Rehearsal Process Research Articles

Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer (review)

Reviewed by: Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s by Iris Smith Fischer Cindy Rosenthal Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s. By Iris Smith Fischer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. pp. 266. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Iris Smith Fischer’s monograph fills a significant gap in experimental performance history, as it is the first text dedicated exclusively to examining the work of Mabou Mines, one of the most important avant-garde theatre groups in the United States. Although the New York–based company received its first Obie (Off and Off-Off Broadway Theater) Award in recognition of its work in 1974, Mabou Mines came to prominence in the 1980s with groundbreaking productions such as A Prelude to Death in Venice (1980), script and direction by Lee Breuer, and Dead End Kids (1980), conceived and directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Beginning with a clearly written and insightful introduction, the book is organized chronologically in five chapters, ending with a brief epilogue. Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s also includes a section of excellent production photographs and a useful appendix with a timeline of members’ activities and company achievements, from 1957 to 1980. Writing about a group that “set out to create indescribable performance” (v), Smith Fischer carefully documents the first and lesser-known decade of Mabou Mines’s production history, beginning in 1970, when the company was supported in its first three years by Ellen Stewart, director of La MaMa Experimental Theatre, and then, over a ten-year period, by Joe Papp of the Public Theater. Smith Fischer weaves together accounts of core members’ artistic backgrounds as she tells the story of how Mabou Mines’s multidisciplinary performances came about. In her introduction Smith Fischer states that detailing company members’ biographies is not her intent here. Her focus is on the “coming together” of the multitalented founders, JoAnne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, and David Warrilow, and the group’s rehearsal processes and productions. Actors Frederick Neumann and Bill Raymond joined the group in 1971; Terry O’Reilly joined in 1973. Smith Fischer also suggests why some members had moved apart or left the group by the end of the 1970s. Smith Fischer argues that Mabou Mines rejected the notion of the actor as an interpretative artist, and instead, performers were seen as “creative agents” (1). This company of individual artists—“Co-Artistic Directors”—sometimes with disparate visions, often struggled with collaboration as they consistently “made new” and often provocative work together. The group ultimately evolved into what Smith Fischer describes as a “company of directors,” with Breuer [End Page 154] acknowledged as the “first” director and Akalaitis as “the second director” with a “sensibility and vocabulary of her own” (120). In the introduction, Smith Fischer situates Mabou Mines’s work in the 1970s within the context of longer, ongoing conversations in theater and performance studies about the avant-garde—or avant-gardes. In Smith Fischer’s analysis, the idea of and adherence to the “Avant Garde as Community” is crucial to an understanding of how Mabou Mines functions: members support each other through their efforts to create and foster a common language and techniques and through sharing responsibility (organizing childcare within the group is but one example). In the first chapter, “Coming Together,” Smith Fischer charts the complex movements of the couples, Breuer and Malaczeck and Glass and Akalaitis, from coast to coast in the United States and throughout Europe, where they encountered English actor David Warrilow. The five determined to make New York City’s downtown arts scene their base. In this section and throughout the volume Smith Fischer clarifies the connections and the distinctions between Mabou Mines and experimental theatre troupes associated with 1960s radicalism— the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, the Performance Group, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Mabou Mines in the 1970s “was not political” (in Akalaitis’s words): “There was no ideal about politics, or what theatre should be, could be, or how we wanted to change it. . . . [The ideal was] excellence, and finding a performing technique that was American—one that was personal, yet very stylized and technical” (35). Working...

New Notational Strategies for New Interpretative Paradigms: Revisiting the Scores of Anestis Logothetis (1921–1994)

NEW NOTATIONAL STRATEGIES FOR NEW INTERPRETATIVE PARADIGMS: REVISITING THE SCORES OF ANESTIS LOGOTHETIS (1921–1994) MICHAEL MCINERNEY 1. INTRODUCTION HE SUBJECT OF NOTATION never quite goes away. With the continued encroaching of technology into musical life, the slippage between sound and score becomes if anything a more pressing issue. Extended sound resources, post-production editing and dissemination, and new ways of preserving work-identity through recording all conspire to drive the field of notation and the community of interpreting performers further apart. Radical solutions are possible. Interpretative practice in the wake of technology might be considered akin to geometry after Riemann, as a set of axioms that must be logically non-contradicting in order to sustain meaning, but a number of which may be inverted to produce alternative, equally non-contradicting, axiomatic universes that are also plausible. T 100 Perspectives of New Music One such radical aesthetic can be discerned through the many ‘graphic’ scores of the Viennese composer Anestis Logothetis (1921– 1994). In its distinctive resolution of some of the dilemmas of noise, notation, and technology, his oeuvre may be more relevant to performers of our time than it was to his contemporaries in the latter part of the twentieth century. Between 1959 and 1994 he worked consistently within a notational system of his own devising to create a body of work that reflects a distinctive approach to interpretation: not only to what musical signs represent, but also to how the reading of them to performance might be carried out, and what that might mean for composer, performer, and engaged listener. In order to present this interpretative aesthetic in a clear light, this paper attempts to set up a comparative review of interpretative aesthetics from three current musical practices: jazz, rock, and the concert hall tradition. The review concentrates on musical praxis—the activity of rehearsal and performance and how this reflects core values about (in this case) the relationships between performers, composers, the work, and the event of performance. It depends on a number of principles both aesthetic and pragmatic that appear consistently across the genres but each time in a differently ordered, logically consistent set. Taking the results of this analysis into the world of Logothetis reveals that his oeuvre can be seen to represent a fourth distinctive yet equally consistent reading of the same principles. There is something inevitably reductive about such a comparative analysis. In this article, the Miles Davis album Kind of Blue (Davis 1959) and U2’s Achtung Baby (U2 1991) have been used as exemplars of jazz and rock interpretative practice, respectively. This is not to say that each album can stand as a complete metonym for its generic context, but in each case the background and rehearsal process has received a close analysis from which I have been able to impute an interpretative methodology that seems reasonably representative. As no more than the third premise of a comparative review, I hope that the analytical quote from Roman Ingarden below can act as a sufficient representative of essential concert values: The composer fashions his work in a creative effort, over a certain period of time. This labour fashions something . . . that previously did not exist but from the moment of its coming into being does somehow exist quite independently of whether anyone performs it, listens to it, or takes any interest in it whatever. The musical work does not form any part of mental existence, and in particular, no part of the conscious experiences of its creator. . . . Moreover . . . New Notational Strategies for New Interpretative Paradigms 101 [it] is not identified with its various performances. Despite this difference, the performances resemble the particular work, and the more they resemble it the “better” they are. Finally, the work is totally different from its score. It is . . . a sounding work, while the notation of the score is simply a defined arrangement, usually of graphic signs. (Ingarden 1986, 2) The three analyses that follow explore the interpretative practice of each genre on the basis of the six principles identified in Example 1 below. These analyses can be thought to occupy a common vector space whose six basis vectors can be identified with the six given principles. The...

Influence of Education, Performance Level, and Presentation Medium on Evaluations of String Orchestra Performances

Abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of education level (high school orchestra students, undergraduate string music education majors, and in-service orchestra teachers), ensemble performance level (good, average, and weak), and presentation medium (audio-only and audiovisual) on the evaluations of string orchestra performances. Participants (N = 96) evaluated audio-only or audiovisual recordings of good, average, and weak string ensembles. A repeated-measures ANOVA test revealed that string education majors rated intonation more favorably than inservice teachers. All participants were able to discriminate between the good, average, and weak performances when evaluating tone, intonation, and rhythmic precision. Ratings for musical effect did not differ significantly between the good and average groups. Participants assigned significantly lower tone and intonation ratings in the audio-only presentation medium than the audiovisual. Finding evidence of when musicians learn to accurately assess music performances can be useful both for in-service music teachers and teacher educators. If this ability is apparent in high school students, they can have a larger role in the rehearsal process.

Effects of Imagined Interactions and Rehearsal on Speaking Performance

Imagined interactions (IIs) constitute a type of social cognition that can reduce fear of communication. Through the mental preparation enabled by IIs, an individual can reduce disfluencies and mitigate the anxiety that arises from a speech. Study 1 indicated that rehearsal influences the reduction of silent pauses but not vocalized pauses. In addition, those who reported higher levels of communication apprehension demonstrated more total disfluencies throughout the speech. Study 2 examined how utilizing mixed modes of imagery can affect the rehearsal process in comparison to visualizing (VIS) an encounter alone. The results indicated that a rehearsal consisting of both II training and the mixed modes of imagery resulted in more overall fluency in speech and in higher self-reported speech evaluations.

Combining Coco, Arranging for Het Coco Collectief

Name: Jannelieke Schmidt Main Subject: Classical Singing Research Coach: Patrick van Deurzen Title of Research: Combining Coco, Arranging for “Het Coco Collectief” Research Question:How do I arrange from a market, artistic, voice technique and stylistic point of view mostly single-voiced by piano accompanied music for “Het Coco Collectief” which consists of five sopranos and one pianist? Research Process: In order to develop my skills, theoretic knowledge and insight in the process of making arrangements I studied sources concerning music theory and chord writing, I made several arrangements, I interviewed arrangers and singers, I had my fellow Coco colleagues answer questions about their preferences concerning singing in the ensemble and I analysed my arrangements. Summary of Results: My paper contains all the information I gathered over a two year research period. It has become a little handbook of tips, tricks and rules. I gained skill and knowledge mainly through trial and error, rehearsals with the ensemble and analysing my interviews and questionnaires. I arranged three pieces by Rossini (La pastorelle delle Alpi, La Danza, La legend de Marguerite) one piece by William Bomcom (Amor) one piece by Johannes Röntgen (Op een Kwal) and one piece by Bizet (Adieux de l’hotesse Arabe). I used La Danza en La legend de Marguerite as material to compare arrangements before and after my research in order to detect differences in choice making and using gained knowledge and skill. I used Op een Kwal en Adieux de l’hotesse Arabe in order to explain how a piece changes through a rehearsal process and adapting the piece for either stage of radio. Through talking to the arrangers and working on my pieces together with my coco colleagues and my research coach I found what I was looking for: skill. From the beginning of this research I was looking for justification of my choices. I found that for me to feel secure of my work I needed those two years of thinking that rules is all I needed. That if I could explain an idea by saying it there because of a style or historical context, from a voice technical of personality choice, from Coco’s image or other peoples opinion my arrangement would be good enough. If I could find arguments and explanations for why I did what I did, I should not have to justify why I dare to rearrange already ‘perfect’ repertoire. I created the handbook, containing tips tricks and rules: music theory, all the knowledge shared with me during interviews, Coco’s preferences, all the rules are there. Everything in order to be able to let go of them if it pleases me. My choices are still based on knowledge but now I can consciously use or not use the rules. I have developed a greater trust in my own artistic ideas about the pieces I arranged. I have developed a greater understanding of what it is to write for this ensemble, for these people. And as said before I have created a little booklet of rules for anyone who wants to arrange for voices and piano. During my presentation Het Coco Collectief will sing both La Danza and Adieux de l’hotesse Arabe.

Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide by Joe Deer (review)

Reviewed by: Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide by Joe Deer Kevin Calcamp Directing in Musical Theatre: An Essential Guide. By Joe Deer . Abingdon, UK : Routledge , 2014 ; pp. 288 . In Directing in Musical Theatre, Joe Deer offers a new textbook option for graduate and undergraduate courses that provides a comprehensive, articulate, and thorough account of how to effectively navigate the role of the director for a musical. Although it is geared toward musical theatre, this book will benefit any beginning director because it describes the roles and functions in a methodical, step-by-step process. Actors and designers may also benefit from Deer’s reflections and perspectives on the process of creating musical theatre. He astutely divides his book into the five phases of the director’s process: conception, collaboration, rehearsal, production, and performance. This approach allows for a chronological unfolding of the pragmatic steps a director takes when creating a musical, and a systematic approach for preparation and rehearsal. The book concludes with a wonderful series of appendices that provide sample documents, timetables, questionnaires, and a glossary of useful stage terms. Storytelling is the thematic core prevalent throughout the text. Deer emphasizes the director as storyteller in phase 1, “Conception.” There are two chapters here, “Preparing for Collaboration” and “Imagining the Chorus.” As is the case with all the chapters in the book, they are divided into smaller units. Each phase begins with a comprehensive timetable that guides the reader temporally through the production process. In “Preparing for Collaboration,” the author provides a detailed breakdown on how to gauge first impressions, perform script and character analyses, and establish and articulate style. He shrewdly clarifies that in storytelling, it is respectable and sometimes necessary to invoke the spirit of a prior production, but warns against copying or plagiarizing the work of other artists. In the next chapter, Deer highlights the chorus as storyteller and emphasizes its function as spectacle and as characters. The director is one of many storytellers in the production process. In phase 2, “Collaboration,” the author emphasizes the collaborative art of storytelling. Chapters on “Collaborative Partners” and “Directing the Design” encourage the director to be a collaborator and illuminate how to effectively communicate and share ideas. “Collaborative Partners” explores the functions of the choreographer, the musical director, and the designers, as well as how to work collaboratively with each and how to enable them to bring their skills, talents, and ideas to the table as co-interpreters. In “Directing the Design,” Deer accentuates the need to share your passion, clearly articulate your ideas, and to be open to and respect the ideas of the other artists whose work forms a portion of the whole. Deer transitions from his consideration of the collaborative processes to the realities of the rehearsal process in phase 3, “Rehearsal.” The two chapters in this section, “Auditions” and “Staging and Coaching,” assist the director in how to effectively tell a story with the actors. “Auditions” reviews the process for conducting a musical theatre audition. The author provides tips and suggestions to help make the process flow effortlessly. For example, to address the issue of multiracial and color-blind casting, Deer suggests that the director must first honor the character and the musical as a whole by asking two questions: Whether or not race or gender matter in the role? What might deviating from the traditional casting model do for or against the production? He encourages the director to make the choice that best serves the story. After casting, the rehearsal process begins, and Deer helpfully reminds the reader that staging a musical is not the same as staging a play. In “Staging and Coaching,” he stresses that the most important part of the musical is its songs, and it is here that staging and choreography must coalesce to both keep the heart of the show alive and pump life into the rest of the production. Staging, blocking, and coaching represent methods of storytelling that the director must use throughout the rehearsal process. Deer emphasizes the continued role of the director as storyteller as he moves from the rehearsal into phase 4, “Production,” which overviews the process from technical rehearsals to the final...

Critical Proximity: A Case for Using the First Person as a Production Dramaturg

Critical Proximity: A Case for Using the First Person as a Production Dramaturg Shelley Orr (bio) On 1 May 1767, in speaking about the choice of play for the inaugural production of the ambitious Hamburg National Theater, Gotthold Ephriam Lessing noted wryly: “It was clearly important to begin with a German original, which in this case would also have the attraction of novelty. But the intrinsic value of this particular play could not make any claims to such an honor. The choice would warrant criticism, if anyone could demonstrate that they could have found something better” (essay 1, paragraph 3). Lessing apparently only holds back his most severe criticism of the quality of this play because of the overall abysmal state of new plays being produced on German stages. Thus, the field of dramaturgy was christened in the fire of the sharp-eyed and sharp-witted criticism that Lessing leveled at his own theatre on the occasion of its very first production. It does not seem that he had any kind of grudge against his employers, despite his dim view of the play; in fact, in the brief preface he provides to his Hamburg Dramaturgy, he praises the opening of the theatre highly, especially in light of what he sees as a gaping need for productions of new German plays rather than imports from other European stages. I contend that it is from Lessing’s perhaps brave and perhaps foolhardy commitment to excellence that the field of dramaturgy draws a widely held view that dramaturgs should strive to be unfailingly objective as they offer criticism. Dramaturgs are often taught to position themselves at a critical distance from production work, even (and perhaps especially) their own production work, to preserve high aesthetic standards and prevent being swayed by mitigating personal factors. Anyone who has been part of even one production knows that rehearsal is rife with mitigating factors. In his first essay of the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing’s honest appraisal of the work being done on German stages was well-grounded in a thorough knowledge of dramatic structure, theatre history, production conditions, and aesthetic principles. He demonstrated his clear knowledge of all these, as well as his extensive understanding of the play’s source text in his point-by-point demolishing of Cronegk’s Olindo and Sophronia. (By the way, the young playwright died at age 26; Hamburg presented his play posthumously. Although Lessing acknowledged this fact, it does little to soften his unenthusiastic assessment of the play. An inaugural, posthumous production—talk about mitigating factors!) In Mary Luckhurst’s thoroughgoing yet accessible history of the dramaturg, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre, she addresses the fact that the English-speaking stage seemed to be relatively late to incorporate the field of dramaturgy and the role of the dramaturg into theatrical practice. Luckhurst helps to uncover dramaturgs working in areas and eras previously thought to be without them. Consider this quotation from Florence Alexander: I always attended the two last rehearsals before every play because my opinion was worth having just before the play was produced. My remarks were taken down in shorthand and I was always told I was wrong, but in the end my opinions were always taken and proved all right. When an actor has been rehearsing a play for weeks he becomes blind to its faults. I could say things to Alec about his work that nobody else could, and when I went in to the last rehearsals I was called the sledge-hammer. (60) [End Page 239] As Alexander attests, functions associated with the role of the dramaturg were alive and well during the explosion of theatrical activity in nineteenth-century England, but this work was largely hidden. Alexander held no official title at the St. James Theatre in the 1890s, but she was in a unique position as the wife of theatre manager and actor Sir George Alexander. So here we have an example of someone who had distance from the rehearsal process and yet the trust of the actor-manager. Her blend of “fresh eyes” and trusted perspective made her a good candidate to give critical feedback to improve the production before opening. The term...

Shape-Shifter in the Green: Performing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Who, namely, was weird, imperious being, qualified to challenge, test, unmask, pass sentence? The Green Knight who could tuck his head under his arm appear with it in place again, whose wife was fairest temptress in world, whose Green Chapel was a kind of eerie crypt, the cursedest kirk, as Gawain judged it, that e'er I came in!-who is he what is his name?-Heinrich Zimmer, The King Corpse (76)Sir Gawain Green Knight is a courtly romance, finest Arthurian in English, Albert C. Baugh wrote in A Literary History of England in 1948 (236). The critical reputation of poem remains unquestioned today, succeeding generations of literary critics continue to praise poem in words nearly identical to those used by Baugh over half a century ago. Gawain Green Knight is, wrote Vincent J. Scattergood five decades later, the finest Middle English Arthurian romance (419). The poem's brilliance shines through in its alliterative verse, its complex blending of Pagan Christian mythologies, its weaving together of its two plots (the Beheading Game Temptation), its masterful use of suspense.1 But there is no end of things to exclaim over, concludes Baugh, and we can only hint at enjoyment to be had from reading re-reading this fine romance (237).Given its literary reputation, its language, its complexity, Sir Gawain Green Knight is a particularly challenging source text for storytelling performance. Yet I took up challenge as if under its enchantment chose Sir Gawain Green Knight for exactly that, I have continued to perform it over many years at storytelling festivals, schools, academic conferences, International Congress on Medieval Studies.2 For me, power of poem has always been in its mythic resonances and, specifically, its enigmatic Green Knight. This essay considers poem's critical heritage different ways literary critics have interpreted mysterious character of Green Knight-that green shape-shifter-whose appearance is no less remarkable today than it was long ago Christmastime in Camelot. Additionally, I think, essay serves as an exemplum of kind of research required by oral interpretative storytellers who turn to canonical texts for performance.Joseph D. Sobol describes oral interpretative storyteller:The teller begins with a written text, whether of her own or another's devising, commits this text to memory. She then overlays paralinguistic, performative elements of facial, vocal, kinesic expression timing upon preset verbal scaffolding, whether in rehearsal process of in heat of performance. (Innervision 72)Sobol's description is very helpful for articulating artistic work of oral interpretative storyteller.3 However, its purview does not include background research this mode of performance requires. Too often my experience has been listeners those new to storytelling assume work of an oral interpretative storyteller is simply to abridge to memorize a selected text, which would be tantamount to performing a text offthe surface. Risky business, especially if storyteller is performing text for an audience of literary scholars! Research, I argue, is invaluable and, indeed, necessary for storytelling artist working with a complex literary text in order to develop a resonant, grounded performance. Research informs a myriad of artistic choices, among them (but not limited to) tone of story, attitude of teller to story's characters, individual characterizations, as well as an understanding of a story's use of symbolism. This essay, then, takes its reader behind scenes with oral interpretative storyteller to library to understand research behind a performance of a complex, multivalent masterwork. …

Simon McBurney’s Ambitious Pursuit of the Pure Maths Play

When Simon McBurney set out to create a play about the fabled relationship between Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy and the self-taught Indian genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, he was immediately confronted by the question of how to engage the mathematics authentically. Undaunted by his own uneasiness with the subject, McBurney incorporated a host of experts into the rehearsal process, calling on mathematical educators, expositors, and Fields medalists to come work with the company. While on the surface maths and drama make an incongruous pair, the result was a vibrant collaboration. The final product — the award-winning play A Disappearing Number — shines an interesting light on the surprising similarity between the creative process in mathematics and the creative process in theatre, especially as manifested by the company at Complicite.

A practical guide to greener theatre: introduce sustainability into your productions

Protecting the environment should be a priority of every theatrical production, but it can be challenging to mount an environmentally-friendly show with limited time, resources, and information. A Practical Guide to Greener Theatre: Introduce Sustainability Into Your Productions not only gives you the information you need to make greener decisions, but provides you with practical, workable solutions. You will learn how to assess and improve every production area – from costuming and painting, lighting and technical direction, to administrative offices and the rehearsal process. Checklists, examples of successful strategies, and step-by-step instructions will show you how to identify areas where manageable, sustainable changes can make your productions greener, and advice from working professionals, with experience greening their own productions, will leave you confident that your processes are environmentally sound. Even non-technical people who find themselves responsible for supervising productions will find green solutions that can be instituted with a staff of volunteers or students. Remember: every step toward sustainability is a step forward. Discover small fixes that will make your theatre productions greener. Examine ways to introduce greener practices in the design, execution, and strike process. Explore how introducing sustainability into your theatre productions can save your company time and money. Learn how sustainability and safety intersect to help protect your workers and volunteers.

Spaces of Preparation: The ‘Acton Hilton’ and Changing Patterns of Television Drama Rehearsal

It is only comparatively recently that performance in arenas other than theatre and cinema has begun to receive serious academic attention. The ‘Spaces of Television’ project and the University of York’s ‘Playing the Small Screen’ symposium have each opened up discussions regarding the impact of production process and space upon television acting, yet little consideration has been given to those spaces in which performances were traditionally prepared prior to studio transmission or recording. This article attempts to address this by focusing on the BBC’s ‘Television Rehearsal Rooms,’ better known by those who used them as the ‘Acton Hilton,’ which offers a precise model of the ‘outside’ rehearsal process which characterised multi-camera studio production. A creative hub for not only drama, but also sitcom and light entertainment, the Hilton represented an extended community for the many performers who gathered there to rehearse, a community that has all but disappeared in the modern era of single camera location work, where prior rehearsal of the type conducted at Acton has virtually disappeared. Drawing upon a combination of archive research and interviews with practitioners, this piece examines the important role played by the Acton Hilton in the history of UK television acting.

Directing the Hamlet Story in Hamlet—The Actor

MJCompany’s production of Hamlet The Actor, the three actor version of Hamlet, was first staged in 2012 and won ‘the 1st Korea Shakespeare Awards’ for Best Young Director and Best Actress. The production was restaged with a new cast in 2013 and attracted the attentions of international Shakespearean scholars in particular, who were invited to attend the International Shakespeare Conference organized by the Shakespeare Association of Korea, delighted with this production as an eye-opener to them, and convinced that Hamlet can be adapted to a purely theatrical play without involving cultural concerns and political arguments. Hamlet The Actor portrays Hamlet as a player-director, rehearsing with two players his own play on revenge to overcome the state of dissociation and witnessing instead the disastrous effects his revenge might have on his beloved Ophelia. Directing the Hamlet story becomes not about whether to kill Claudius or not, but about whether to continue a rehearsal or not. The play’s adaptive strategy is the making of a classical work, that is, the collaboration between Hamlet and two players; it is characteristic of what distinguishes itself from a metadramatic device. Hamlet relies on the rehearsal process for the realization of his intentions and expects two players to make a creative contribution. Their collaborative work is characterized as a dynamic process of reshaping a classical work by means of stage production. The play’s circular and open-ended structure facilitates the dynamic process and stimulates the audience’s imagination to fill gaps in the story.

The Dalcroze Method, Marie Rambert, and Le Sacre du printemps

The standard narrative about the original production of Le Sacre du printemps is that the Ballets Russes dancers hated Nijinsky's choreography; that rehearsals were prolonged; that the work outraged audiences, who rioted; and that the ballet failed and disappeared, but Stravinsky's music endured as modernism's masterpiece. This article offers a revised history, drawing on archival and practice-based research on the method developed by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who incorporated movement into music teaching. Starting with what Nijinsky and Diaghilev observed at the Dalcroze institute at Hellerau, I turn to how the dancer Marie Rambert brought embodied knowledge from her Dalcroze background into the rehearsal process to help Nijinsky prepare the dancers to perform the complex work. I then take up the coverage of Dalcroze and Nijinsky that overlapped in newspapers and journals of the time. Finally, I reflect on why their reputations, first joined a century ago, remain intertwined.

Facilitating role of 3D multimodal visualization and learning rehearsal in memory recall.

The present study investigated the influence of 3D multimodal visualization and learning rehearsal on memory recall. Participants (N = 175 college students ranging from 21 to 25 years) were assigned to different training conditions and rehearsal processes to learn a list of 14 terms associated with construction of a wood-frame house. They then completed a memory test determining their cognitive ability to free recall the definitions of the 14 studied terms immediately after training and rehearsal. The audiovisual modality training condition was associated with the highest accuracy, and the visual- and auditory-modality conditions with lower accuracy rates. The no-training condition indicated little learning acquisition. A statistically significant increase in performance accuracy for the audiovisual condition as a function of rehearsal suggested the relative importance of rehearsal strategies in 3D observational learning. Findings revealed the potential application of integrating virtual reality and cognitive sciences to enhance learning and teaching effectiveness.

Simulation of the critical steps of the Nuss procedure

Simulation can be a critical component in the surgical training, planning and rehearsal process of difficult or new procedures. This is true for the Nuss procedure, which is a minimally invasive surgery for correcting pectus excavatum (PE) – a congenital chest wall deformity. Surgeons who routinely perform this surgery identified the most critical steps during the procedure. We chose to simulate these components which involve the process of creating a pathway anterior to the pericardium underneath the sternum as this step can, if incorrectly performed, lead to the death of a patient or, at least, serious complications. In this paper, we describe the hardware setup of the Nuss procedure surgical simulator, the constructed virtual environment, modelling of anatomical structures, surgical instrument and its insertion point without the aid of physical components, reproducing PE deformity, and eventually physics of the tunnelling process.

Thinking through Intercultural Spatialities on Imelda: A New Musical

This article examines the performance of culture on a Filipino American musical called Imelda: A New Musical by the Asian American theatre companies East West Players and Pan Asian Repertory Theatre. In so doing, it critically discusses how this musical moved towards a more open conception of spatiality. By analysing the context of production, processes of rehearsal, the performance's dance and costumes, and the musical's reception, this article demonstrates the dialogic and multiple production of cultural space on Imelda. This article also reveals the resulting complexities inherent in trying to affiliate performances to located cultural identities. The implications of these more fluid, shifting geographies for intercultural theatre and the production of identity are then detailed.

Exploring the notion of Bildung in theatre work: conversations with actors rehearsing Brecht's Fatzer

The article explores the German notion of Bildung, in relation to drama and theatre work, with a particular focus on the rehearsal process. Bildung is a term used to describe education that is simultaneously a process and a product, one that is oriented towards developing life competencies rather than predetermined or set skills. Drawing on an example from Bertolt Brecht's Fatzer, directed by Tore Vagn Lid for the Bergen International Arts Festival (Norway) 2012, the article examines if Bildung, as a cultural, self-reflexive, developmental kind of learning, can be identified when five actors rehearse for this performance. It is set against a global education backdrop where the humanities and the arts in particular, are devalued and vulnerable.

Facilitating emotion management: organisational and individual strategies in the theatre

Detailed analysis of two theatre productions shows that the concept of bounded emotionality can be used to tease out aspects of emotion management that would not otherwise have been detectable. Non-instrumental ways to manage emotions – to facilitate emotion work – are used in situations where the goal is to produce quality performances, not to promote well-being as such. The rehearsal period consists of phases that require different emotion management strategies. In an initial phase, a secure working climate is established to deal with feelings of insecurity and shame. A creative phase allows for role-related emotions, and a crisis phase calls for a balance between frontstage and backstage regions. In a final phase, the ensemble closes its ranks and prepares to meet the audience. The director is expected to ‘manipulate with finesse’, transforming his/her leadership role during the rehearsal process from that of boss to coach. Private, role-related and situation-related emotions are differentiated, showing how emotions are seized, channelled and divided in order to direct emotional energy in effective ways. Finally, we discuss implications for organisations outside the theatrical domain.

Short-Term Memory to Long-Term Memory Transition Mimicked in IZO Homojunction Synaptic Transistors

Short-term memory (STM) is a temporary potentiation of neural connections, and it can be transformed to long-term memory (LTM) through the process of rehearsal and meaningful association. Here, indium-zinc oxide (IZO)-based synaptic transistors gated by SiO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> -based proton conducting electrolyte films were fabricated. STM behavior is demonstrated by paired-pulse facilitation experiment. STM to LTM transition is realized by increasing the pulse amplitude or pulse number. Interfacial electrostatic modulation and electrochemical doping of IZO channel by mobile proton play an important role for such memory behavior and memory transition.

Recovering and Reanimating ‘Lost’ Traces: The Digital Archiving of the Rehearsal Process in Siobhan Davies RePlay

Siobhan Davies RePlay provides open access to a significant collection of performances, photographs, and text-based materials, and includes a large number of rehearsal tapes that offer a unique insight to the dance making process. Following the development of simple capture technologies, Davies’ dancers have recorded and reviewed their own movement experiments or ‘scratches’. These previously private memory objects enter the public domain via the archive. Though raw and unedited captures they become traces of an intelligent process that is rarely available for public scrutiny. When made available alongside films and other documents relating to performances, these scratches offer a unique insight to the choices made by the artists; what is left out and what is featured. It might be argued that these scratches accrue cultural capital through their inclusion in the archive, and when distributed online. This article examines the extent to which the tapes generate new readings of dance, transmit new knowledge, create new kinds of tools for reconstruction and/or prompt a reconsideration of the relationship between dancer, choreographer and audience to re-conceptualise the dance-making process. It will be argued that the tapes broaden expectations of what is traditionally held within an archive, revealing the rich potential for dance archives to enhance and enrich our understanding of dance.