Performance-based Practices Research Articles

Live Art

Typically expressed as beats per minute (or bpm) the sound of the heartbeat while drawing becomes an aid – a way to experience, absorb and measure time. In considering the body as a drawing tool, it is the sound of blood and the concept of blood as a marking material that introduces the role of the artist’s body. In introducing a performance-based practice that is engaged in the landscape, the writing also is an investigation into how movement and environmental references, like the earth’s riverbeds and mountainous structures, can offer an understanding of the body and can form a particular relationship to the land. In reference to Iceland, the artist Carali McCall suggests ways to look at measurements of time and the nature of colour to make associations. The article describes artworks by Roni Horn and Barry Le Va and texts by Donna Haraway. Prompted by the troubling matters confronted when making work today, such as climate change and the polarisation of social and economic upheaval, the paper aims to adopt, acknowledge and encourage native and indigenous philosophies and land acknowledgements – to support a kinder, sustainable attitude to making and addressing things both subjectively and objectively. Interpreted through the artist’s practice and the body as a drawing instrument, the artworks Circle Drawing and Performing Rock are both described; the first being a series of large-scale drawings made on paper and compressed graphite with blood as a result of the repetitive action. And the other, a work made by performing both ‘in’ and ‘of’ the landscape – holding a rock as an act of endurance. Documented as a live performance, both address the weight of things and the longing for lines of empathy and connection.

Design experimentation for Nature‐based Solutions: Towards a definition and taxonomy

The role of Design Experimentation has been increasingly recognized in dealing with uncertainties inherent in Nature-based Solutions and designing performative systems.The term Design Experimentation has been widely used in Design Research scholarship. However, there is no agreed common definition and criteria to clarify what it entails in terms of both epistemology and methodology. This paper aims to address the lack of definition, criteria, and methodological approaches for designing, operationalizing, assessing, and learning from Design Experiments for creating climate resilient Nature-based Solutions. Through a Delphi method, a Design Experimentation Taxonomy is developed based on conceptual and empirical understandings of the term. A three-round Delphi survey with 15 experts across 8 countries was undertaken to capture expert knowledge and perceptions of the role of Design Experiments, as well as key criteria and characteristics of Design Experiments. The findings informed the development of a Design Experimentation Taxonomy. Results show that Design Experiments should be purposive, bound to context and solutions-oriented, and have practical relevance while driven by a strong research agenda. They help linking intuitive approaches used in design, to scientific inquiry, which can lead to innovative and performative outcomes. In the quest for evidence-based approaches to integrate nature in our built environments, Design Experiments offer more agency to nature and natural processes in design. The developed taxonomy is the first step in establishing a reflexive, data-driven and performance-based practice, as well as advancing experimental agendas in landscape research and practices related to Nature-based Solutions.

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Opening Conversations that Matter in Public Music Studies

Performance-based Teacher Education: The Impacts of a Creative Drama Course on Pre-service Teachers’ Beliefs

ABSTRACT This study explored the impacts of a creative drama course on pre-service teachers’ beliefs about teaching skills. The participants kept weekly reflective journals and were observed in micro-teachings during the drama course. They were also interviewed four times over a period of two years. The results revealed positive perceptions about using drama in teacher education programs. Their beliefs were more oriented around personal and professional skills. As a result, performance-based practice embedded in creative drama courses in teacher education was discussed with a “teaching as a performing art” approach.

Renovate my uterus: Aging queerly through performance art and karaoke

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall (IK-UCH) is a performance-based sound installation that examines vulnerability and shared intimacy through the site of my body by inviting audiences to sing their favourite karaoke song into my uterus while other audience members listen via stethoscope through my flesh. This article uses this project as a case study to examine the queering of the uterus as a site of production (not reproduction) and recoups the perceived uselessness of my middle-aging queer female body. This work connects to Linn Sandberg and Barbara Marshall's critique of the “problematic ways that aging and imagined futures are intertwined with heteronormativity in contemporary Western cultures” and how “some aging bodies and subjectivities are understood as desirable and taken-for-granted while others are constructed as unwanted and problematic” in their article, “Queering Aging Futures” (2). To make the body, vagina, cervix, and uterus structural materials for a venue is to renovate their functions outside of the logics of cisheteropatriarchy and reproductive futurity and further trouble mainstream perceptions of aging. I challenge heterocentric human reproduction as a marker of successful aging and as evidence of ‘living a good life’ by presenting queer feminist performance-based practices that centre my nonreproductive body as site for art production, presentation, and consumption.

The Academic Profession in Neoliberal Times: A Gendered View

While witnessing a feminization of its workforce, the academic profession has experienced a process of market-based regulation that has contributed to the precarization of early career phases and introduced a managerial culture based on competition, hyper-productivity, and entrepreneurship. This paper aims to investigate the implications of these changes for female academics. A mixed model research design was used based on administrative data on the Italian academic population and qualitative interviews with life scientists within a specific academic institution. Results show that the implications of university transformations in terms of gender heterogeneity are complex. On the one hand, the increased precarization of early career stages has increased gender inequalities by reducing female access to tenured positions. On the other, the adoption of performance-based practices has mixed consequences for women, entailing both risks and opportunities, including spaces of agency which may even disrupt male-dominated hierarchies.

Performance-Based Practice: Clinical Dashboards for Addiction Treatment Retention

Purpose: Substance use disorders (SUDs) are on the rise, particularly concerning opioids, and existing services are still not adequately meeting treatment needs. Most treatment dropouts occur within the first few weeks of treatment, indicating health improvement is likely not occurring. In this study, a clinical dashboard tool has shown promising utility with increasing retention in SUD treatment. Method: This pilot study was designed to measure the effects of implementing a performance-based practice clinical dashboard tool and having a process for monitoring patients’ recovery in a Midwestern SUD treatment center. Results: The results demonstrated the efficacy of a clinical dashboard tool that complements therapists’ monitoring and measuring of their patients’ performance. Discussion: Results support a building knowledge base about the impact of real-time, evidence-based tools on the retention and support of clients seeking SUD treatment.

Bodies of Fashion and the Fashioning of Subjectivity

This article explores the links between habit, fashion and subjectification to extend analysis of the clothed body beyond the semiotic frames that have tended to dominate discussions of fashion across the social sciences and humanities. Our goal is to explain how fashion’s diverse materialities participate in the modulations of subjectivity, affecting bodies in diverse encounters between matter, signs and practices. We develop our analysis by way of Gilles Deleuze’s discussion of encounters, habit and memory. Our principal contention is that fashion may usefully be theorised in terms of specific habits of coordination by which affects, memories, sensations and desires are transmitted between bodies in varied spatial, temporal, material and affective encounters. Following the work of John Protevi, we argue that such coordination expresses a distinctive mode of subjectification according to the specific encounters immanent to it. We ground this discussion in detailed analysis of the work of Melbourne artist Fiona Abicare. Abicare’s installation and performance-based practice invokes the affective and habitual aspects of fashion as each is instantiated in encounters between bodies. Abicare’s attention to the habits and memories of the clothed body alludes to the varied practices of subjectification by which diverse subjects of fashion emerge.

Educators’ Perceptions of Performance-Based Approaches in Teaching Difference With Youth

Recent research into critical pedagogy supports the implementation of performance-based practices into the classroom. This qualitative research explored the pragmatic ways in which youth, ages 8-17, are taught in Canada’s, specifically Ontario’s, education system on topics of difference and power. Through semi-structured interviews, four elementary and high school educators described their experiences using performance-based teaching in the classroom. A thematic analysis revealed that teachers found including such practices empowered students and influenced their understanding of their own identities as well as the systemic oppression of marginalized groups.

The new social work

ABSTRACTSocial work practice is an industry based mostly on therapist intuition and gut feelings. There are virtually no real-time, reliable data showing the performance of any patient outcomes or on therapists providing treatment services. In this paper a new system is recommended, performance-based practice. In the future, the New Social Work proposed will not operate as a system in which patients enter community facilities to sit in waiting rooms and interact with a randomly assigned therapist for one hour a few times weekly. Social service building will transform into technology centers where therapists use tools to measure and intervene with patients in real-time. The New Social Work will finally understand that people do not recover or learn how to recover in therapist’s offices—but in their own communities—with assistance from high-performance professional therapists interacting in the moment.

Therapist–Patient Demographic Profile Matching: A Movement Toward Performance-Based Practice

Purpose: Patients of substance use disorder (SUD), who successfully complete the treatment programs recommended by their therapists, have better health outcomes than the vast majority who drop out in the middle. We investigated the contribution of race and gender of both patients and therapists to address the cause of treatment noncompletion and gaps in knowledge. Method: Data collected from 11 SUD treatment outpatient programs, comprising 2,230 patients and 69 therapists, were analyzed to understand the effect of therapist–patient profile matching on treatment completion success rate. Results: Of the overall completion rate of 23%, White-male therapists had the highest rate (ranging from 20.4% to 50.0%) followed by White-female therapists (13.9% and 31.2%) dependent on patients’ race or gender. Non-White female and male therapists alike had varied but lesser completion rate. Discussion: Our studies recommend research and practice implementing performance-based practice measures with appropriate patient–therapist matching for better SUD-treatment outcomes.

Finding the Necessary Distance

Over the past two decades, methodological approaches that operate at the intersection of theater and ethnography have gained both popularity and critical attention. However, given the newness of these endeavors, certain methodological and theoretical elements of such approaches remain unexplored. This is particularly the case in fields such as health research, where people often use theater as a tool of knowledge translation. This article aims to broaden and enrich the growing canon of work in this area in two directions. First, it provides an empirical example of a theatrical script that emerged from a health research project informed both by ethnographic and creative, performance-based practices. In this project the authors used fictionalized accounts of history to help audiences engage with contemporary cultural/ethical issues regarding pandemic planning and response. Second, the authors theorize that this project can be usefully understood as having incorporated a hermeneutic approach to inquiry, and we introduce the notion of mimetic distance as a means of making sense of this project’s success. This article asserts that these theoretical contentions provide further interpretive and creative scope for ethnographic research–based theater and, thus, can usefully expand this growing field.

Emerging paradigms for applied drama and theatre practice in African contexts

The prevailing tendency in applied drama and theatre research and practice in African contexts has been for both critics and practitioners to apply the Freirian educational paradigm of ‘codification’ and ‘decodification’ in the interpretation of their work. Guarav Desai asserts that most of the theoretical premises of applied theatre workers in Africa take their origins from the Freirian educational pedagogy. It therefore follows that an understanding of Freire's codification theory is crucial for the appreciation of African theatrical practices. Although many applied theatre critics have followed Freire's pedagogy, it sounds rather paradoxical to critique a performance-based practice such as applied drama and theatre using criteria of a non-performative nature. What is needed is more performance-based paradigms that would make applied drama and theatre practice a truly creative enterprise. This article examines a few paradigms that have emerged in applied drama and theatre practice such as folk media, popular participation, integrated development and intercultural theatre. These paradigms are interrogated using illustrative examples drawn from the work of two theatre organisations that have made significant strides in HIV/AIDS education, namely Amakhosi Theatre Productions in Zimbabwe and DramAidE (Drama in AIDS Education) in South Africa.

From Passivity to Potentiality: The <em>Communitas</em> of Stillness

From Passivity to Potentiality: The <em>Communitas</em> of Stillness

Cookbook versus performance SIS practices

A safety instrumented system (SIS) is designed to achieve or maintain a safe state of the process when unacceptable process conditions are detected. An SIS is an independent protection layer that is covered by the performance-based standard ANSI/ISA 84.00.01-2004. The risk reduction allocated to the SIS determines its target safety integrity level (SIL). ANSI/ISA 84.00.01-2004 allows a combination of factors to be considered in the verification of the SIL of the SIS. Performance-based practices provide flexibility to users, yet add complexity to the design process, encouraging project teams to reinvent the wheel for even widely used process equipment. For many engineering applications, prescriptive approaches are favored due to simplicity. These so-called cookbook practices were very common in the process industry when ANSI/ISA 84.01-1996 was issued. They are also the backbone of many application standards and recommended practices. The cookbook typically specifies the SIS and maximum proof test interval based on analysis and accepted practice. The user must ensure that the cookbook assumptions are met by the existing equipment and mechanical integrity program. Otherwise, the installed risk reduction may not achieve the expected performance. This article provides an example of a “cookbook” approach for a simple SIS and illustrates the effect of extending the proof test interval from 1 year to 5 years on its probability of failure on demand. © 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 2008