Representation Of Experience Research Articles

Hippocampal representations as a function of time, subregion, and brain state.

How does the hippocampus represent interrelated experiences in memory? We review prominent yet seemingly contradictory theoretical perspectives, which propose that the hippocampus distorts experiential representations to either emphasize their distinctiveness or highlight common elements. These fundamentally different kinds of memory representations may be instantiated in the brain via conjunctive separated codes and adaptively differentiated codes on the one hand, or integrated relational codes on the other. After reviewing empirical support for these different coding schemes within the hippocampus, we outline two organizing principles which may explain the conflicting findings in the literature. First focusing on where the memories are formed and stored, we argue that distinct hippocampal regions represent experiences at multiple levels of abstraction and may transmit them to distinct cortical networks. Then focusing on when memories are formed, we identify several factors that can open and maintain specialized time windows, during which the very same hippocampal network is biased toward one coding scheme over the others. Specifically, we discuss evidence for (1) excitability-mediated integration windows, maintained by persistently elevated CREB levels following encoding of a specific memory, (2) fleeting cholinergically-mediated windows favoring memory separation, and (3) sustained dopaminergically-mediated windows favoring memory integration. By presenting a broad overview of different hippocampal coding schemes across species, we hope to inspire future empirical and modeling research to consider how factors surrounding memory formation shape the representations in which they are stored.

When theatre meets fandom: Audience reviews of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Abstract The 2016 launch of the stage production Harry Potter and the Cursed Child presented fans with their final opportunity – the first in nearly a decade – to reunite with the characters of their beloved series. Running in London’s West End since summer 2016 and transferring to Broadway in 2018, Cursed Child presents an unusual case study of what happens when an author working in other media chooses to continue their own storyworld onstage. This makes it the ideal focus point to explore what happens when theatre and fandom collide. The play script was also published in book format, and quickly became the fastest-selling theatre script since records began. But what did audiences themselves make of this dual rebirth? This article explores how the live performance and the playtext were received by fans as very different forms of afterlife. This has prompted important questions about access. Presented with an extension to their beloved storyworld after so many years, what happens when Harry Potter fans found themselves unable to actually take part in this new theatrical experience? And to what extent was the publication of the script a fair compromise in return for audiences’ undying loyalty? This article analyses both the specific example of Cursed Child and offers a more general exploration of fan-led efforts to democratize access to exclusive live events.

Live delivery of neurosurgical operating theater experience in virtual reality

AbstractA system for assisting in microneurosurgical training and for delivering interactive mixed reality surgical experience live was developed and experimented in hospital premises. An interactive experience from the neurosurgical operating theater was presented together with associated medical content on virtual reality eyewear of remote users. Details of the stereoscopic 360‐degree capture, surgery imaging equipment, signal delivery, and display systems are presented, and the presence experience and the visual quality questionnaire results are discussed. The users reported positive scores on the questionnaire on topics related to the user experience achieved in the trial.

Towards recognition and regard: Creating connectivity in theatre education through intentional wakefulness

ABSTRACTIn secondary theatre education, activities described as spiritual, mindful and ritualized are normalized components of actor/crew training. Theatre techniques categorized by these concepts contribute to the development of the whole teen in addition to preparing them for rehearsal and performance. Yet these terms are rarely used for fear skeptics will scoff at theatre work for lack of rigor or accuse teachers of blending church and state. Little attention has been given to the positive effects that these experiences have on teens who live in fast-paced, technology-infused environments where instant gratification is a common-place expectation. Because adolescence is a period of particularly intense emotional, social, and spiritual growth, a heightened sense of self-awareness helps them become more sensitive to others as they gain a deeper sense of their own and others’ motivations, insecurities, and levels of self-confidence. Termed “Intentional Wakefulness” by the author, theatre strategies that guide student focus toward the development of their inner selves include breath, stillness, presence, and community students. This essay examines how these four aspects of theatre experience engage inner core development in high school theatre students and describes ways “Intentional Wakefulness“ manifests on a daily basis from the perspective on one practitioner.

Acerca de lo político y lo histórico en el teatro documental contemporáneo: algunas experiencias de Argentina y Chile

This essay approaches the political and historical dimensions of three contemporary experiences of documentary theatre: one from Chile—Ñi pu tremen. Mis antepasados—and the other two from Argentina—Archivo White and Las personas. All three of them brought to the stage not professional actors but rather members of a certain community: respectively, women of mapuche origin, neighbors of the city of Ingeniero White, and workers of the Teatro San Martín of Buenos Aires. After an initial description of these projects, the essay examines in each of them the relation between art and politics on the basis of theories proposed by Jacques Rancière and discusses the possibility of considering these practices as a particular historiographical form enriched by characteristics specific to theatre.

Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas by Sandra M. Mayo, Elvin Holt

CLA JOURNAL 241 Book Reviews Mayo,SandraM.andElvinHolt.StagesofStruggleandCelebration:AProduction History of Black Theatre in Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. 317 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4773-0820-2. $29.95 Paperback. Stages of Struggle and Celebration: A Production History of Black Theatre in Texas is the first and only book to undertake a comprehensive study of black theatre organizations in Texas. Co-authored by seasoned theatre practitioners Sandra Mayo and Elvin Holt, the book draws upon a wealth of research on the most prominent and best documented theatre organizations in five major cities in Texas: San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston. Stages of Struggles and Celebration provides historical background on active, thriving theatres as well as defunct theatre organizations. Many of the contemporary theatres in Texas emerged to replace theatres that struggled but failed to maintain solvency, and Mayo and Holt clarify for the reader that the black theatre tradition of struggle and celebration in Texas shares a common ground with black theatres across the nation. Mayo and Holt have skillfully compiled,analyzed,and contextualized extensive research on the Lone Star State black theatre organizations. The co-authors have organized the book into two sections with six chapters and an afterword. In Part I, “Setting the Stage,” the co-authors provide an excellent synopsis of the history of black theatre in Texas, one that includes a brief overview of black minstrelsy of the 1800s, black musicals, the Negro Little Theatre Movement, historically black college theatre troupes, and the emergence of the black professional theatre companies. The study provides a context for black theatre by first offering a definition: “Black Theatre in Texas, established and sustained by black theatre professionals trained in the Western theatrical tradition, does not simply imitate theatre in the larger context; infused with a black artistic sensibility, black theatre in Texas fundamentally enriches the Western theatrical experience and is enriched by it.” (7) Referencing W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of black theatre, namely that black theatre must be about us, by us, for us and near us, Mayo and Holt provide insightful examples of the ways in which Texas black theatre companies created a brand that reflected the culture of the communities they served while reaching outward to absorb the cultural influences of black theatre theorists and practitioners across the United States. One case in point was Myra Davis Hemmings, a graduate of Howard University in 1913 who studied under Alan Locke and Montgomery Gregory when they were theorizing black theatre. Ms. Hemmings returned to San Antonio to make a career of directing plays at schools, churches, and community gatherings. This one instance of the direct influence of key figures like Locke 242 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews and Gregory on Texas black theatre history offers validation that Hemmings and her contemporaries in Texas joined and contributed to the Negro Little Theatre Movement that emerged in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s. Mayo and Holt’s research rightly includes the nine historically black colleges and universities of Texas (HBCUs) that contributed to the Negro Little Theatre Movement spreading across the country. Highlighted are Wiley College’s Log Cabin Players, Prairie View A&M’s Charles Gilpin Players, and Texas Southern University’s University Players. The burgeoning black theatre of the 1920s around the nation and specifically in Texas continued its upward trajectory into the 1960s and 1970s where,according to Mayo and Holt,black theatres nationwide organized more than 600 community and university theatre programs. The growth of black theatre in Texas signaled the tremendous efforts of blacks across the country to build and sustain theatres, including such companies as the Lorraine Hansberry, the Oakland Ensemble, the Berkeley Black Repertory Theatre, ETA Creative Arts Foundation, Penumbra, and many others. In Part II of Stages of Struggle and Celebration, titled “Their Place on the Stage: Representative Organizations,” Mayo and Holt focus chapters 2 through 6 on the development of black theatre organizations past and current in select urban cities in Texas. The chapters in this section of the book represent a major contribution to theatre history, black theatre history, Texas history, and women’s history because of the predominantly female-run theatres in the Lone Star State...

Theatrum Mundi: Rhetoric, Romance, and Legitimation in The Tempest and The Winter's Tale

This article shows that William Shakespeare's late tragicomic romances model metatheatrical devices speaking to and for an increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan audience. Contrasting efficacious theatrical artifice with oratory, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest appropriate rhetoric's cultural authority for commercial theater. These tragicomic romances advance a fantasy about the efficacy of dramatic persuasion appealing to an audience containing every category of person within seventeenth-century London, an increasingly pluralistic city with a newly global reach. The Winter's Tale and The Tempest transform problematic representations of social strife and communication into part of the value of theatrical experience, offering playgoers a position of forensic detachment with which to view events performed on stage. This fantasy reshapes dramatic performance into a commodity, but it also represents traditional legitimations for hierarchy and social order as performative.

The Making of Nightmare Dream

‘The Making of Nightmare Dream’ reflects on the process of creating and producing a site-specific, immersive theatre experience within Toronto’s Historic Campbell House. In this conversation, director/creator Mumbi Tindyebwa and playwright Motion reflect on the origins of their collaboration, and key aspects of their immersive work—from concept to page to production. Before the creation of Nightmare Dream, the two theatre artists met while participants in artist development programs at Obsidian Theatre Company in Toronto. Discovering a mutual interest in multi-disciplinary arts, they set out to create an inter-disciplinary theatre production to be presented at Summerworks, which emerged into an exploration of the African’s experience with “the other.” Through this process, they explored themes such as immigration, Diaspora history, identity, race, colonialism, cultural legacy and reinvention, intergenerational conflicts, and the complex stories where these intersect. The site-specific nature of Nightmare Dream grew out of the concept of creating a story to counter the historical use of space within the Campbell House—one of the oldest remaining Upper Canada Georgian-era homes in Toronto. Inspired by an actual dream, the work developed into a series of haunting installations, which inhabited the whole house, requiring the audience to move with the narrative. From the workshop, rehearsal and production phases, the authors revisit the collaborative process of creating with a team to achieve the immersive experience. They discuss the functionality of sound, costume, performance, movement, and text, and the challenges of creating, performance, and producing within an existing space. They have continued to collaborate and develop new immersive theatre projects, including Motherland and Oraltorio: A Theatrical Mixtape.

Paradoxical Sleep and Flights of Imagination: Sleep Rock Thy Brain and the Performance of Research

Sleep Rock Thy Brain is a triptych of plays commissioned for the 2013 Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville, inspired by theatrical flying technology and the neuroscience of sleep, and written by Rinne Groff, Lucas Hnath and Anne Washburn. It involved collaboration between Actors Theatre, the University of Louisville, and ZFX Flying Effects across scientific, artistic and technical disciplines. This article argues that the process served as performance-based research that supplements sleep science with an experiential representation of the situated somatic, emotional and paradoxical elements of scientific research, sleep and dreaming.

Las escenificaciones como herramienta metodológica de la antropología

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

Theatre of the Inescapable and Single Thread Theater Company’s “Everyman”

The presentation will present the hypothetical and practical application of "Theatre of the Inescapable", a new and experimental theory of theatre developed by Alex Dault. The theory is concerned with the use of theatre as a tool for social change and the vitality of the live theatrical experience. The presentation will examine the manifesto of the Theatre of the Inescapable; this includes the purpose of the theory and its basis in the writing of Antonin Artaud and Friedrich Nietzsche. The Theatre of the Inescapable relies upon the isolation and terror of the individual audience member in order to create the sensation of being within a vivid waking dream devoid of "attentive escapes". The audience member must accept the conditions of the theatrical world as real in order to function within it. The presentation will explore many of the questions and answers arising from documented experimentation with actors. Finally, the presentation will look at the recent production "Everyman" and its forty performances for one audience member. Special focus will be given to the perspective of the actors involved and their observations on performing for one audience member. The presentation will include photographs and video footage from this production.

Auden at Work ed. by Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin

Auden at Work ed. by Bonnie Costello and Rachel Galvin

When Movies Were Theater: Architecture, Exhibition, and the Evolution of American Film

Nostalgia pervades William Paul's discussion of the way Hollywood's film productions were intricately tied to the theatrical spaces where they were exhibited, given that today the theater has ceased to be the primary venue for watching movies. The book's photographs of store theaters and movie palaces evoke a lost world, and its discussion traces the changes in movie theater design, asking us to rethink the effect of these architectural spaces during their heyday. By manifestly defining the relation of the spectators to the film screen, theaters shaped the way the audience came to define a moving image. As such, this book fills a lacuna in film studies. While much attention has been paid to the economic, cultural, and political conditions of Hollywood, the movie theater has been of less interest. By shifting the focus to the reciprocal relationship between filmgoing and movie theaters, Paul offers many insights into how questions of illumination, seating, and curtain arrangements helped contain uncanny aspects of cinema's magic effect even while producing a more democratic theatrical experience than live theater.

Immersive performance and somatic practices: Joan Davis and the Maya Lila project

Abstract In this article, I focus on the work of Irish choreographer Joan Davis in order to draw out a debate on the value offered by somatic movement approaches to the field of immersive performance. Such works immerse audiences and performers in sensory, site-based and participatory performance. There has been a recent surge in the popularity of immersive theatre experiences and scholarship on this topic, with the writings for example of Alston, Harvie, Machon and White examining issues such as the agency of audience members and the relationship between individual freedom and group responsibility. What do somatic performances, which often physically immerse participants in outdoor environments, found spaces or designed installations, have to offer this field of theory and practice? Drawing on ideas in environmental theatre and performance ecology, including the work of Reeve, Kershaw and Schechner, I explore the relationship between people, sites, objects and wildlife in somatic performances as part of a whole ecology in shifting negotiation. I propose that although active, individual, experiential participation is part of these performances, body– mind reflective engagement in relationship to context is a vital contribution that somatics can offer to immersive practice more generally. This will be discussed in relation to Joan Davis’ Maya Lila project (2002–15), as she invites participants to become aware of their behaviours within installation environments, as a means to explore being within and separate from a community, and challenging expectations, perceptions and actions.

Transformative Taste-Encounters

This article considers the potential and significance of taste as a transformative part of the theatrical and culinary experience. The cross-pollination between food and performance in restaurants and contemporary theatre is explored through an analysis of Reckless Sleepers’ The Last Supper, Leo Burtin’s The Midnight Soup and restaurateur and chef, Simon Rogan’s ‘Tasting Menu’ served in his Michelin-starred restaurant L’Enclume.Drawing on Michel Serres’ philosophy of taste (2008) and theories of the body and eating from Elspeth Probyn (2000), I examine how the performances of taste in these three dining events were constructed as relational encounters that invited intimate and active engagement with food and bodies. I offer a reading of taste in these instances as both cathartic and anxiety inducing, and consider the different ways that the taste experiences afforded contemplation on the relationship between life, death and eating. I identify the culinary aesthetic strategies of distaste, agency, catachresis and synaesthesia that were in play across the theatrical and culinary-performative contexts discussed. I argue that these strategies can contribute to a discourse of a beyond of taste by revealing the interconnectedness of taste, and enabling the perceived nebulousness and seeming impossibility of taste to become manifest in new ways.

Exit Stage Left: Bringing out the Bard at Library Drama Camp

Most people would agree that the public library is an unconventional agency to host a youth drama camp, let alone a Shakespeare drama camp for children. So, how did I end up creating exactly that at my library?STEAM programming has been getting a big push recently, but most of the emphasis seems to be on the STEM part, and I wanted to focus on the arts. I had participated in youth theater myself back in the day, and it was a transformative experience. I loved the idea of having a theater program, especially for younger school-age kids, so I started brainstorming on how I could bring the theater experience to our young patrons.

Who’s devising your theatre experience? A director’s approach to inclusive theatre for blind and low vision theatregoers

In this article, the authors present the first documented implementation of a director-produced and delivered audio description (AD) for devising theatre. In a single live, audio-described performance of Highway 63: The Fort Mac Show at Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, Canada, the director/describer’s artistically informed approach focuses on entertainment value for blind and low vision (B/LV) theatregoers. In-depth, semi-structured interviews with the director/screenwriter/describer garnered insight into a director’s unique perspective on the development process for the integrated approach to AD, including her artistic choices, expectations and delivery style as a first-time amateur director/describer. The process of developing and delivering integrated AD had a transformative effect on her as a director.

Arte y transformación social en Buenos Aires: Análisis de una actuación cultural de Teatro Comunitario

Fil: Mercado, Camila. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Filosofia y Letras. Departamento de Ciencias Antropologicas; Argentina

A Tri-network Model of Human Semantic Processing.

Humans process the meaning of the world via both verbal and nonverbal modalities. It has been established that widely distributed cortical regions are involved in semantic processing, yet the global wiring pattern of this brain system has not been considered in the current neurocognitive semantic models. We review evidence from the brain-network perspective, which shows that the semantic system is topologically segregated into three brain modules. Revisiting previous region-based evidence in light of these new network findings, we postulate that these three modules support multimodal experiential representation, language-supported representation, and semantic control. A tri-network neurocognitive model of semantic processing is proposed, which generates new hypotheses regarding the network basis of different types of semantic processes.

Learning Robotics in a Science Museum Theatre Play: Investigation of Learning Outcomes, Contexts and Experiences

Theatre is often introduced into science museums to enhance visitor experience. While learning in museums exhibitions received considerable research attention, learning from museum theatre has not. The goal of this exploratory study was to investigate the potential educational role of a science museum theatre play. The study aimed to investigate (1) cognitive learning outcomes of the play, (2) how these outcomes interact with different viewing contexts and (3) experiential learning outcomes through the theatrical experience. The play ‘Robot and I’, addressing principles in robotics, was commissioned by a science museum. Data consisted of 391 questionnaires and interviews with 47 children and 20 parents. Findings indicate that explicit but not implicit learning goals were decoded successfully. There was little synergy between learning outcomes of the play and an exhibition on robotics, demonstrating the effect of two different physical contexts. Interview data revealed that prior knowledge, experience and interest played a major role in children’s understanding of the play. Analysis of the theatrical experience showed that despite strong identification with the child protagonist, children often doubted the protagonist’s knowledge jeopardizing integration of scientific content. The study extends the empirical knowledge and theoretical thinking on museum theatre to better support claims of its virtues and respond to their criticism.