluidity and permeability to imagination. Fluidity and intractability co-exist, another source of wonder. Sound mimics these paradoxes: the assonance and consonance in flame and amazement create a near rhyme that echoes the near identity of fire and human amazement. If, as Gurr and Ichikawa observe, a Renaissance audience expected to hear more than see a play, this echo calls attention to Ariel's marvelous powers. 4 Lest the noises and pleasures of the Renaissance theatre, which recent scholarship deems to be considerable, distract audience members from this bit of language, similar moments reinforce Ariel's play in and with language and matter throughout the play. Marvelous poetic language is of a piece with a "fever" that is of "the mind," with music that "creeps," actors who vanish, new found goddesses who speak the discoverers' own language.Amazement provides our cue: it and its cognates name the appropriate response to Ariel, his language, and to The Tempest itself. Attention to Ariel's poetic language reveals that it, like the plot, conforms to the marvels of the play and to the period's well documented love for marvels in several ways. Wonder, an aesthetic "'object of desire'" in itself, and a response to the inexplicable in classical and early modern views, may be evoked by the unexpected in style (and through other strategies that the era's handbooks taught). 5 The clause "I flamed amazement" epitomizes the unexpected in syntax as well as differing from one of the few sources found for The Tempest, William Strachey's 1610 letter, which describes just such a storm. 6 While St. Elmo's fire itself may elicit wonder, Shakespeare's syntax and diction reinforce that marvel. And no wonder: rhetoric and theatre alike depend upon audience attention, and wonders naturally evoke it. Jarring language also harmonizes with The Tempest's structural marvels—loose ends, disrupted actions, unforeseen futures—issues several critics explore. 7 [End Page 497]The wonders of The Tempest, however, also involve imagination—in early modern psychology, the human faculty that permits perception of the world and invention of images. 8 Wonder responds to how the perceived differs from the expected, how the imagined supplants the usual, how an... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wonder, Imagination, and the Matter of Theatre in The TempestMary MooreAriel occurs. Recounting his performance of "the tempest" in Act I, scene 1 of The Tempest, he presents himself as being and action, fracturing grammar, spatial and temporal logic in ways that amaze and confound:I boarded the King's ship; now on the beak, Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement. Sometime I'd divide, And (...) burn in many places; on the topmast, The yards, and bowsprit would I flame distinctly, Then meet and join...(1.2.195–201) 1"I flamed" means that Ariel emits or is flames, which in the normal order of things would consume him. His very narration, however, proves his survival, evoking wonder through the utterance itself. Forceful and compacted syntax, a recognized source of wonder in Classical and Renaissance accounts of style (Biester, pp. 14; 35–40), magnifies this effect. 2 Shakespeare's transitive use of the usually intransitive verb flame reflects a not uncommon practice, as E. A. Abbott shows; 3 but this syntactic device also reflects The Tempest's own logic. Ariel crosses boundaries between [End Page 496] deed and being, verb and noun, subject and object, matter and spirit: he both is and does flames. What could be more jarring to syntax and semantics than a singular subject whose utterance claims that he can flame, divide, meet and join? Just as "a" fire consists of many flames yet functions grammatically as a singular substance in English, just as the Christian Trinity is both singular and multiple, Ariel burns in many places at once. Meanwhile, this extraordinary language seems belied by the actor's very embodiment. Ariel cannot have done what he claims; yet the prior scene has represented the very storm in which Ariel flamed. In that sense, the actor's embodiment represents what we imagine to be matter's intractability, while Ariel's claims, coupled with the storm we have just witnessed, reveal matter's fluidity and permeability to imagination. Fluidity and intractability co-exist, another source of wonder. Sound mimics these paradoxes: the assonance and consonance in flame and amazement create a near rhyme that echoes the near identity of fire and human amazement. If, as Gurr and Ichikawa observe, a Renaissance audience expected to hear more than see a play, this echo calls attention to Ariel's marvelous powers. 4 Lest the noises and pleasures of the Renaissance theatre, which recent scholarship deems to be considerable, distract audience members from this bit of language, similar moments reinforce Ariel's play in and with language and matter throughout the play. Marvelous poetic language is of a piece with a "fever" that is of "the mind," with music that "creeps," actors who vanish, new found goddesses who speak the discoverers' own language.Amazement provides our cue: it and its cognates name the appropriate response to Ariel, his language, and to The Tempest itself. Attention to Ariel's poetic language reveals that it, like the plot, conforms to the marvels of the play and to the period's well documented love for marvels in several ways. Wonder, an aesthetic "'object of desire'" in itself, and a response to the inexplicable in classical and early modern views, may be evoked by the unexpected in style (and through other strategies that the era's handbooks taught). 5 The clause "I flamed amazement" epitomizes the unexpected in syntax as well as differing from one of the few sources found for The Tempest, William Strachey's 1610 letter, which describes just such a storm. 6 While St. Elmo's fire itself may elicit wonder, Shakespeare's syntax and diction reinforce that marvel. And no wonder: rhetoric and theatre alike depend upon audience attention, and wonders naturally evoke it. Jarring language also harmonizes with The Tempest's structural marvels—loose ends, disrupted actions, unforeseen futures—issues several critics explore. 7 [End Page 497]The wonders of The Tempest, however, also involve imagination—in early modern psychology, the human faculty that permits perception of the world and invention of images. 8 Wonder responds to how the perceived differs from the expected, how the imagined supplants the usual, how an... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Changing Theories of Undergraduate Theatre Studies, 1945–1980Anne Berkeley (bio)IntroductionThe history of theatre study in American undergraduate education is a story of prodigious quantitative success. Although it took two centuries to secure the right to perform plays at American colleges, it took only eighty years for the curriculum to grow from a few isolated courses at the turn of the twentieth century to well over 14,000 in the 1970s.1 By (...) far the steepest growth occurred during the unprecedented expansion of higher education between 1945 and 1979. But academic theatre's meteoric rise after the war years conceals more problematic qualitative achievements. Throughout its ascendancy, vexing questions persisted concerning the quality, standards, and evaluation of theatre programs. In academic journals and books, theorists explored with alacrity broad opportunities for educational theatre in the university. But they also bickered constantly about objectives and practices and their role in academe, ultimately providing a decidedly ambivalent assessment of accomplishment.According to Oscar G. Brockett, the fundamental questions are, What place, if any, should theatre have in a university? and, For what are students being educated?2 This study traces answers to these questions given by scholars and educators between 1945 and 1979.3 It explores the connections between the scholarship about theatre studies and the programs that developed, what scholars and educators wanted it to become, and what it became in the context of liberal arts education. These years are important because they are the golden age of higher education, a time of unprecedented expansion. Following World War II the G.I. Bill greatly increased student enrollment, and academic and research programs surged. At this time, the [End Page 57] university's governing interests were established by the politics of the Cold War, and the desire to surpass the Soviet Union at everything motivated the expansion of higher education.4 The National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 (legislation made possible by a prosperous economy) injected vast financial resources into program development, and federal programs such as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were established.An earlier study of theatre curriculum between, roughly, the Civil War and the Second World War provides a useful background against which to interpret the data for this later period.5 From the earlier study we learn that academic theatre suffered from religious hostility for two centuries but that by the end of the nineteenth century there were extracurricular dramatic clubs and productions. The emergence of the modern research university brought with it the expansion and diversification of knowledge, the differentiation of the colonial college's general curriculum into discrete disciplines, and the departmentalization of the curriculum. As principles and aims for liberal arts education, and the bachelor of arts degree, began to take shape, reconstruction of the curriculum included the introduction of departments of speech and literature, which included dramatic curricula.6 Academic theatre first began in classical and later modern language departments as a way of teaching literature in another language; later speech and English departments added courses in oral interpretation and playwriting.After George Pierce Baker opened the theatre department at Yale in 1925, theatre became an autonomous field of study in increasing numbers of universities. During this early period several developments took place: curriculum for theatrical studies developed out of extra-curricular theatre, theatre was identified and justified as a humanistic study, the seeds were planted for the university's eventual role in nonprofit and professional regional theatres, and the study of theatre as a legitimate academic discipline was developed. During this period, too, most theorists argued that theatre was one of the liberal arts and should be taught as part of the humanities. Late in the period there developed a small but increasingly vocal group of scholars and teachers who began to argue that theatre departments should teach technical skills of theatrical performance as well as humanistic inquiry. Thus was born the so-called craft or culture dichotomy: should educational theatre emphasize the crafts of performance or the humanism that prevailed in general (unspecialized) liberal study?The Forties and Fifties: The Curriculum Diversifies... (shrink)

A Professor of Medical Ethics and a theatre director, also mother and daughter, talk about health, illness, suffering, performance and practice. Using the lenses of ethical and performance theory, they explore what it means to be a patient, a spectator and a practitioner and cover many plays, texts and productions: Samuel Beckett’s Not I and All That Fall, Sarah Kane’s Crave, Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl Is a (...) Half-Formed Thing, Duncan MacMillan’s People, Place and Things and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. These were selected because first we have seen, studied or worked with each and they have continued to inspire us. Second, they offer rich and revealing insights into the ways in which meaning is/are both negotiated and contested in relation to health and illness. It is the iterative negotiation of meaning that, it is argued, is the essence of narrative practice, be it in medicine or in the theatre. The difference and divergence of perception, response and interpretation to dramatic performance can test relationships, be they professional, creative or familial. Yet, the capacity to understand, and embrace, disagreement and uncertainty is vital; fundamental to a flourishing life. For it is by recognising our part in creating narratives, broken and otherwise, that we can begin to recognise the necessary interactionism and humanity of both medicine and theatre. (shrink)

In theatre rehearsals, actors can occasionally be seen getting stuck in the play text, which is called blanking. To overcome such textual difficulties and continue with the given text, a prompter can verbalize the line in question, thus contributing to an actor’s word search by prompting. The paper focuses on interactional practices by which prompters and actors interactionally resolve blanking situations. This study’s data comprises a case collection of 67 prompting situations, which are taken from a 200-h video corpus of (...) a rehearsal process at a professional theatre. These cases demonstrate how theatre professionals organize prompting situations and how they negotiate/sanction prompting actions such as when there was no blanking but a dramatic pause or when the dramatic performance is interrupted due to a missing prompt. In addition to the audiovisual recordings, eye tracking data of the person prompting is also used to describe the coordination of the visual resources in the context of multimodal interaction analysis. The analysis suggests that prompting and blanking persons interactively resolve blankings with the help of verbal and visual markers. (shrink)

The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy is a volume of especially commissioned critical essays, conversations, collaborative, creative and performative writing mapping the key contexts, debates, methods, discourses and practices in this developing field. Firstly, the collection offers new insights on the fundamental question of how thinking happens: where, when, how and by whom philosophy is performed. Secondly, it provides a plurality of new accounts of performance and performativity as the production of ideas, bodies and knowledges in the arts and beyond. (...) Comprising texts written by international artists, philosophers and scholars from multiple disciplines, the essays engage with questions of how performance thinks and how thought is performed in a wide range of philosophies and performances, from the ancient to the contemporary. Concepts and practices from diverse geographical regions and cultural traditions are analysed to draw conclusions about how performance operates across art, philosophy and everyday life. The collection both contributes to and critiques the philosophy of music, dance, theatre and performance, exploring the idea of a philosophy from the arts. It is crucial reading material for those interested in the hierarchy of the relationship between philosophy and the arts, advancing debates on philosophical method, and the relation between Performance and Philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

Due to the simultaneous linguistic and musical quality of voicing, voiced breath poses theoretical challenges to notions of ‘embodiment’, especially as they are used in theatre practice/studies. In this article, I make two intertwining arguments to address questions of the place of semantic meaning and conscious thought in performance practice/theories as they arose in my anthropological engagement with laboratory theatre. Firstly, theatre and performance practice/theories keen to embrace ‘embodiment’ often leave out things like explicit analysis, reflexivity, referential (...) or semantic meaning and so on because, as my ethnography shows, they are judged as secondary, and thus belonging implicitly more closely to disembodied ‘mind’. I engage in anthropological comparison to show how other ways of being/knowing complicate any sense in which practices labelled ‘embodied’ can be seen as primary in contrast to conscious, linguistic or explicit knowing. Instead I outline an onto/epistemology of emergence that offers an alternative imaginary in which no binaries exist a priori. Rather all is a matter of ongoing mutual constitution. Secondly, while the discourses of embodiment in performance practice/theory that I critique may continue to reproduce dualist assumptions, theatre approaches influenced by Grotowski’s anti-method, focusing on continual revision of practice, offer insights for scholarship concerned with the ontological indistinguishability of social, psychological and physical phenomena. Laboratory theatre practices offer a prospective way of knowing, enabling an exploration of the ontological equality of breath, in this case in song, and the sorts of meaningfulness associated with language and analysis. In 2011, my Nanna (grandmother in Maltese) passed away in circumstances that remain traumatic to me. I turned with to my daily practices to find ways to scream, to grieve: to anthropology and to a particular practice of song in laboratory theatre, where encounter is actively sought. Arising from ethnographic and analytic engagement with such practices, in this article, I offer an anthropologically inflected critique of notions of embodiment in performance studies and performance philosophy. I present the alternative imaginary of emergence onto/epistemologies and the prospective investigative practices of laboratory theatre. I do this by weaving autobiographical, ethnographic and anthropological threads to explore my own practice relating to the work of my collaborator Gey Pin Ang, a Singaporean director, actor and pedagogue. (shrink)

Something extraordinary has happened to metaphysics. At the very moment when philosophy is focusing its efforts at bringing metaphysics to an ‘end,’ metaphysics finds itself flourishing in the theatre, which speaks of itself as ‘metaphysics-in-action’ and publishes treatises carrying such titles as The Act of Being: Toward a Theory of Acting. The irony of the situation appears to have been lost on postmodern philosophers. What this paper sets out to do is explore the potential consequences of the metaphysical weight that (...) has been acquired by the theatre for the practice of philosophy. It argues that the theatrical performance is in fact an ‘enactment’ of the performance of being and that, as such, it is possible to extend our understanding of this performance from the theatrical stage to the ‘theatre of the world.’ Finally, in doing so, we can establish the context for a metaphysics that does not privilege presence. (shrink)

Something extraordinary has happened to metaphysics. At the very moment when philosophy is focusing its efforts at bringing metaphysics to an 'end,' metaphysics finds itself flourishing in the theatre, which speaks of itself as 'metaphysics-in-action' and publishes treatises carrying such titles as The Act of Being: Toward a Theory of Acting. The irony of the situation appears to have been lost on postmodern philosophers. What this paper sets out to do is explore the potential consequences of the metaphysical weight that (...) has been acquired by the theatre for the practice of philosophy. It argues that the theatrical performance is in fact an 'enactment' of the performance of being and that, as such, it is possible to extend our understanding of this performance from the theatrical stage to the 'theatre of the world.' Finally, in doing so, we can establish the context for a metaphysics that does not privilege presence. (shrink)

Women, Modernism, and Performance is an interdisciplinary 2004 study that looks at a variety of texts and modes of performance in order to clarify the position of women within - and in relation to - modern theatre history. Considering drama, fiction and dance, as well as a range of performance events such as suffrage demonstrations, lectures, and legal trials, Penny Farfan expands on theatre historical narratives that note the centrality of female characters in male-authored modern plays but that do not (...) address the efforts of women artists to develop alternatives both to mainstream theatre practice and to the patriarchal avant garde. Focusing on Henrik Ibsen, Elizabeth Robins, Ellen Terry, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Edith Craig, Radclyffe Hall and Isadora Duncan, Farfan identifies different objectives, strategies, possibilities and limitations of feminist-modernist performance practice and suggests how the artists in question transformed the representation of gender in art and life. (shrink)

The enshrinement of William Shakespeare’s plays in printed editions has led to the assumption that they were performed with an ideal of exact verbatim reproduction of the language. Evidence drawn from alternative versions of the plays circulating in Shakespeare’s lifetime and from our knowledge of the material practices of playing in early modern England presents us with a very different picture. Performing practices in this period were marked by a tension between improvisational here-and-now languaging practices, including the use of gesture (...) in playing, and a new set of expectations based upon an emergent conception of plays as written documents. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by both artists and academics explores the significance of Wittgenstein's writings across a diverse field of performance practices, including poetics and choreography, theatre, and psychotherapy, as well as reflections on political thought and ChatGPT.

Critical thought on immersive theatres is gathering in pace with many arguments centred on explorations of audience/performer interaction and the unique relationship these theatres create. Within this paper I look beyond these debates in order to consider the implications of immersive theatres within contemporary culture, with the aim of furthering the ways in which immersive theatres are presently being framed and discussed. Theatre and science fiction have shared a somewhat limited relationship compared to their burgeoning usage within other forms of (...) entertainment. This paper focuses on how the conceits of science fiction are being staged within this theatrical setting. Primary focus is given to Punchdrunk’s… and darkness descended and The Crash of the Elysium. This is considered alongside The Republic of the Imagination’s Cerebellium, an original narrative created for the performance which has been subsequently developed over a three-year period to date. This discussion is presented and framed through my personal experience as both a performer in Cerebellium and as audience member. The particular use of dystopian narratives and alternate worlds is given consideration, with reflection on the way these works destabilize and call into question the audience’s sense of self either through their ability to survive or understand their sense of self. By making evident the spectrum of practice, I endeavour to delve further into identifying and de-mystifying immersive theatres and their differences to conventional theatre. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005) 12-19 [Access article in PDF] Seeking the Aesthetic in Creative Drama and Theatre for Young Audiences Nellie McCaslin Introduction Is an aesthetic experience ever achieved in a creative drama class or in attending a performance of a children's play? If it is, how do I know and how can it be achieved? This is a question to which I have given much (...) thought and in so doing have been flooded with memories of my own passion for theatre in all its forms, first as a child and years later as a teacher. These memories have shaped my perception of the aesthetic presence, elusive but powerful, which comes in its own way and in its own time. The following is an account of revisiting those memories in the light of today's practices and objectives. The result is not a scholarly piece or approach to the question but simply a record of one person's journey through the theatre arts as she experienced it at a particular point in time, when the pedagogy and the terminology of today were nonexistent, or at least were not generally known. Nor, I might add, was the question.From that journey through time, I have reached a few tentative convictions. First among them is that the most important element in teaching creative drama or producing children's plays is the one too often marginalized by practitioners today in their pursuit of practical ends and contemporary issue-oriented scripts.1 It is the aesthetic. Is theatre an art form worth studying in its own right or is it an educational tool, appealing to administrators and producers because it is effective? I believe that it is an art and should be taught as an art form first and foremost, but that skillfully done, it can accomplish both objectives. The grey area between art and education is difficult for the inexperienced teacher to negotiate without the loss of one goal or the other. It is the intent that charts the course. [End Page 12] Early Recollections What was it that first drew me to the theatre? Was it the play? The players? Or the combined skills of all who were involved in the production whether it was a professional company in a theatre downtown; a puppet show at a community center; "dramatics" in the classroom, when the teacher allowed us to "act out" a history lesson or favorite story; or an assembly program put on by the eighth grade in the school auditorium? To me, they were all theatre, and theatre in whatever form it took was magic. To us, theatre was real, regardless of the performers or the venue. Even the puppets ceased to be inanimate figures in the hands of an artist who shared his belief in their reality with his young audiences. Indeed, the puppets assumed human proportions before our eyes and have remained so in my memory ever since. Was this not just as much of an aesthetic experience for us, the viewers, as the performance of living actors? I believe that it was, although at the age of eight I had never heard the word "aesthetic" or stopped to analyze my reactions.The reason, among others, for my lack of discrimination as a child was the fact that in America at that time no differentiation was made between what we did and what we saw, never mind who did it. There was a clear distinction between the amateur and the professional; it didn't concern us. We flocked to the few shows, both amateur and professional, deemed appropriate for children, and we made up shows of our own in our own backyards. Our shows were improvised (another term we didn't know then), but even minus a script, it was still theatre because we believed in it and so did the little ones on our block who were the audience.It was Winifred Ward, an American pioneer in the field, writing a few years later, who was to distinguish between process and product... (shrink)

Art forms tend to mirror themselves in each other. In order to understand literature and fine arts better, we often turn to music, speaking of the 'tone' in a book and of the 'rhythm' in a painting. In attempts to understand music better, we turn instead to the narrative arts, speaking of the 'story' of a musical piece. This book focuses on two examples of such conceptual mirror reflexivity: narrativity in jazz music and musicality in spoken theatre. These intermedial metaphors (...) are shown to be significant to the practice and reflection of performing artists through their ability to mediate holistic views of what is considered to be of crucial importance in artistic practice, analysis, and education. This exploration opens up possibilities for new theoretical and practical insights with regard to how the borderland between temporal art forms can be conceptualized. The book will be of interest not only to scholars of music and theatre, but also to those who work in the fields of aesthetics, intermedial studies, cognitive linguistics, arts theory, communication theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

This article proposes how theatre, as a site of expert adult imaginative play, provides a unique window into how E-cognition can advance our understanding of imagination as a lifelong practice. I characterize theatrical activity as highly developed actions and strategies for wielding bodies, objects, and environments as imaginative practice. Through an enactively based case study of the play _Provenance_ by Autopoetics ( 2018 ), I reveal how creation and performance processes literally and epistemically engineer novel niches for the (...) spectator. This case study investigates how _Provenance_’s recurring theatrical device of newspaper manipulation constitutes a cognitive device for an affordance-oriented and predictive spectator. As I track the priorities and processes of these longstanding play development and performance techniques informed by the theatrical tradition of Jacques Lecoq (1921–1999), I suggest how concepts such as affordances, affordance spaces, predictive engagement, and the free energy principle are apt conceptual tools for understanding how these practices engender imaginative encounters. I follow this analysis by suggesting, via the free energy principle’s conception of “models,” that there may be cognitive consequences to the possible changes experienced by the spectator that exceed theatrical experience. I conclude this discussion by pointing toward how my 4-E inflected insights on the imaginative practices of _Provenance_ may be applicable to imagination and pretense in other arenas not just behind but also beyond the footlights. (shrink)

My general topic is whether limitations in olfaction’s conceptual and generally mental capabilities hinder its suitability for playing significant and sophisticated roles in theatrical productions of the standard narrative type. This is a big question and I only scratch the surface here. I begin with a brief look at smell’s most prominent roles in the theatre, as illustration and to evoke mood and atmosphere. Next, I consider the relation between smell and the experience of space, looking first at a kind (...) of power it has that is sometimes overlooked. Third, I examine a conundrum about what the objects we smell, as opposed to the objects we see, do and do not represent in a theatrical performance. Finally, the conundrum leads into a deeper discussion of whether scents or the objects we smell do the representing in theatre. (shrink)

In early 2020, as the first of many COVID lockdowns began across Australia, a collective of feminist and queer performance scholars and artists embarked on the research project Staging Australian Women’s Lives: Theatre, Feminism and Socially Engaged Art. Our aim was to document contributions of womxn theatre makers, while conducting a feminist analysis of strategies used to deal with gender inequality and oppression, on stage and off. While pivoting to the digital and the virtual, we recognised a need to support (...) womxn theatre makers whose lives and livelihoods are thrown into further precarity by the pandemic. This paper speaks to our commitment to bringing together critical theory, arts practices and everyday life in ethical forms and encounters that make visible, recognise and express care for one another and for the work. (shrink)

En focalisant notre attention sur l'atelier comme lieu de formation des improvisateurs et improvisatrices de théâtre, cet article vise à réintroduire le Théâtre d'Improvisation dans le processus d'apprentissage qui l'accompagne. Dirigé par un·e chef·fe d'atelier chargé·e de la gestion des exercices, des consignes ainsi que des retours, l'atelier se construit comme un jeu interactionnel et discursif visant à transmettre des compétences à improviser. Ce processus suppose des modalités d'ajustements collectifs et de compréhension mutuelle entre les comédien·ne·s qui s'exercent et le·la (...) chef·fe d'atelier qui prend le rôle de conseiller·ère, d'évaluateur·rice et d'enseignant·e. En ce sens, le travail d'atelier relève d'une dynamique particulière en tant que performance avant la performance publique, impliquant d'élargir la notion d'exercice à ses débordements interactionnels. Au sein de ce cadre pédagogique, le retour, moment d'échanges en aval de l'exercice, devient un phénomène primordial. S'il recouvre différentes fonctions telles que l'évaluation, la critique ou le conseil, le retour offre aussi la possibilité de déréférencer le propos de l'exercice en question pour traiter du Théâtre d'Improvisation comme pratique. Le retour dans sa dimension épisémiotique permet dès lors de saisir le passage de l'exercice, comme phénomène éphémère et localisé à la pratique du Théâtre d'Improvisation, comme discipline stabilisée et collective. (shrink)

Don't tell terrible stories—everyone here has enough of their own. Everyone here has a whole bloody sack of terrible stories, and at the bottom of the sack is a hammer the narrator uses to pound you on the skull the instant you dare not believe your ears. Or to pound you when you do believe. Not long ago I saw a tomboyish girl on Khreshchatyk Street demand money of an elderly woman, threatening to bite her and infect her with syphilis. (...) Don't stroll through Volodymyr Hill Park, don't stroll around the botanical garden, and especially don't stroll on Kontraktova Square. Don't stroll anywhere. Don't go to the pavilion with the Golgotha panorama near St. Alexander's Church. Not even the twelve-meter-tall crucified Christ will save you. Don't go outside when it's dark and people turn into shadows a shade darker than dark. Also don't go where you can be seen from far away. Not to imply that people used to be like a bunch of lilies, but now they stink like a cellar of cabbage.The city, which earlier might have had some fun, is now going crazy. It's like a fish in warm water: it doesn't react to anything, swims slowly like it doesn't care if it swallows a hook or not. The excitement and exaltation pass into oppression, just as our necks have sunk into our shoulders, our shoulders into our lumbars, our lumbars into our nether regions. The holiday turns into a funeral, the parades into explosions, depression into mania. Winter passes into summer, people turn into beasts, the hours into ages, and the ages into hours. It's worth simply walking around the city to see a soldier from an unknown army taking a piss near the opera. Farther on is a row of identical old widows selling ball gowns and candelabra. Then there are the aristocrats and manufacturers who throw so much at the prostitutes that they'll soon be richer than their wives.I returned late through the Kyryliv Wood, not heeding all the warnings that I myself have given here. It really is dangerous—the place is famous for it. There's a madhouse nearby, caves where criminals and the sick can hide out. Also, once upon a time, as they say in fairy tales, the great dragon Zmei Gorynich lived here beside the Puchai River. The stench in these places drives away the most committed misanthropes and even one type of philanthrope—that is, perverts. It sounds dumb, but the stench is cleansing. I don't know where it comes from. After the operating theaters and the rooms with amputees, the stench no longer repelled or attracted me; it just was. And this was a great place to think. As I walked, I considered an incident with our patient.The patient, a respectable individual whose name carries too much weight for me to state it directly, one day began to assault people. He nearly strangled a merchant who he believed asked too much for a beaver coat. He likewise wanted to kill his business partner when he didn't say hello loudly enough. But the worst was, he lost all shame of his own nakedness. At first it was the police who took care of it. When our future patient slipped off his pants and undergarments, he was taken to Kyrylivska, which has had means for dealing with such cases dating back to the day when unhinged Cossacks and composers from Kyiv Mohyla Academy were taken there.During the examination we determined that the patient was experiencing a severe breakdown. His wife added that lately, more than once, he had allowed himself strong words in front of the children and often suffered from ennui. Furthermore, she said, the patient had been undergoing treatment for “the French disease” for some years—which was, obviously, where we needed to start.“Syphilis!” Skorsky spat out the matchstick he was chewing on. He was a specialist on the psychological aspects of diseases related to the venereal. “Tertiary syphilis! When poorly treated, over time ‘the French disease’ can destroy the central nervous system. Hence the patient's chicanery. Such theater!”Skorsky and I had not spoken since the incident at Bilinsky's. Meanwhile, something significant had happened to him. The most boring person on earth, Skorsky had simply caught fire. He said hello and kibitzed. I even heard the doctor got drunk alone in his office, then wandered through the forest. Could he be using narcotic substances?“Cocaine!” was the doctor's second proclamation. It was his favorite treatment for the psychological complications of syphilis. Skorsky himself never took what he called “the universal drug”—good for alcoholism and toothaches, neuroses and morphine dependency—though he had read in an article by a respectable Viennese physician, who used cocaine as a panacea, that it was not addictive. That doctor subsequently recanted, but Skorsky paid no attention. He believed the retraction was made under pressure from pharmacologists who had no incentive to cease production of the medications that cocaine might supplant. Their representatives either paid or threatened the Viennese to repent.As the patient was escorted to his room, he assaulted the orderly, Alevtyna. They tried pulling him off her, but, though he released his fingers from her neck, he buried his teeth in her leg. The poor orderly, who had not until then been attacked by a psychotic, nearly died of fear. Later, panic set in over Skorsky's diagnosis. He told her about the consequences of syphilis: grotesque patterns on one's face due to infection of the skin, mucous membranes, cartilage, and bones. He went on about the devastation to the central nervous system, which they had just observed in real life: “The face starts to look like lace some mangy dogs fought over before rolling in the mud.”Alevtyna, who had not yet regained her faculty of speech, straightened up. Ignoring the slavering male orderlies, she bared her leg to get a better look at the wound. She then ran down the hall and out into the garden, where she fell on the ground to rip up grass and small bunches of daisies. Alevtyna ate them along with the soil in their roots.“Minor hysteria. She needs fifteen milligrams of cocaine.”Skorsky took a snuff box out of his pocket and scooped up some white powder with a toothpick made from a goose feather. He gave the order to close Alevtyna's mouth and one of her nostrils, forcing her to snort the medication.We fretted over her so long that evening fell. I decided to walk down, along the ravine, behind the church.It was unlikely there were any large beasts there, but something was rustling. The pits and mounds, ravines, paths, graves of witches whose living sisters flew in the treetops from time to time, the whispers of the forest spirits, the spirits of the nutcases who died in the hospital, the spirits of the monks from the St. Cyril Monastery, Zmei Gorynich and the bogatyrs who wanted to defeat him. The city would be calmer without this forest. I saw the gaps between the trees and went off in the direction of the tram tracks.As I was coming out of the forest, there was a patch of Amanita muscaria that had been trampled into porridge. A bit farther on, the body of Professor Bilinsky lay killed in the blackberry bushes. The way he was lying it looked as though he had not struggled before death. I quickly examined his body but saw nothing out of the ordinary. There were no wounds, no dirt under the fingernails. Animals had not yet smelled the carrion, but swarms of various insects covered him. Oh, why did I have to find the putrid body?The best thing would be to take the tram to his house to inform his relatives. The doors closed, and I noticed my own calm. This death had not evoked any emotions in me other than a feeling of responsibility, the need to tell the family. But also—some alarm at the thought of who the murderer could be. I knew that it was murder.“Your nose is bleeding.” A woman as round as an onion, carrying two baskets full of strawberries, offered me an ironed and starched handkerchief.“Have I dirtied my shirt?”“No, it's as neat as a pin. It's just your nose that's dirty. Wipe it now before you spray blood on my strawberries.”“No one will see the red on red.”“Ah, but it's salty!”“You know why it's not sweet? We'd drink it like syrup.”“Those with Christ in their heart do not talk that way.”“Are your strawberries expensive?”“Why? What?”“I'm checking to see if you have God in your heart.”“Child, if you knew how I have to work for this berry! I have to weed it a hundred times. In a week, the quitch grass grows as high as a horse. And I water it with water I carry from the stream, it kills my arms... ”“How much are the berries?”“They're not for sale. Anyway, soon money won't mean a thing. Soon all money, all these papers made from the skins of sinners on their satanic presses will be annulled. What matters is how we treat each other.”“So if I try your strawberries for free, my ‘thank you’ will be enough?”“Hands off!” she said and thwacked my fingers.I heard loud laughter behind me—same laughter as from the café near the Continental. There was no one sitting near Alina. (This is what fate looks like, remember.) Without asking, I sat next to her, away from the old lady.“Excuse me, but the night before last didn't you, yes, didn't you intrude on my privacy?” She started right away.“I saw it a little differently. Who was that young man with the mustache who paid me for you?”“Are you checking to see if you can flirt?”The tram stopped. People got on and off.“Are you coming back from the hospital?” she asked. “Don't be shocked. My uncle works there. He's told me all about you.”“An uncle by the name of Skorsky?”(Remember: this is what fate looks like.)“Yes. Skorsky's been strange recently—says things that make me wonder if he hasn't lost his mind. Have you noticed anything?”“I don't know.”“You know perfectly well.”“Where are you going?” I tried to change the subject.“I have to send something to my theater friends in Odesa. By the way, they'll be putting on Oedipus Rex soon in Kyiv—in Ukrainian.”“Greek tragedy in Ukrainian! That's a first.”“Exactly. The troupe is rehearsing now in Odesa. The theater where they will perform this fall is being remodeled.”“Wait. Now I remember where I've seen you before—it was at a performance! Vynnychenko's Black Panther and White Bear, at the Bergonier on Fundukleivska.“The same director is doing the Oedipus. He's my friend.”“He's your friend in what sense?”“Again with that tired subject. By the way, I've been thinking about you.”“And I about you.”“That's good. I was thinking not about you, to be precise, but about that elevator you invited me on.”“Who was that man with you?”“Like a broken record! Even if he had been my fiancé, I'm not bought or inherited. I'm not a brooch or a hundred acres of land, and I'm not a house in Kaniv!... Who was with you when you saw Black Panther?“Ah, so.”“Answer!”“That was my mother. She looks very young. She is coming to Kyiv the day after tomorrow. I can introduce you.”“Oh, this is my stop.”I looked out the window and realized that I had long since passed the stop for Bilinsky's.“Can we see each other again?”“We can. But you have only one chance.”Alina the anarchist wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.Morning, not morning but a thick porridge (I hate porridge). Dew, thick spit, crushed fruits, urine, all on the sparkling cobblestones. The sun, just barely having made its appearance, is already scorching. The human masses scurry and grumble like poorly digested food inside a stomach.I walked diagonally across St. Sofia's Square, then along the perimeter, then one edge, then again diagonally across. I went underground. The basement café of the Continental Hotel was practically empty. I again asked the server to bring the cloth with the embroidered portrait, but I couldn't remember the musician's last name, only that it ended with -sky. The server said that -sky was currently in the southern cities of Yalta and Odesa. I added that Kurbas, the director, Alina's friend, was also in Odesa, rehearsing Oedipus Rex, and that he'd previously put on Black Panther.I was bored, so I walked along Khreshchatyk and then headed down, calling to mind all the Kyiv churches of Podil: there's Birth of Christ, St. Nicholas on the Shore, Intercession, Pyrohoshcha, Holy Presentation, St. Dymytrii Rostovsky, St. Illia's. And also the Epiphany Brotherhood Monastery, Ascension Convent, and St. Katherine's, all these whipped-cream churches on the waffles of our streets. A few of them reminded me of themselves by appearing suddenly out of nowhere.The smells on Kontraktova Plaza where commerce buzzed were like multicolored light bulbs turning on one after another. Here you could catch the aroma of Balabukha jam, which blended with the next smell, English shoe polish at the Raiskys’ shop. Then the crunchy-smelling cabbage from old women standing in a row like herons and spitting out the shells of sunflower seeds. Farther on, the stench of a good-sized rat that crawled under Mrs. Shevchuk's shop where she sells broadcloth. Oh, she can't scream: no, she'll quietly dig that rat out herself so as to not scare off her clients.I bought a paper and two pairs of underwear. I asked two laughing young chambermaids who were secretly puffing in a grape-filled yard for a smoke. I wandered around Podil until evening when I came across a sawmill near the Dnipro that surprisingly smelled pleasantly of mazut fuel oil. The weather was dry, yet in the middle of the road was an enormous puddle, a deep dark black. A forty-year-old woman in a pale pink dress stood near it. The theatricality of it all provoked me to pose her a question,“Ma'am, what should I do?”But she paid me no attention. I shouted,“What should I do?”“What to do, what to do?” she said in Polish. “Jump in the water and swim so far away that you cannot return.”I quickly crossed a section of the forest. The wind brought a mixture of unpleasant air, like a stinky handkerchief held under one's nose. Passing the trees, I saw light in the spaces between them and exited at the hospital.Outside the windows, two orderlies lay in chairs with their heads thrown back. Two others—fools—ran around the yard in different directions, peering out at... something. The lights on the first floor of the hospital were on, and the staff milled about.“You're just in time!” said Ivan, a tall, young orderly.“For what?”“Your patient ran away! We went into his room and he wasn't there.”“What patient?”“The one who bit Alevtyna,” said Danylo, the other orderly, short and middle-aged.“That's Skorsky's patient, not mine.”I had no intention of helping them. This was all history—like my family, Kyiv, and my previous life. I had no intention of thinking about it. I wanted to go to my office, pack up my field surgery kit, and get out. So what? Their psychotic syphilitic ran away—it happened.Of course, that patient could have something to do with Bilinsky's murder. But that was no longer my problem.“What a strange coincidence!” the doctor on duty said. “Comrade doctor, the other one responsible for this patient was just here.”“And where is he now?”“He took off toward the church to look for the patient.”“Didn't the patient escape earlier?”“Don't know.”“How do you not know? You had better call the police, moron, before he kills someone. And get those sleeping orderlies to look for him.”“They can't... ”“Why not? Should I go wake them?”“They're on morphine.”“And you, I can see, have lost your mind. Go, catch your psycho! If it turns out that he killed Bilinsky—and on your watch—you can't imagine what's in store for you.”I adjusted my homburg and set off in the direction of St. Cyril's, that unwelcoming monolithic cube. I glanced around—what if our escaped syphilitic were to jump out of the bushes and bite or strangle me. I looked around because I wasn't sure of my actions, wasn't sure of my choices. Tripping over a clump of clover, I reached the open doors of the church. I couldn't stop myself from going in.The walls and ceiling were covered with frescoes. There was what used to be an angel rolling up the sky on the southern column of the narthex. But also graffiti: people scratched their names on it so as not to be forgotten—their idea of eternity. Prince Volodymyr the Great compared this activity to the desecration of graves. The vandals paid a fine and were beaten with canes. During the raids of Batu Khan, the church was deserted and cracks appeared all over it. Wild martens and feral dogs sought shelter here; insects swarmed under the ceiling with its red mosaics. Birches grew in its midst. Water seeped in the cracks, the water became ice, the ice widened the cracks, more water seeped in the cracks, becoming more ice that further widened the cracks, the wall split and nearly fell over, and then the wall fell over. Yet the angel is still rolling up the sky... When I reached the exit, I heard a rustling behind me. I turned after I stepped outside: in the depths of the church, like a stick in a pot of tar, stood a man with a large bag thrown over his shoulder and a revolver pointed right at me.“Is that you, Doctor?“Don't move!”“What's... Skorsky, what's with you?”“Don't move, I say!”“What are you doing here?”And finally I understood... Skorsky was himself the psycho! (Really, I had known for a while.)“You are the murderer! I knew it! But—why?”“Shut up.”“It was you. You! The stolen cigarettes, the strange behavior, Bilinsky. If I shout, everybody will come running. They've already called the police!”There was heavy breathing behind me. And then a gun rang out.The city is overgrown with new buildings. They encircle everything that was once on the periphery. Kyiv has become an old lady that can no longer restrain herself in the face of pastries. The city climbs farther. It steps over the swamps, turns the old rivers into a series of lakes; the other bodies of water it drives into canals. The grain that falls from the wild wheat is black. When the sun heats it, the grain melts and trickles into the earth. St. Cyril's stands indestructible. No one spackles the small cracks in its walls with either expensive putty or glues, nor with cheap cement and whitewash. One day a small fox appears in the doorway. It runs inside and along the floor of simple gray tiles. The gods watch from the walls, watch and fall into ruin. The fox runs to the iconostasis. Before it is a time-darkened Virgin Mother and Child in oil on sheets of zinc. The fox runs the metal steps that wind up to the second floor. The fox runs past all the vaults, naves, all the frescoes. A buckthorn seed flies in through a broken window. It will be the first. Soon the buckthorn will grow everywhere. A dumb hare will make its nest in the buckthorn bushes and nightingales will settle in the upper branches to sing until the end of the world. The fox runs between the thick rays that penetrate the windows. It catches one of the rays, squints its eyes, and warms itself in the sun.The shot rang out, but I did not fall. I looked around—and on the church threshold was our syphilis patient bearing a rod. His head lay on the rocks by the doorway.“If only he'd been at the stage of nose deformity! Just imagine: a hole instead of a nose plus a hole from the bullet—like an extra pair of eyes!” Skorsky laughed at the corpse.“We need to call the orderlies.”“They heard the shot. They'll run here on their own. You see, Professor Bilinsky believed it would take two or three years to wrap up this patient's case,” Skorsky told me. “But I took care of it much faster!”“Excuse me, but I'm going crazy in this city. I thought that you were Bilinsky's murderer.”“Just so. Why not? I am Bilinsky's murderer.”“Don't tease. You've changed a lot recently, so... ”“Yes, I've started killing people. You might term such a change significant.”“You have the right to irony.”“I am not being ironic.”“Let's call it sarcasm.”“It's the honest-to-God truth.”“And yes, you have the right to mock me.”“Well then, let's be done. To the horses!”“What horses?”“Alina's waiting!”Alina, her uncle Skorsky, a few others I didn't know, and I rode like the wind that ripped off my homburg and carried it back to Kyiv.“There's a fresco in the choir loft at St. Cyril's where Vrubel painted himself and patients from the hospital as the apostles. When I came across it by accident, I really believed they were saints,” Alina said.“I've never been up there. I've only seen the church from below.”“Remember the way back so you can see it sometime.”“The Puchai River used to flow here. You shouldn't trust the landscape,” Skorsky said, reaching for something, perhaps his bag, just when we left the darkness of the trees and saw the endless steppe ahead of us.We rode all night without stopping. Though no one was chasing us. Though we had nowhere to be. We rode like beasts released from a cage. The promises of the horizon turned what we'd left behind into a cage fit for those from whom freedom had been severed, like an anomaly, at birth.The pre-morning sky looked at first like a sack of turnips—filled with something heavy. But with each verst, the sky became lighter. When it was finally light enough to see clearly, we arrived at a knoll at the foot of a stone wall that from a distance had appeared to be a gigantic piece of halva. The exterior ruins of the castle gave no hint of how it was when all was fine here, when people defended themselves successfully from the nomads’ raids. From far off, the wreckage looked like a natural agglomeration of stones—a rocky elevation, no more: a cluster of cliffs. It would rain a few hundred more times, a few hundred more winds from a few hundred directions would blow on this heap, and it would collapse as though nothing had ever been here.A few stalks of wheat grew from one of the rocks. Someone had probably cast a handful of grain here for some birds that forgot to eat it.“Who could this castle belong to?” I asked Skorsky.“I reckon the Swan Princess,” the doctor rejoined, hoping to sound knowledgeable.From behind one of the piles of gray sandstone emerged a young man in a black reptilian coat and a white papakha as lush, bright, and out of place as a dahlia. His name was Artem. The heat was melting our brains, but he was dressed like that, in rooster fashion, which was popular among the otamans. Artem helped Alina dismount her horse and tried to kiss her on the lips, but she offered him a cheek instead.Had she been racing to see this clown?We entered the yard—the ruins had fashioned an internal space that was more or less protected, at least from strangers’ eyes. It turned out that there were even places where it was possible to hide from the rain, and from there the ruins didn't look half bad.In the center of the court was a table, and on it a wooden bucket with pink gladiolas. How romantic! It all looked like it came from outer space. Where on earth, in the middle of the steppe, far from any village or town, did this table, this simple table, come from? And the gladiolas? The steppe hadn't been plowed in so long that any cultivars would have gone wild, degenerated, dried up completely.A campfire crackled nearby—a little preview of what we would soon do to the houses, villages, and cities. Artem the otaman brought over a cezve from the fire and poured the first portion into a small, copper cup for Alina. He also got out a porcelain cup with images of rosy cherubim—but how...?“Who else would like coffee?”Only Skorsky and I responded. The question excited me, even distracted me from the thought of the kiss I had recently witnessed and the Kyiv I had recently left.“It's obvious who the professors here are; cultured people drink coffee. Are you both doctors?”“Uh-huh.”“For wolves of the steppe, like us, doctors are gold, even more precious than gold. Actually, a Hippocrates like you should eat more, because those in your profession will soon be worth your weight in gold. Work on your figures, both of you.”“Who will take pity on the horses that have to carry us?”“We'll find the horses. And very large doctors can be transported on machine-gun carts. We'll need to seat the otamans near you. Only a fool would shoot at a doctor.”“I think we'll find quite enough fools here.”“With your beard, Doctor, you look like Tsar Nicholas II. But even so you won't be shot. You might even be canonized!”“We've only just arrived and you're going on about executions,” Skorsky grumbled and checked to make sure that he still had his bag.“Apologies, apologies, pardonnez-moi. But you are not merely a doctor. A venereologist! Skorsky, you're a specialist! A venereologist is the most important person in wartime. The most valuable! You are the botanists of war. You can't imagine what varieties of flowers grow here, and these beds have long awaited a proper gardener. Or even just a man with a scythe!”“Bite your tongue,” Alina said. “I don't need to listen to this.”“Yes, yes, of course. Excuse me, my r—. ” He almost said “rose.”We rested all day. We went down to a surprisingly close river overgrown with lilies. We rowed the boats left by fishermen. I talked to Skorsky. He took his bag everywhere, refusing even to swim so he wouldn't have to part with it. I asked him what he had in it, but he said it wasn't my damned business.Alina rowed with the otaman to the middle of the river. They were having a loud discussion. She was waving her hands. The current carried their boat downstream slowly and smoothly. What a nuisance, that current!I tried to meet with Alina one-on-one, but she was avoiding me. In the morning I was confused, by lunch I was sad, and after lunch I got angry.In the evening, I lay on the hot grass and drank another cup (I have no idea where they got such good coffee), which had no effect at all on my sleep. I watched the Perseids. Every year, the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Swift-Tuttle. People can see the meteor shower and make a wish. I wished. I counted forty-seven falling stars. All forty-seven of my wishes were for the same thing.Around the campfire, they were sitting, talking. I saw how he tickled her face with a piece of grass and she brushed him off in annoyance. Then they were screaming at each other. Later they again spoke kindly, after which they again quarreled. My joy grew after each tiny mistake that Artem made. I wanted him to show the worst he was capable of.They were screaming at each other, but all I could hear was beautiful opera singing. The stars fell to the sound of their screaming. The stars blessed my joy.Then this happened: Alina kicked the fire, scattered burnt kindling, and burned some of the grass. Artem grabbed her by the arm, but she broke away from him and ran off to the horses.“Go then! I guarantee you'll get to Katerynoslav and return with your tail between your legs.”“I'm going to Huliai-Pole! To Father Makhno!”I jumped up and ran after her.“Where do you think you're going?” Artem shouted.Really—where was I going? I was going after her: to Huliai-Pole, to Katerynoslav, to Rome, to Washington, to Istanbul, to Montevideo... “Go to sleep,” he said. “Come morning, this coquette will be here, right as rain. We've already been through this show. Tomorrow she'll be right here next to my boot!”... No, she won't.In some sort of shape we entered some town. There were some buildings that were some colors, some trees, some streets, some roads, and some signs. Posts, flustered birds’ nests, echoes, colors, shapes—each of some kind. A wedding procession was coming toward us. If you want to make orange, you need to add yellow to red, and then bam—it's black. If you want to salt the soup, shake in a little, and then bam—two handfuls. You want to say a kind word, and then bam—a punch in the face. I was rocked around like a watermelon on a boat and threw up my breakfast straight into the horse's fluffy mane. Sanko found this hilarious, but I said I'd pulverize him. So Sanko sped ahead.No one knew anything about Alina. The daytime sky was like a poorly washed bowl. The sun was a squashed, rotten apricot. The night sky looked like the sole of a boot to me. The moon was a dirty cheap copper coin that had gotten stuck to the sole. Everything seemed spoiled to me, irrelevant, unnecessary. Without her, this journey was a waste of time.“You'd better stay away from everyone,” Artem said. “You'll infect us with your pining, and pining is worse than the clap.”The wedding procession was before us. The young couple, still utter children, walked so calmly it was as if they didn't see us. As if we were made of a light breeze—our bodies, clothes, our horses and their iron shoes—of the lightest gasses. As if we were visible only to ourselves and the coal-black dog that barked, panting and gasping.The wedding was headed straight for us. We were in the middle of the road, and so were they. We approached each other slowly, a wave going toward a wave. Some ten meters before their indifferent faces, I noticed the color of the bride's eyes. And the coral-colored tulips that fell on the road before her. Round goose eggs on meaty stems, the flowers were falling and falling before her. The bride's eyes were almond shaped.“Hey there,” Artem shouted at me. “Wake up!”I came to and saw the whole village, everyone there, not realizing my group had turned left onto a side street away from the procession. The tulips disappeared—where'd they get tulips in the fall? I was sitting alone on my horse in the middle of the road, and the entire wedding procession came to a stop. I moved to the side, and the throng marched on, cutting off our escape route. We rode a few more meters and came across the synagogue.“You know what, you're right,” said the otaman.“Who is?”“Oleksii is the only one here who's right.”“About what?”Artem turned his horse and raced back. Everyone stood still while he ran his horse into the crowd and began firing his revolver. People scattered in all directions. Artem trotted, cackling like an imbecile. The horse kicked an old guy in the mouth. The man fell, spitting out his gold teeth. We rode up to the commotion and formed ranks, but none of us wanted to join the otaman.The bride stopped in the middle of the street. On both sides were buildings and trees, as well as dust, sky, and sun. She stood still, beautiful, as if nothing had happened. Then she adjusted her garland and walked calmly on.“Well, should we get some sugar now?” Artem laughed, looking at the bride, and off he went toward the sugar factory.It was then I noticed that all of the houses had shutters—fuchsia, blue, ocher—and that all the shutters were closed.We flew toward the dirty building, whistling and shouting. If there had been aesthetes among the otamans, they would certainly have razed the abomination in this field after seizing it. They would have spread soil on top and sown buckwheat. Long live buckwheat!, that wonderful crop. Like hunting dogs hot on the trail, we raced to our defenseless victim, with the baying of hundreds of hounds behind us. The field shook beneath us. We became an artist's canvas, evolving from Realism to Romanticism, Romanticism to Expressionism, Expressionism to Suprematism. If we had been painted in black and white, we would have been splotches (until the ink ran, annihilating all remaining patches of white).Two men stood near the gate—unarmed and undressed, in nothing but their undershirts and boots. Our fervor, our kinship with the elements, our entirety, were all for naught.“Jesus Christ! What bores!” Artem exclaimed. “How boring you are!”“Maybe boring for us, but fireworks for them,” Sanko said, dismounting his horse.“The fear of death engenders creativity,” our otaman—a distinguished philosopher of the early twentieth century, that demonic breed—prophesied.He went on, “Excuse me, but with all due respect, we are not going to search you. Just show us right away where the money is. Why are there so few of you? Don't say there's not much money. I want piles and piles of money! If you don't show it to us, we'll print our own on your skin. Believe me, we will.”We entered the factory grounds. There were no workers, only an enormous mountain of sugar beets that looked like a pile of coal from a distance and a pile of dead rats from up close.“So, did you have a good year?” Artem asked a man in an undershirt.“Not really—too dry.”“Nah, that's fine. You wouldn't have been able to gather most of the harvest this year anyway. There's a fire burning across all of Ukraine, all of Russia. The whole world!”While Artem tossed thoughts like well-chewed sunflower seeds into the crowd, the two men quietly stepped aside and then ran fast ahead to the factory's main hall. The gigantic door slammed shut. The gate was locked behind us! The windows were smashed! The factory roared from inside like a cumbersome machine starting up. Bullets whirred through every window.“Bastards! It's a trap! Quick, after me!”Still on horseback, Artem bounded over to a vast window, low to the ground, and smashed it mercilessly. He broke the frame and jumped inside on his horse. I and a few others followed. We broke into their lair, threw open the doors, and let the other warriors inside.Iron vats of hot sugar were steaming, pipes were clattering; machinery groaned.“Parasites!” Artem gritted his teeth. “I'll get you. I'll get you red sons of bitches. Painted whores!”At the word “painted,” his horse fell to the ground. Lying prone, Artem continued fighting, but the red soldiers wouldn't let him stand. Fighting nearby, I rode over to assist but did not know where to aim. Artem got up, ran forward, and brought his sword down on the head of the closest soldier, all the way to the middle of his skull, to the bridge of his nose. It was like butchering a pig. Artem thrust the sword into the buttock of another who was fleeing and cut off his leg at the bend in the knee.“I'll cut off every last one of your asses! Cut off your asses!” Artem bellowed.A half hour later, the dead were lying, the captured sitting, and the victors doing anything they pleased.“Skorsky, are there a lot of casualties?” I asked the doctor, whose hour it was. I hoped not, because I was too tired to help him.“Just a few. The dead are already dead, and the wounded are not ours.”Though Skorsky rarely asked my help, and though I'd become an ordinary soldier, the doctor in me was still present in the most unpleasant attribute—knowledge. Others saw an eviscerated man, pieces of dusty flesh smeared with clay, soil, sand, and straw. I saw a perfectly formed kidney hanging perfectly from the rest of its body like a child's mitten from its coat. You could try this death on for size. Wear it like a sanbenito of the Inquisition.Artem counted the money and then lay on the floor alongside the gigantic sugar mountain in the middle of the room. From time to time, the crystals rustled as they fell.“I didn't think you'd be such a fighter!” the otaman said without turning toward me. “I thought you'd be healing us. You'd keep to the rear and we'd hide you like a girl. But here you are, in the vanguard, like a lion!”“I got excited,” I told him, choosing not to react to the “girl” part.“’Cause Alina said there was no sense counting on you to fight.”“Really?”“Does that sting?”“Why would it? I'm a doctor—not everyone is. It requires a brain. Unlike waving a sword.”“Yeah, yeah. I gave her gladiolas. We were lying in the boat near that castle, doing all manner of things, and she told me all about you. How you met.”“You were lying in that boat talking about me?”“It was the day before you left Kyiv. You agreed to go with the anarchists so quickly!”“Were you surprised? Doctors make fast decisions.”“But you probably had great prospects. Your parents are rich, right?”“And who are your parents?”“Probably all your relatives fled abroad—bourgeois. Why did you stay?”“What the hell's your point?”“Alina, by the way, died a while ago. Probably.”“Don't jinx her.”“Listen here,” he said, staring at the ceiling. “And listen good. If you have designs on her—dead or alive—it's best you castrate yourself now.”“After you.”“If I want to kill somebody, you know, I just do it.”At last he looked at me. I was lying on the floor nearby and looking in his direction, sweaty and relaxed, my appearance complemented by my disdain for his opinion, his authority, his stupid hat. His everything.Artem raised his arm above his head, stuck a finger in the sugar mountain, and licked it. We both got up. Had I anticipated this turn of events, I would have readied a gift for him. Artem held his revolver. Under my hand I found a knife the workers used for gathering beets: it was a deliberately sharpened arc they sank into the swollen brassicas. I jumped up and quickly stepped around the sugar mountain.Artem's bullet hit a pane and broke the glass.“Not man enough for hand-to-hand?”The otaman shot again.“You should've challenged me to a duel, you romantic!”Encrusted with white crystals, I charged Artem from the sugar mountain. We fell in, and the sugar stuck in our hair, mustaches, nostrils, armpits.The gang ran in to get us apart, then backed off because it had nothing to do with them. By now the sugar mountain had burst its banks. Of the once perfect pyramid, a deformed mound remained.Wounded, Artem fell on the sugar mound, turning the white red.I stood before the gang sugar-coated and holding a bloody hook. The old otaman was drawing his last breath. Blood trickled from the corner of Artem's mouth and streamed from the left side of his breast.“What's the commotion?” Old Roman had just come in.“Be quiet,” the boys told him. And a good thing they did.“You killed him? You killed the otaman!”“Shut your mouth,” the boys told him.“You... ”I slugged Roman's stinky herring mouth. How did that son of a bitch find pickled herring in a sugar factory? My fist was now bigger and stronger than ever before, a steel anvil that could split nails and shatter memorial plaques. The unfortunate man's jaw twisted like an upper millstone that had gone off track from the lower.“Let's get out of here and go to Makhno's camp,” I gave my first order.We galloped so fast the grass burned beneath us. The birds and bugs had no time to fly out of the way; hooves trampled the burrows of rodents who didn't dare crawl out of their holes for a long time after. We raced like no one had ever raced before.The steppe, that sly fox, pretended to be an innocent fool. The steppe said, “I'm like Adam: I don't even know my own name.” But its grass harbored the tracks of thousands of armies and the heels of Herodotus, the crunch of Trypillia vessels, and the smell of Scythian hemp, Roman coins, clay figures of wolf people, the chevrons of Denikin's army, glass from the Chekists’ ruby stars, traces of uranium from flying saucers. I threatened it: “Steppe, show me your layers, or I will burn you, plow you under, flood you.” But it just replied: “I'm like Adam: I don't yet know my name.”I lost geography as if it were a silver coin. It fell out of my pocket and rolled through the feather grass that blanketed the steppe in white foam. The open space ahead was so endless that the whole world might as well have been steppe. If people ended up here from somewhere else, they would conclude they were on another planet. The coin fell and became an argentum, became one with the ring on the hand of the princess who had one green eye and one blue, with the twisted candlestick at the monastery on the other side of the steppe, with melted ingots. It broke down into simpler elements, simpler and simpler yet. The horse carried me spreading the seeds of northern plants to the south, just as southern riders had once brought flowers and weeds to the north. And then I turned back. Just as I had no geography, I had no time. Every night I fell asleep with the thought that the next day I would again race. Through all spacelessness, all timelessness. I exchanged one horse for another, got on a train, on a boat, traversed forty versts on foot—in rain that brought the river up to the road, in heat that overturned cattle. The earth I walked on became mine. Mine was the water in the lakes and springs, clean water, dirty water, enlightened water, contaminated with oil, stinking of algae, of fish that died in wells, stinking of the memory of atrocities, water as clean as broken bread. The water did not become Alina.I was doing this for her: I got the basturma out from under my saddle, sodden with the horse's sweat, sliced the throat of a rich man whose daughter I had danced with at a ball, climbed into a vat of beet juice and took a sugar bath, carried out the expropriation of the savings banks, wiped the sweat from my face with my shirt—and the cloth turned red; I didn't know from what. If it was someone else's blood, I didn't care; if it was my own, even less.We mostly came across Reds. We scraped them up like old red paint on a door in order to repaint the boards black. Black looked better. Red is tasteless, but black has style. Healthy men died before us of myocardial rupture like bunnies found in the nest. The ones whose hearts were sewn of steel wire envied the deceased. Seizing estates, banks, distilleries, and prisons reminded us of gathering in the harvest. If you're too lazy to pick an apple, you can shake the tree; some of the fruit gets bruised when it falls. We seized buildings like we were shaking apple trees. No one picked the fruits, we just shook: shook under the beds, under the tables, behind the curtains. No, there was no picking. We just shook until the red juice spurted from the apples.Near the Khorol River with Father Makhno and me in charge, we captured sixteen machine guns and four cannons, as well as five hundred prisoners who immediately came over to our side. The villagers voluntarily gave us bread and cheese, chickens and kvas. People joined us. The front of the machine-gun cart said “You can't run,” and “You won't catch us” at the back. We took factory after factory. Millions of karbovantsi, thousands of poods of sugar, weapons. We smashed the telephone exchanges and captured the telegraphs. We made alliances with some and then with others. Lenin, Wrangel, Frunze, the Germans, Chinese, Australians, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Cleopatra, Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina. We ran the steppe. There were a hundred thousand of us. There were three hundred thousand of them. There were three hundred thousand of us. There were a million of them. There were two million of them. We were all of humanity. We were so many that we were none.The nobles’ estates were long ago forsaken. In the people's deepest trunks lay silks and guipure laces that were once perhaps used only to cover a table. Five steps from the barn in the direction of the pear tree, some silver candlesticks are buried; there's a plaster figure of an angel in the chicken coop, covered with shit and feathers.I was reluctant to be going to my home, but I didn't see any way out. Fate intended me to be a different being from the one I was before.Here my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were born. Here the ones who caused my grandfathers and great-grandfathers to flee had stopped. When we were still far off I noticed that someone was in the house. It was our men—Skorsky had brought them here, about twenty in all. I asked Sanko, whom I had walked with side by side more than once, where the doctor was now. All the men answered that he was around somewhere, but I didn't see him that evening.In 1918, the spirit of my great-grandfather Stepan, along with my mother and uncle, had gotten into a britzka and scrambled off to Paris, to Napoleon, against whom my great-grandfather had fought with the Cossacks, to whom the Russians promised to return self-rule. Following him in the cart went the soul of Grandpa Oleh, who lost a finger when he cut down the old linden near the house; his second finger was blown off by a cannonball near Balaklava, and later his entire hand was cut off by some Turk. Next went the spirit of my father, also Stepan, who did not take part in any war but died of measles at the age of forty. They all got the hell out of here. First, they went to Kyiv, led by my mother, Tamara Makarivna, in order to collect Uncle's family and me, their son. And their son, it turns out, has now come back to rob his own home (I didn't drive my war buddies away, did I?). It's a shame that I didn't know where the bathtub was, or whatever they bathed me in when I was small. It would have been good to walk through the ranks of anarchists with that basin and tell them all to spit into it.Remembering every room, I carried Alina upstairs to my mother's bedchamber. There was no longer furniture or pictures, only bare walls. The bed and mattress remained, but that was enough. Mother hated noise, so she set up her room far away from the running in the halls and the creaks on the stairs. I adjusted the mattress; in a gap, looking like a stalk of wheat, there lay a gold bracelet that she lost in the haste and that the thieves could not find in the mayhem. I tucked it into my pocket.The place could still be saved. It was strong, built under the leadership of my grandfather, who knew how to do it right. He built a sawmill, a gristmill, a dress factory (today it's probably been ransacked, maybe even by our own men).Alina had a complete, displaced break in her right fibula. We needed water first. I went downstairs—the guys were dragging out the piano like an old cow to the slaughter.“What are you doing with that?”“Taking it out.”“Why?”“What's it to you? We want to have fun.”“Can you play?”“We're not your bourgeois lily-handed bitches.”They couldn't play, but they were famous at destruction. “Noise is the music of the new time,” one of the smarter among them might have said. “But noise is the opposite of music. Just as a rose is the opposite of your ugly mugs,” I'd have responded if there was anyone to say it to. I could also have said that this was a Bosendorfer grand piano, that it was very valuable—but do the guys not deserve such a luxury?“Why are you so boring? We're relaxing.”“Then let me play a little first.”“Go ahead, but fast. One-two.”So I played. As before. My fingers ran up and down the black and white keys, which weren't simply keys of these, the simplest, colors. These were the keys that remembered my fingers specifically—achieved by that slovenly German Katerina, our governess. She knew a bundle of languages, could play the piano, and was interested in the latest scientific discoveries. But she had not an ounce of sympathy for anyone who couldn't master anything on the first try. More than once she hit my pinkie against the black key that remembered every one of its four thousand touches. She would pound it on the key and shout, “Si bémol! Si bémol,” and later bang my fingers and translate, “B flach! B flach!”I played. I could not expose myself, so the only thing I could do was believe in miracles. What if these coarse men saw value in this bit of furniture so unintelligible to them? And what if they didn't destroy it, this emblem of my childhood, my land, my air, which I could protect in no other way? My air. My water.“Shchedryk, shchedryk, shchedrivochka,” one of them who recognized the tune began to sing along.“Look at you.” They did not expect music from me, who had until recently been drinking blood like water.They said, “Again, again!”A group of curious men gathered around me. They were ordinary farmers, thieves, and recidivists, peasants and workers, everyone except for Skorsky. They needed this music as they needed baths. The music cleansed them from the inside, perhaps. They had not heard anything besides the whistle of a bullet, the neighing of a horse, or the knocking of a chisel and the whirring of a saw, amputating limbs, for a long time.But it could not go on long. I did not close the piano lid, just stood and went to fetch water for Alina, leaving the unfinished song for later. The well was to the north—that is, at the “Head.” My father once promised to give me a compass if I could learn to identify the ends of the earth by means of the sun. And to make it easier to remember, I gave each one of them a name: the east where the day begins was “Right” (my right hand), the west “Left,” the north “Head,” and the south “Feet.” Back when I could still do whatever I wanted all day long, I would wake in the morning and say: I'm going to the Feet. The mound was at the Feet, Left had the river, Right had the forest. It was only to the Head that I rarely went, because a village was located there. When the villagers saw me, they would speak in whispers and avoid the master's son.... I wiped her brow and her burning, sunken cheeks. I lay down next to her to feel the heat of her skin.When the fire in Alina calmed slightly, I went out into our orchard. My father had once been given a gift from Japan—a tulip tree that blossomed with yellow-green flowers. It had to have grown in the time that I was away. It would have been fatal had it been cut down. I again took the stairs down into the drawing room and came across nobody—they had all disappeared in search of food or were hidden away in their burrows. In the middle of the hall, like an opened rib cage, was the piano, irreparably shattered.B Flach! B Flach!Translation © Ali Kinsella 2022. (shrink)

A co-authored collaboration between a theatre practitioner and a clinical psychiatrist, this paper will examine Rough for Theatre II and Beckett’s demonstration of the way records are used to understand the human subject. Using Beckett’s play to explore interdisciplinary issues of embodiment and diagnosis, the authors will present a dialogue that makes use of the ‘best sources’ in precisely the same manner as the play’s protagonists. One of those sources will be Beckett himself, as Heron will locate the play in (...) its theatrical context through reflections upon his own practice as well as recent studies such as Beckett, Technology and the Body and Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ; another source will be the philosopher Wilhelm Windleband, whose 1901 History of Philosophy was read and noted upon by Beckett in the 1930s, as Broome will introduce a philosophical and psychiatric context to the exchange. Windelband is now a neglected figure in philosophy; but as one of the key figures of Neo-Kantianism in the late 19th century, his work was an important impetus to that of Rickert, Weber and Heidegger. Specifically, Windelband gives us the distinction between idiographic and nomothetic understanding of individuals, an approach that is of relevance to the psychiatric encounter. This academic dialogue will consider tensions between subjectivity and objectivity in clinical and performance practice, while examining Beckett’s analysis of the use of case notes and relating them back to Windelband’s ideas on the understanding of others. The dialogue took place in 2011 at the University of Warwick, and has since been edited by the authors. (shrink)

This chapter will explore the ways that live improvisational performances by professional-level actors, musicians, and dancers, take place at both cognitive and sub-cognitive levels in ways that are relevant for understanding perception and appreciation of the performing arts. First, evidence from cognitive science will be used to show that improvising, as in a dance or a music jam session or a scene in theatre, may involve physical responses that occur before we are conscious of the event to which we are (...) responding. Second, this chapter will demonstrate how understanding these cognitive processes can help us to pinpoint why live improvisational performances have aesthetic value. Next, this chapter will consider the extent to which critical appreciation involves the enrichment and supplementation of perceptual experience with interpretive practice. Like the improvising performing artist, the audience member, too, has cognitive processes that occur before conscious articulation of what they have perceived. This means that evaluative judgments of live improvisation in the arts, like the improvisatory decisions that are made by the performers in the performances that they are judging, are not made at the purely perceptual level. (shrink)

To entertain an idea is to take it in, pay attention to it, give it breathing room, dwell with it for a time. The practice of entertaining ideas suggests rumination and meditation, inviting us to think of philosophy as a form of hospitality and a kind of mental theatre. In this collection, organized around key words shared by philosophy and performance, the editors suggest that Shakespeare's plays supply readers, listeners, viewers, and performers with equipment for living. In plays ranging (...) from A Midsummer Night's Dream to King Lear and The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare invites readers and audiences to be more responsive to the texture and meaning of daily encounters, whether in the intimacies of love, the demands of social and political life, or moments of ethical decision. Entertaining the Idea features established and emerging scholars, addressing key words such as role play, acknowledgment, judgment, and entertainment as well as curse and care. The volume also includes longer essays on Shakespeare, Kant, Husserl, and Hegel as well as an afterword by theatre critic Charles McNulty on the philosophy and performance history of King Lear. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Image of the Performing BodyEric C. Mullis (bio)Elsewhere I have discussed the principles of embodied expression that are developed in the practice of the performance arts—dance and theatre.1 These principles, it was argued, disclose the work that must be done in order to transform the human body into an aesthetically expressive medium. That is, precarious balance, the interplay of oppositional energies, and the compression of energy must (...) be mastered if a performance artist is to overcome the artifice of the stage and develop scenic presence. However, in that essay I said little regarding the manner in which the body acquires these skills and little about the effects that the transformation has on the artist's experience of embodiment. I would like to continue here by discussing how the body is modified in the process of developing the skill sets necessary for performance as well as how this developmental process affects the performer's corporeal experience. More specifically, I will draw on the notions of the body schema and the body image in order to clarify how the body can be transformed into an aesthetically expressive medium. In the first section I discuss the functions of the body image and body schema as well as the nature of their interaction. In the second section I discuss what relevance these concepts have for our understanding of the skill acquisition process. Finally, since the points made in the first two sections can be applied to non-peformative practices (such as sport, yoga, and martial arts) the last section focuses on the performance arts by discussing how the body schema and body image are developed in order to create a space of effective gesture.Body Image and Body SchemaShaun Gallagher argues that "The body image consists of a complex set of intentional states and dispositions—perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes—in [End Page 62] which the intentional object is one's own body."2 That is, there are three kinds of intentional content that constitute the body image—the body percept, the body concept, and the body affect. The image of my body is rooted in sensorimotor and kinesthetic perceptions, specific beliefs about my body, as well as emotions that often arise in response to such beliefs. Perception gives me a sense of the condition of my body at any point in time, while conceptions build upon perceptual content and allow one to understand the nature of one's embodiment. For example, the belief that the body is akin to a machine that can run well, break down, be diagnosed, and repaired is widespread since it is based in a widely accepted philosophy of medicine. That is, the body is often conceived as a thing that must be fixed by those who have the expertise that allows them to understand its intricate systems and processes. This example not only gives us insight into the perceptual and conceptual content of the body image but also demonstrates that beliefs about the body are conditioned by culture. This latter point is also supported by observations regarding the manner in which the body is invested with emotion. For example, some may feel frustrated with their bodies since they do not meet social standards of beauty, while others experience the joys of physical competition and accomplishment that are brought about by participating in widely practiced games. This brief discussion illustrates that the image that one has of one's body is a synthesis of perceptual experience, beliefs about the nature of one's body, and emotional responses.In 1911 Head and Holmes defined the body schema as the postural model of the body.3 In this account, the body schema functions by continually comparing the body's present posture to those held in the immediate past. That is, at the preconscious level, the schema provides a standard against which changes in posture can be judged. It must be stressed that the body schema functions below the surface of consciousness and, unlike the body image, does not include perceptions, attitudes, or beliefs about the body and is consequently not subject to cultural influence. Gallagher notes that the body schema "is a system of sensory-motor... (shrink)

As one of the most influential feminist theorists in Western academic circles, Hélène Cixous is often associated with écriture feminine, a term she coined in 1977, and with a fluid, poetic style both in her essays and in her fiction. This article investigates how Hélène Cixous uses the concept of the ‘feminine’ in her plays as a container for heterogeneity, liminality and difference, mobilizing it to animate feminist strategies that interrupt male, white and/or hegemonic forms of subjectivity. If for Cixous (...) the practice of feminine writing is fundamentally characterized by the desire to create a mode of expression in which difference and otherness would retain their alterity, in dramatic writing she found an especially conducive medium for the realization of that desire. This article examines Cixous’s anti-realist postdramatic works, from her first produced play Portrait of Dora to her works for Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, in the context of a feminist aesthetics of estrangement, and considers how her plays enact feminist theory’s own movement away from the psychoanalytical discourses of the 1970s and 1980s to postcolonial and materialist critiques. The article employs a range of intersectional critical methodologies for situating Cixous’s dramatic writing within a broader feminist praxis, using the work of feminist performance scholars like Elin Diamond, Rebecca Schneider and Jill Dolan to consider the liminal Other as a precarious feminine figure that Cixous re-inscribes into discourse. Feminine writing, the progressive movement away from realism towards postdramatic theatre, and Cixous’s artistic collaboration with Mnouchkine are each considered as feminist strategies towards a rendition of the subject that can reiterate its otherness on stage. The central argument is that it is the enactment of these strategies in live performance that makes Hélène Cixous’s concept of femininity as liminal difference so relevant for feminist politics today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BreathingLuk Van den Dries (bio)This text, "Breathing," was conceived for the book From Act to Acting: Fabre's Guidelines for the Performer of the 21st Century (2021). The book was conceived and designed by Jan Fabre, author, theatre artist, and visual artist, active since the 1970s. The book was written by Luk Van den Dries, dramaturg and theatre researcher of the University of Antwerp, in tight collaboration with Jan Fabre (...) and the three most important performers/teachers of the Belgian theatre company, Troubleyn (Annabelle Chambon, Cédric Charron, and Ivana Jozic). The book sheds new light on the physical, mental, and vocal training of the performer and furthermore gives insight into Fabre's revolutionary thoughts on contemporary theatre.1Breathing is the first of the ten performative principles that together create the basic grammar in which the language of the performers is grounded.Three-phased breathing (one part in, one part out, one part nothing) is a basic condition in the series of exercises Jan Fabre developed throughout his career. This respiration technique returns in all exercises. Also, it is the first principle that the performers are taught: by dividing breathing into three equal parts, energy is built up and stress or fatigue is canalized. It is a way to rebalance, to find a place of rest after a strenuous effort, or it can also be used as a springboard to a heightened performance. Very regularly during individual exercises, Fabre will refer to this respiration technique, especially in specific situations of high adrenaline, but of course the performers should learn to use this respiration technique autonomously. They should become so familiar with the rhythm of this breathing that they automatically fall back on it when necessary. Because this respiration technique is so crucial to Fabre's acting pedagogy, it is described in detail as the very first exercise in his book. Its basic principles are explained below as well, as the first performative principle.Breathing is a sign of life, and on this primal and essential level it needs to be understood that, through breathing, the performer gives life. He breathes life into the performance. Fabre himself has described this basic condition for the birth of theatre through breathing very precisely: [End Page 30]The most important weapon of the warrior of beauty is his respiration. When the performance starts, life stops. Life itself dies. The warrior of beauty is alive, but life itself is dead. The warrior of beauty remains with just his own breath. When he enters the stage, he needs to breathe life into deceased life. Like a god gives his breath to create life. In the same way he will create life with his breath. How will he achieve this? By breathing correctly: one-third inhaling through the nostrils, one-third exhaling through pursed lips, one-third without breathing. And then the miracle happens. The breath becomes imagination and the imagination breathes. The warrior of beauty is the master of breath and life.2Fabre's abdominal breathing differs from regular forms of breathing, such as techniques derived from Asian yoga techniques, Chi-kung or Tai-chi, as it stresses different parts. At the same time, it is closely related to it, because these practices also adopt the notion that breathing in the first place rouses vitality and spirit and that the right kind of breathing thus aims at controlling life currents and bringing about a clear mind. In yoga it is called pranayama: prana meaning spirit or force of life, ayama meaning 'control' or 'grasp.' Yoga knows many variants in directing the breath, depending on the asanas (yoga postures) in which they are bedded. Sometimes focusing mainly on the diaphragm and the flanks, sometimes on abdominal breathing. Also, suspending your breath (kumbhaka) is a yoga technique, applied at the end of inhalation as well as after exhalation and during taking breath.In Fabre's case, abdominal breathing is stressed: first, air is inhaled through the nose, subsequently sent in the direction of the peritoneal cavity and the flanks, and then again exhaled via a very precise blowing technique (a dosed flow of air through an imaginary straw). During the cycle the diaphragm remains... (shrink)

The Virtual Embodied is intended to inform and provoke. It juxtaposes cutting-edge theories, polemics, and creative practices to uncover ethical, aesthetic and ecological implications of why, how and in particular where, human actions, observations and insights take place. It refuses simply to hold a euphoric view of technology yet equally resists the apocalyptic scorn which surrounds the new. The contributors use a range of interdisciplinary strategies to point to a re-worked aesthetic for embodying knowledge and explore such areas as colonialism (...) and the internet, the virtual unconscious in electronic systems, theatre as a virtual space, 'information' and the capitalist society, ecstatic bodies and the rave scene, desire and the 'virtual comfort' zone. In The Virtual Embodied many of the authors, artists, performers and designers apply their interdisciplinary passions to questions of embodied knowledge and virtual space. (shrink)

This article discusses the results of a practice-as-research intensive project carried out in August 2019, which in turn applies the doctoral research of scholar-practitioners Jorge Crecis and Lucía Piquero. The project delved into ideas about embodied cognition to support a practice-led theoretical understanding of the experience of emotional import and peak performative states in theatre dance performances. A series of creative sessions were recorded and analyzed, and then presented to an audience at the end of each day. The (...) experience of the audience is also collected through questionnaires and open discussion, to develop a multi-perspectival understanding of the experience of emotion in performance. The main pursuit of the project was to understand and develop tools in relation to the dancers’ awareness of their own sensorimotor patterns, in relation to peak performance and understandings of emotion in performance. The article develops a conceptual framework through the theoretical notions of embodied cognition, enactive perception, and sensorimotor patterns. This allows for analysis based on the experiences of the participants, and for an integration of views which then develops into a discussion of the dancers’ awareness of their sensorimotor patterns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 84-89 [Access article in PDF] Christian Views on Ritual Practice Concerning Ritual Practice and Ethics in Buddhism Donald W. MitchellPurdue UniversityThe three papers presented by this panel have given me a much greater knowledge about, and appreciation for, the relationship between ritual practice and ethical action in Tibetan, Zen, and Nichiren Buddhism. I would like to respond to each of the papers (...) one at a time from a Christian point of view by making certain comparisons with the connection between Christian ethics and ritual practice. Let me begin by raising a comparative five points concerning Stephanie Kaza's wonderful description [End Page 84] and insightful analysis of the function of ritual in nurturing authentic personhood in Zen.First, it seems that the practice of ritual in Zen demands a degree of self-sacrifice which in turn aids in the cultivation of the virtue of selflessness. For example, Kaza says that through the participation in ritual practice, "the student is freed from his or her own individual designs and preferences... not asking any questions but just trying to do it better and more fully each time." Or elsewhere Kaza concludes, "Zen ritual is a training ground for intensive practice in giving up the small ego-bound self." In a similar way for the Christian, the self-sacrifice demanded in ritual performance can be seen as nurturing selflessness in the context of community--as aiding one in giving up one's ego in order to participate more fully in the communal life of agape. But more than this, the value of selfless participation in the Christian community that is reinforced by the ritual is connected to a call for future action: It calls one to contribute selflessly together with others to building the reign of God. In Christianity, the performing of ritual with others sensitizes one to the fact that he or she is part of the church working for a collective love and unity that manifests in human community the very holiness of the unity and love of the Trinity. One is thus called within the sacred ritual environment to bring this love and unity into one's everyday environment through ethical behavior.Second, besides selflessness, another positive quality that is cultivated through ritual practice is mindful awareness. As Kaza states in regard to the meal ritual, this practice "cultivates mindful awareness... if one merges wholeheartedly with the process, the meal itself becomes a lesson in co-dependent arising." In other words, the ritual performance brings to mind an awareness of fundamental reality according to Buddhism, namely, dependent arising. Being aware of mutual interdependence brings a deeper sense of compassion for all beings, and a more focused inspiration to act morally on their behalf. So, too, in Christianity, ritual is seen to be a "social drama" that brings to awareness the reality of the mystical body of Christ, the church, being the social form of Jesus Christ in the world. Ritual, as a sacred and dramatic social manifestation of the church, brings this communal reality of Christ to the Christian's mindful awareness by breaking into the secular structures of ordinary consciousness. Furthermore, the ritual also guides, forms, inspires, strengthens, and encourages the participants to re-enter that ordinary life committed to living the values and ideals expressed in the ritual. The formative power of the ritual performance lies, in part, in the fact that ritual ties ideas, values, and ideals to sensual and emotional stimuli in a way that, in the words of Victor Turner, "connects the obligatory into the desirable" (The Forest of Symbols, 1967).Third, Kaza shows how ritual in Zen helps to convey the tradition and promote solidarity within the community. She says that ritual in Zen: "promotes healthy sangha through sharing the stability and continuity of traditional practice forms... which generate a culture of the larger body--familiar and supportive." In Christianity, too, the multidimensional expressions of the ritual performance--the physical movements, sounds, music, smells, verbal articulations, etc.--all blend together in ways that pass on certain ideas, ideals, and values... (shrink)

This book investigates transdisciplinary, arts-based approaches to developing innovative and pertinent higher education pedagogy. Introducing timely critical thinking strategies, the author addresses some of the key issues facing educators today in an increasingly complex digital, technological and ecological world. The author combines emerging ideas in the New Materialism and Posthumanism schools of thought with arts-based teaching and learning, including Practice-as-Research, for Social Science contexts, thus exploring how this approach can be used to productively create new pedagogical strategies. Drawing on (...) a rich repertoire of real-life examples, the volume suggests transferrable routes into practice that are suitable for lecturers, researchers and students. This practical and innovative volume will appeal to researchers and practitioners interested in Posthuman and New Materialist theories, and how these can be applied to the educational landscape in future. (shrink)

This article proposes an approach to teaching and learning in the university arts sector that is able to accommodate and assess creative process alongside practice. In arguing thus, romanticized notions of ‘the spontaneous artist’ are exposed to scrutiny, and the creative process itself is made subject to analysis. Notwithstanding its focus on the areas of theatre and performance, this article has a wide application to the field of developmental higher education. Whereas performance functions as a peg on which the (...) article hangs, the content is concerned with locating the creative endeavours of students in all art and arts-related disciplines at the heart of the lifelong learning experience. (shrink)