The human dimension of nosocomial wound infection : a study in liminality

Nosocomial wound infection is a disease that has to date been primarily understood through the language of science and biomedicine. This paper reports on findings from a sociological, interpretive study that focused on the experiential dimension of this phenomenon. The illness experience of a nosocomial wound infection is examined within a cultural milieu that values the smooth, untroubled body and alternatively ascribes cultural meaning to a body that has a definable illness. Within this context the person with a chronic wound from nosocomial infection defies normative categorisation and is thus situated outside the patterning of society. The human dimension of nosocomial wound infection includes the private, existential and embodied aspects of living with a chronic, infected wound. This report indicates that the experiential dimension is characterised by an embodied state of liminality. People with this illness live an indeterminate existence that is in-between health and illness, cure and disease. As such they have no recognised place in the medical or social world.

The functional liminality of the not-dead-yet students, or, how public schooling became compulsory: A glancing history

This paper redefines the focus for narrating histories of education in the USA through a ‘glancing history’. It highlights the important role played by ‘not-dead-yet students’ who occupied a liminal place on the scale of life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Traditional histories of education have been more singularly focused on the advent and dynamics of public schooling, ignoring the functionality of such child subjects to public schooling’s existence. This paper argues that public schools as historical objects cannot be understood outside of a broader trinary system of prior institutions that were established for ‘delinquent’ and ‘special’ children. These prior institutions facilitated the formation of ‘the public’ in public schooling less in opposition to ‘the private’ and more in consonance with ‘the human’. The existence of prior institutions enabled the enforcement of compulsory attendance legislation. Compulsory attendance legislation, in place across all existing states by 1918, was concerned more with the conditions for exclusion and exemption than with compelling attendance. Thus, at the most immediate level, this paper historicizes some of the discursive and hence institutional events that linked an array of tutelary complexes by the early 1900s, and which enabled such legislation. This part of the argument extends the notion of institution to consider broader places of confinement and systematicity. It examines the prior practice of reservation and slavery systems, and the efficacy they lent to further institutionalized segregation in the USA. At a second level, the narrative reflects on how such a narration has become possible. It considers how histories of education can currently be rethought and rewritten around the notion of dis/ability, historicizing the formation of dis/ability as identity categories made noticeable in part (and circularly) through the crystallization of a segregated but linked common schooling system. The paper thus provides a counter-memory against dominant economic foundationalist and psychomedical accounts of schooling’s past. It documents both ‘external’ conditions of possibility for public schooling’s emergence and ‘internal’ effects that emerged through the experiences of confinement

Medeleven

Medeleven was a practice-based research work that challenged conventional notions of how audiences ‘experience’ contemporary dance. It resulted in a 40 minute ‘experiential’ performance that inverted the traditional ‘passive’ presentation paradigm by situating the audience centrally within the creative process. The ‘traditional presentation paradigm’ was inverted in numerous ways including: asking the audience onstage with the performers, placing swings onstage for the audience to play on during the performance and guiding the audience through backstage corridors before entering onstage – all of which added elements of physicality, agency and liminality to the performance not usually available to audience members of contemporary dance. Five dancers moved throughout the space allowing the audience to choose where and how they engaged with this work and the swings were utilised both as a performance space and for audience seating. In addition to these spatial variations, the quadraphonic soundscore created distinct ‘environments’ throughout the stage space that varied individual experience possibilities. By positing performance as an experiential phenomenon, the pivotal objective of this work was to create a live-art experience that extended its performativity to include audience members as active meaning-makers, challenging both their role within this paradigm and their expectations of contemporary dance. The work produced strong responses from the audience with surveys indicating the presentation format, as well as the construction of the work, changed audience experience and ability to connect with the dance work. The research suggested that, in addition to existing research on dance audiences, barriers to engagement with contemporary dance may include how the art is constructed and where the audience is positioned within that creative framework. The research builds upon artistic practices being undertaken throughout the world that challenge the notion of existing ‘passive’ performance paradigms via creative ‘engagement’ with audience.

The 'authentic dancer' as a tool for audience engagement

An engagement with performance is an experiential event. To have a lived experience within a performance construct infers that the experience is somehow ‘more live’. This paper situates the body of the audience member as a site of understanding and meaning making, and challenges the role of the traditional ‘passive’ presentation format and ensuing ethical considerations within that assertion. It looks at the relationships between audience experience and a series of creative tools that facilitate subtle shifts in this traditional dance paradigm. Along with the tools of audience agency, liminality, variations of site and proximity – tools that create engagement via physical interactions with the audience – can ‘performer authenticity’ also become a tool of connection with the audience? This paper looks at the overarching field of contemporary dance, with a primary focus on Western contemporary dance and the traditional dance paradigms prevalent in the construction and presentation of that form. It outlines the role of the experiential within this form and highlights established research and creation tools that encourage audience connection via audience interaction. It also looks at the role of the dancer within this construct, citing both current qualitative research into audience responses, as well as current theory and creative practice from an international field of artists creating work with the ‘authentic dancer’.

Performing the unutterable : mapping the experiential in contemporary dance

This research project looks to engage audiences in a variety of experiential ways by reexamining and manipulating the traditional presentation paradigm for viewing Western contemporary dance. It considers how the audience may be situated in the creation and presentation of contemporary dance generally, and specifically in the work The Voyeur, which researched these issues in action. By situating the body of the audience member as a site of understanding and meaning making, this practice-based research considers the audience within the artists’ creative process from the inception of a creative work, rather than after the work has been created. The research questions how a ‘lived experience’ of contemporary dance could be deepened for the audience. It presents a series of ‘tools’ to create alternative frameworks of presentation that challenge the dominant modes of creation, presentation and meaning making in contemporary dance. The five tools established and applied in this research are: site, liminality, agency, proximity and performer authenticity. These tools are framed as a series of calibrated scales that allow choreographers to map decisions made in the studio in relation to potential audience engagement. These scales have the ability to house multiple presentation formats from the traditional to the avant garde and open up possibilities for broad analysis of a wide range of artistic dance works.

ArtConnexions series

The exhibition consists of a series of 9 large-scale cotton rag prints, printed from digital files, and a sound and picture animation on DVD composed of drawings, sound, analogue and digital photographs, and Super 8 footage. The exhibition represents the artist’s experience of Singapore during her residency. Source imagery was gathered from photographs taken at the Bukit Brown abandoned Chinese Cemetery in Singapore, and Australian native gardens in Parkville Melbourne. Historical sources include re-photographed Singapore 19th and early 20th century postcard images. The works use analogue, hand-drawn and digital imaging, still and animated, to explore the digital interface’s ability to combine mixed media. This practice stems from the digital imaging practice of layering, using various media editing software. The work is innovative in that it stretches the idea of the layer composition in a single image by setting each layer into motion using animation techniques. This creates a multitude of permutations and combinations as the two layers move in different rhythmic patterns. The work also represents an innovative collaboration between the photographic practitioner and a sound composer, Duncan King-Smith, who designed sound for the animation based on concepts of trance, repetition and abstraction. As part of the Art ConneXions program, the work travelled to numerous international venues including: Space 217 Singapore, RMIT Gallery Melbourne, National Museum Jakarta, Vietnam Fine Arts Museum Hanoi, and ifa (Institut fur Auslandsbeziehungen) Gallery in both Stuttgart and Berlin.

Transcending the inanimate : evoking the sublime in puppet-based performance

This study investigated how contemporary puppet-based theatre can create deeply imaginative experiences for adult audiences. Designed to interrogate the potential effects of double-vision (Tillis, 1992), the theories of the sublime (Kant, 2008; 2003) and the uncanny (Jentsch, 1906; Freud, 1919) were used to create a series of creative guidelines. As practice-led research, the project embraced an iterative approach consisting of two cycles for creative experimentation, and a third for the creation of the final performance work The Harbinger, presented as a part of La Boite Theatre Company’s mainstage season. A theoretical investigation was also conducted to inform the developing practice.

Mapping the experiential in contemporary dance

The research questions how a ‘lived experience’ of contemporary dance could be deepened for the audience. It presents a series of choreographic ‘tools’ to create alternative frameworks of presentation that challenge the dominant modes of creation, presentation and meaning making in contemporary dance. The five tools established and applied in this research are: variations of site, liminality, audience agency, audience-performer proximity and performer qualities. These tools are framed as a series of calibrated scales that allow choreographers to map decisions made in the studio in relation to potential audience engagement. The research houses multiple presentation formats from the traditional to the avant-garde and opens up possibilities for analysis of a wide range of artistic dance works. This research presents options for choreographers to map how audiences experience their work and offers opportunities to engage audiences in new and exciting ways.

Velum

Velum continues material experimentation with edible materials as explored within Formations: New Practices in Australian Architecture 2012. 1 The work employs the central theme of veiling as a ‘second skin’, an intermediary agent simultaneously engaging with Heideggerian themes of ‘nearness and revealing’ (1927, 1954). This second skin creates a liminality distorting everyday objects of popular culture and technological consumption. In doing so, the work puts forth multiple considerations, the figurative play upon consumption itself; the role of the strange and obscure to affect a deepening awareness of our accelerated consumption and experience; and more tangentially, questions surrounding imminent scenarios of hybridity between body and technology. Velum represents a recent focus of the authors’ creative practice, ‘Making Strange’ (Strange Making) published and presented elsewhere. Making Strange explores the sublime process, fundamental to both the final design outcome and the designing experience. The sublime process is seen as a leading, a physiological overpowering of self to a state of intense self-presence, often leading to self-transcendence or state of otherness. As such, the work engages with the body and materials, experimentally and in a trans-disciplinary manner to inform new material practice.