Performance Art Research Articles

Creativity and collaborative performance of artists and STEM professionals

This study examines the relationship between creativity and performance in collaborations between artists and STEM professionals. It investigates the antecedent factors of the creativity of artists and STEM professionals and elaborates on the performance of temporal and imperfect organizational creativity. A survey was administered to 969 Korean artists and STEM professionals, of which data on 131 respondents with experience of art and STEM collaboration were used for the empirical analysis by applying a structural equation model. The results show that an individual's intrinsic motivation, and creative personality characteristic positively influence creativity collaborative performance. Intrinsic motivation and creative personality characteristics positively influenced collaborative performance by the mediation of creativity. Our study contributes to the literature by deepening our understanding of creativity and collaboration between artists and STEM professionals, particularly in temporary and imperfect organizational creativity, which has not been addressed in existing discussions of creativity. This confirms that artists and STEM professionals have common antecedent factors of creativity, and that the coexistence of scientific and artistic creativity has a positive impact on collaborative performance.

Aberrant Shakespeare: Ron Athey’s Excesses, Bataille’s Solar Anus, Becomings-Macbeth

l In this article we argue that Ron Athey’s performance Solar Anus is an aberrant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the parodic world of abundant excess that the witches catalyze is redemptively captured and transformed through the playful, androgynous, and excessive performance of Athey, who fulfills the witches’ prophecy and continues to live on sovereignly as both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Athey is a Los Angeles-based performance artist who practices what is sometimes called “extreme performance,” exploring the limits of aesthetics and the capabilities of the human body to express both beauty and pain. His work Solar Anus draws on the works of Georges Bataille, especially his short essay-poem, Solar Anus, as well as Paul Molinier, a queer French painter and visual artist who worked on the fringes of the surrealist movement. We work through the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics and engage especially with the theories and explorations of aesthetics and sovereignty by Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the ways in which Athey is capable of realizing the witches’ prophecy of sovereignty without being destroyed by the parodic world that they create and inhabit. Alongside the concepts of sovereignty, we examine how Bataille’s ideas of parody, sacrifice, and excess offer new ways of understanding the world of Macbeth and how excess and sovereignty both function within its porous borders.

Of Deep Time and Slow Violence: Anthropo-Scenic Timespaces and the Chronotopes of Climate Theatre.

This article explores how contemporary climate theatre navigates the distorted scales of the Anthropocene and the climate crisis through its unique aesthetics – embodiment, spatiality, temporality, and reciprocity. Previous literature on climate theatre has largely discussed its anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in relation to global warming. Building on ecodramaturgical frameworks, this article draws on ecocritical appropriations of Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope to investigate how theatrical time and space make the abstract nature of climate change tangible. The argument posits that chronotopes of climate theatre are crucial for understanding how contemporary theatre and performance tackle scalar derangement. By drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from environmental humanities, performance and theatre studies, and posthumanism, the study situates itself at the intersections of performance art, political theatre, aesthetic theatre, drama, and environmentalism, examining how different theatrical formats use theatrical ‘timespaces’ to address the spatio-temporal complexities of the Anthropocene. It discusses Ella Hickson’s Oil (2016); April De Angelis’s Extinct (2021); Extinction Rebellion’s “The Sea Is Rising and so Are We” (2019); and Chris Rapley and Duncan Macmillan’s 2071 (2014), showing how each uses theatrical chronotopes to transform deep time, slow violence, and the dispersed nature of climate change into the ‘hyper-present’ of the stage.

Caring for the living: the conservation of performance art

ABSTRACT As many disciplines are beginning to reckon with their contributions to historical injustices, so conservation must acknowledge and reflect on the number of its practices that continue to reinforce colonial and imperial legacies. Though such work is currently taking place in ethnographic museums, rethinking conservation and repairing its harms should be the aim of the entire museum community. Using case studies drawn from performance art, this paper demonstrates how performance challenges traditional paradigms of institutional collecting and conservation, and calls for a rethinking of certain museum procedures. It proposes the emerging scholarship on performance art conservation as a potential force for an expanded definition of conservation that puts people at its center. To this end, it presents performance as not only a conservation object to be cared for, but also a tool to care with, reframing the aim of conservation as preserving the vitality of relationships between objects and communities.

Cross-disciplinary perspectives on Nuo opera: bridging the gap between art, culture, and society in Guizhou

One of the most popular folk operas in China is the Nuo opera. Nuo opera, which is distinguished by its distinct elements such as vicious masks, peculiar clothing and jewelry, peculiar language spoken during performances, and enigmatic scenarios, has been named one of China's intangible cultural legacies. The opera is a religious act that is fundamental to the Chinese folk religion known as Nuoism. Nuo opera is performed to ward off evil spirits, illnesses, and other influences. It also serves as a prayer request to the gods for favors. Nuo opera features singing and dancing, as well as masks and costumes for the performers. This research explores Nuo opera, a traditional performance art form that is deeply established in the cultural and social structure of Guizhou using a cross-disciplinary technique that unites art and culture. Sociocultural influence, the study examines how, in a setting that is changing quickly, Nuo Opera acts as an interface for social unity and cultural continuity. The distinct features that this culture exhibits, together with the numerous benefits that the society's sustained growth has brought subsequent such as cultural, social, and economic values, among other significant elements. This study emphasizes interdisciplinary analysis, and its goals are to improve our understanding of the cultural value of Nuo Opera and provide useful insights for ensuring its persistent presence and significance in Guizhou society.

Acoustic discoveries of the Carinthian Gate theatre (Kärntnertortheater) of Vienna: on the trace of a lost artistical building heritage

Throughout history, many cultural heritage buildings of important value have been lost due to natural disasters as well as human causes (e.g. fire, war destruction, change of use etc.). The needs to build a larger theatre, as occurred in Vienna, addressed the Carinthian Gate theatre to have different room functions, while currently is considered the house of Sacher cake at international level. This paper deals with the discovery of the acoustic response of one of the most important theatres of Vienna. The realization of a 3D model that reproduces the architectural features allows the authors to perform acoustic simulations that reveal the sound environment that would be perceived by the audience during artistic performances at the end of eighteenth century in Vienna. In addition, the simulated results of the main acoustic parameters have been compared with the values of other opera theatres provided with similar dimensions and architectural features, as already studied by the authors. The results indicate an overall acoustic response, as typical of horseshoe shape plan layout theatres with the values of clarity found very close or within the optimal range, the sound strength ranging between 4 and 11 dB, and the reverberation time close to 1.5 s, in line with the criteria of opera theatre based on the room volume of the main hall and finished materials applied to the surfaces of the 3D model.

Listening ‘with’ children ‘to’ the more-than-human world: A diffractive analysis of the child and the challenge of sustainability

Objective: Listening to children has been frequently adopted by researchers working within a child’s rights paradigm, as an uncontested method that veritably represents children’s ‘voices’. Whether children can be understood to participate, and their voices represented veritably, when their lives are culturally situated and co-constructed with significant adults is debatable. The data this paper engages with were created by adopting Barad’s posthumanist methodology of diffraction to listen with children to the more-than-human world. Design/Method: Diffraction was deployed as both a creative knowledge-making practice and an analytical framework that sought insight into the ways in which children are affected by, and affect, ideologies of sustainability. Art-making was adopted as a method to enable children a medium for communication and expression. As children make sense of their social and material worlds through play, I considered it to be a form of performance art during the research. The art-making took place within a ‘wild’ park space in the UK with children age 18 months to 9 years old. Results: This paper engages with a sense-making story created during the research analysis to highlight one way in which children’s possibilities to know become foreclosed when they are filtered through societal constructions of the child as ‘vulnerable’ and how ideas of food production become framed as ‘taboo’ when talking to children. Conclusion: Children’s possibilities to contribute to discussion on issues that create sustainability dissonance seem to become limited. The agency attributed to children tasked with bringing about sustainability change seems questionable and implications for their health and well-being need to be considered.

All wounds speak – performing trauma/witnessing grief

While ‘trauma' has become a buzzword encompassing any distressing event, its definition as an unassimilated psychological wound, unresolved and recurrent, also means that it cannot ever be completely known. Trauma therapy seeks to reintegrate experiences, breaking the cycle of perpetual suffering through fragmentary recollection. Drama and performance art offer a platform for this reintegration, potentially facilitating healing. However, the fine line between therapeutic confrontation and re-traumatization necessitates careful navigation, avoiding triggering negative emotions. Crucially, not all traumatic events lead to PTSD; resilience and communal support can mitigate the effects of distressing experiences, as seen in instances of shared acceptance and forgiveness. Theatre's role in addressing trauma lies in its ability to bear witness, creating spaces for communal acknowledgment and shared grieving. While contemporary performances often revel in discomfort, embracing unresolved narratives, they prompt reflection on the limitations of representation. Art's transformative potential lies not in explicit curative intent but in its expression of unresolved complexities of human experience. Through patience, acceptance, and a refusal to impose meaning, creative arts can serve as a site for healing, fostering empathy and connection amidst the fragmentary experience of what Freud called ‘traumatic neurosis,’ what has since come to be called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Porous Spindle-Knot Fiber by Fiber-Microfluidic Phase Separation for Water Collection and Nanopatterning.

Porous spindle-knot structures have been found in many creatures, such as spider silk and the root of the soybean plant, which show interesting functions such as droplet collection or biotransformation. However, continuous fabrication of precisely controlled porous spindle-knots presents a big challenge, particularly in striking a balance among good structural controllability, low-cost, and functions. Here, we propose a concept of a fiber-microfluidics phase separation (FMF-PS) strategy to address the above challenge. This FMF-PS combines the advantages of a microchannel regulated Rayleigh instability of polymer solution coated onto a fiber with the nonsolvent-induced phase separation of the polymer solution, which enables continuous and cost-effective production of porous spindle-knot fiber (PSKF) with well-controlled size and porous structures. The critical factors controlling the geometry and the porous structures of the spindle-knot by FMF-PS have been systematically investigated. For applications, the PSKF exhibited faster water droplet nucleation, growth, and maximum water collection capability, compared to the control samples, as revealed by in situ water collection growth curves. Furthermore, high-level fabrics of the PSKFs, including a two-dimensional network and three-dimensional architecture, have been demonstrated for both large-scale water collection and art performance. Finally, the PSKF is demonstrated as a programmable building block for surface nanopatterning.

Mortality Anxiety and Aesthetic Engagements: A Reading in Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider

The article analyses the effect of performance arts (dance, music, and writing) on the central character Miranda in Katherine Anne Porter's novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider. The study situates itself within the discourse of pandemics and the discourse of expressive arts. In addition to establishing the correspondence between mortality anxiety and aesthetic engagements, it explores the testimonies of performance arts in Pale Horse, Pale Rider and its impact on its central character Miranda who lives a stressful life induced by the Spanish influenza of 1918 and World War I. Dancing, singing, and writing are expressive activities that belong to the world of aesthetics and senses. Besides, as the findings of the study suggest, they are affirmative responses of Porter against the war and pandemic of 1918. They offer pleasure, ecstasy, escape, and liberty.

A Performance Reading: Exploration of Language and Sign of the Tibetan Lama in Kipling’s Kim

This paper explores how the language and sign of the Tibetan lama play a performative role in creating the meaning in Rudyard Kipling's Kim (1901). His language and symbols become meaningful when it comes to the interaction among people. Then, his language vibrates theatrically that he has been far away from the wheel of life (birth, death, and rebirth) after finding the river of arrows. His artistic and creative language of his performs the dynamic meaning. Furthermore, he becomes connected with the people with his dingy woolen stuff, the bowl unsolicited gift, and the belt with wooden beads and they construct the concept of meaning. His language and symbols produce the idea and people grasp it. Then, the researcher uses Dwight Conquargood’s concept of performative art to analyze the lama’s language and symbols which play the performative role in creating the meaning. Thus, his language and signs give the metaphysical concept of meaning and they generate systematic constructive performance in his life.

Dear sabbatical committee: a plea, a reverie, a provocation

ABSTRACT In this performance text, the performer situates the audience as an imaginary sabbatical committee and issues a series of letters that demonstrate a plea for understanding performance scholarship, a flight of fancy imaging the dreamy delight of a performance art project in process, and a provocation and declamation for the importance of performance studies in the contemporary moment.

Attunement to the Great Near with Rebecca Belmore’s Wave Sound

In 2017, on the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, Anishinaabe-kwe performance artist Rebecca Belmore set a quartet of listening trumpets entitled Wave Sound on shorelines across Canada’s national parks. Her metallic instruments amplify the water’s frequencies by drawing them in close, inviting visitors to stop and listen to the found sounds. This technology operates on the scale of W.E.B. Du Bois’s rarely considered sci-fi “megascope,” inviting a new mode of listening to the vital and resilient voice of the lands and waters beyond narratives of settler colonialism.

Learning meaningful representation of single-neuron morphology via large-scale pre-training.

Single-neuron morphology, the study of the structure, form, and shape of a group of specialized cells in the nervous system, is of vital importance to define the type of neurons, assess changes in neuronal development and aging and determine the effects of brain disorders and treatments. Despite the recent surge in the amount of available neuron morphology reconstructions due to advancements in microscopy imaging, existing computational and deep learning methods for modeling neuron morphology have been limited in both scale and accuracy. In this paper, we propose MorphRep, a model for learning meaningful representation of neuron morphology pre-trained with over 250 000 existing neuron morphology data. By encoding the neuron morphology into graph-structured data, using graph transformers for feature encoding and enforcing the consistency between multiple augmented views of neuron morphology, MorphRep achieves the state of the art performance on widely used benchmarking datasets. Meanwhile, MorphRep can accurately characterize the neuron morphology space across neuron morphometrics, fine-grained cell types, brain regions and ages. Furthermore, MorphRep can be applied to distinguish neurons under a wide range of conditions, including genetic perturbation, drug injection, environment change and disease. In summary, MorphRep provides an effective strategy to embed and represent neuron morphology and can be a valuable tool in integrating cell morphology into single-cell multiomics analysis. The codebase has been deposited in https://github.com/YaxuanLi-cn/MorphRep.

The Influence of Local Cultural Factors on the Development of Pingxiang Spring Gongs - Based on the Perspective of Symbiosis Theory

As an important factor in the development of spring gongs in Pingxiang, Jiangxi Province, local cultural factors play an increasingly important role in the symbiosis theory environment. In order to deeply study the influence of local cultural factors on the development of Pingxiang spring gongs, the article divides the local cultural factors into geographic environment, historical background, folk tradition and so on. Based on the perspective of symbiosis theory, the influence of local cultural factors on the development of Pingxiang spring gongs in Jiangxi Province is analyzed theoretically, and local cultural symbiosis is added as a mediating variable, a theoretical model is constructed according to the assumptions, and the following conclusions are drawn from the qualitative and quantitative research by taking Pingxiang spring gongs in Jiangxi Province as the object of the study and applying questionnaire survey method, fieldwork method, in-depth interview method, etc.: the local language, folklore and customs, and local cultural identity have a significant impact on the development level of Pingxiang spring gongs, and this impact is realized through local cultural heritage and development as a mediating variable. In the course of the research, we will pay attention to the key variables of local cultural identity, artistic performance, symbiotic relationship and sustainable development, aiming to provide useful references for the inheritance and development of Pingxiang spring gongs.

Jürgen Habermas and the Critique of the Urban Subcultures of Subversion and Resistance

The Frankfurt School thinkers are concerned with practical aspects of the society that contribute to domination and subversion of masses not just through visible forces but also through subtle propaganda. The aim of these thinkers is to understand the modus-operandi of this subversion and to suggest ways of resisting this domination. Being a major thinker of the School, Jürgen Habermas critiqued a vast number of aspects that also include several issues related to urban subcultures. Habermas’s basic objective behind these critiques is to understand the modus-operandi of social domination and to suggest ways of emancipation and resisting the subversion. This paper is aimed at understanding the ways in which urban subcultures are related with issues pertaining to subversion and control and how they can be used as tools for resistance and human emancipation. For this, the paper evaluates the views of Jürgen Habermas regarding European Urban Subcultures including but not limited to Art and Music Performances, Radio and Television, Professional Subcultures, and the inherent qualities of these subcultures for understanding the role of these subcultures viz a viz social subversion and resistance.

Arena and (Re)Stabilization of Reog Bulkiyo Dance Cultural Production

Contestation among traditional art performances, in the technology and information era, creates complex and diverse challenge to the dance of Reog Bulkiyo. In 1999, the dance had to be stopped following the regeneration and economical problem. Although Reog Bulkiyo has been performed again since 2009, the conditions which makes this dance can be produced is still inexplicable. This article attempts to explain why dance experiencing production and activity stagnation. Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural production theory is used to analyze this problem, while ethnographic qualitative is used as the method. This study found that Reog Bulkiyo dance is in the arena of traditional dance art which has a double-tiered structure. The first structure leads to popular culture, while the second structure leads to art culture. In the first structure, Reog Bulkiyo dance group uses relational capital with relatives, social and Islamic groups to survive in the midst of competition with other popular arts. The dance then gains a relationship with the academy and the state which provides relational, cultural, and symbolic capital in the form of granting intangible cultural heritage status. These two relations give Reog Bulkiyo dance group the opportunity to maintain its cultural production.

КЫРГЫЗ СҮРӨТ ИСКУССТВОСУНУН УЛУТТУК ЖАНА БӨТӨН УЛУТТУК ПРОБЛЕМАЛАРЫ

The purpose of the research in the article is to determine the ethnonational and international problems of modern Kyrgyz art. The economic and socio-political reforms of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had a particular impact on the transformation of Kyrgyz fine art. The methodology of art differs from the methodology of science in that the artist does not always pursue the same goal as the scientist. Art is not a search for truth, but the creation of the most effective form that can convey thoughts, feelings and images to the viewer. For this purpose, the article uses a comparative typological research method. Sometimes in conceptual art the entrepreneurial process is the only part of the work on display, with no visible results. The article interprets new terminological designations of contemporary art (performance, installation, environment, ready-made, science art). The main content of the article analyzes how Eastern and Western cultures influenced Kyrgyz art and examines the criteria of art. As a result, ethnonational and foreign problems of art were introduced experimentally into practical processes, nevertheless, the originality of Kyrgyz artists was preserved and reflected in their work.

The effect of the flipped row strategy on a number of kinematic variables in the Performance art and achievement of some basic skills in volleyball

This research aims at revealing the impact of flipped classroom strategy on a number of kinematic variables in the art of performance and achievement of some basic skills in volleyball; recognizing the differences between pre-tests and post-tests for both experimental and control groups، detecting the differences between both experimental and control groups in post hoc tests of the researched variables. Furthermore، the researchers applied the experimental curriculum in order to adapt it to the nature of the research. The research community consists of (160) students (males and females) from the Faculty of Physical Education، and the research sample reached (40) students of the second stage. The sample was then divided into experimental and control groups، randomly putting 20 students in each group; and the tested sample consists of (12) students due to the lack of commitment of some of them to apply the curriculum and the absence of many others. The two researchers then conducted the processes of homogenization and parity of the two groups، all of which show a value greater than 0.05. In addition، the sample ratio reached15%، and the two researchers in this study arrived at the conclusion that there was a difference in measuring skillful performance between accurate measurements (tests) and the measurement of art of performance by the residents. Moreover، the strategy of flipped classroom has the effect of improving some of the kinematic variables (working angles) of some of the basic skills in volleyball. Besides، there are kinematic variables of the human body that have much to do with the stage of learning skills (handling، receiving transmissions)، compared to variables that have little to do with the learning process when emphasized by the instructor.

Approximating problems in abstract argumentation with graph convolutional networks

In this article, we present a novel approximation approach for abstract argumentation using a customized Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) architecture and a tailored training method. Our approach demonstrates promising results in approximating abstract argumentation tasks across various semantics, setting a new state of the art for performance on certain tasks. We provide a detailed analysis of approximation and runtime performance and propose a new scheme for evaluation. By advancing the state of the art for approximating the acceptability status of abstract arguments, we make theoretical and empirical advances in understanding the limits and opportunities for approximation in this field. Our approach shows potential for creating both general purpose and task-specific approximators and offers insights into the performance differences across benchmarks and semantics.