Ritual, Play and Animals in early human societies: Manipulating the Bones in temple period Malta: Eating and Augury in the Maltese Temples.

Examination of antiquarian records and feasting ritual in prehistoric Malta

The 1863 Melbourne Shakespeare War: Barry Sullivan, Charles and Ellen Kean, and the Play of Cultural Usurpation on the Australian Stage

This essay investigates an intricate drama of cultural identity in performances of Shakespeare on the nineteenth-century Melbourne stage. It considers the rivalry between Charles and Ellen Kean and their competitor, Barry Sullivan, for the two-month period in 1863 during which their Australian tours overlapped. This Melbourne Shakespeare war was anticipated,augmented, and richly documented in Melbourne’s papers: The Age, The Argus and Melbourne Punch. This essay pursues two seams of inquiry. The first is an investigation of the discourses of cultural and aesthetic value laced through the language of reviews of their Shakespearean roles.The essay identifies how reviewers register affective engagement with the performers in these roles, and suggests how the roles themselves reflected, by accident or design, the terms of the dispute. The second is concerned with the national identity of the actors. Kean, although born in Waterford, Ireland, had held the post of Queen Victoria’s Master of the Revels and identified himself as English. Sullivan, although born in Birmingham, was of Cork parentage and was identified as Irish by both his supporters and his detractors. This essay tracks the development of the actors’ national and artistic identities established prior to Melbourne and ask how they played out on in the context of the particularities of Australian reception. It shows that, in this instance, these actors were implicated in complex debates over national authority and cultural ownership.

Shifting Ground:Beyond National Architecture

The Irish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012 charts a position for Irish architecture in a global culture where the modes of production of architecture are radically altered. Ireland is one of the most globalised countries in the world, yet it has developed a national culture of architecture derived from local place as a material construct. We now have to evolve our understanding in the light of the globalised nature of economic processes and architectural production which is largely dependent on internationally networked flows of products, data, and knowledge. We have just begun to represent this situation to ourselves and others. How should a global architecture be grounded culturally and philosophically? How does it position itself outside of shared national reference points?
heneghan peng architects were selected as participants because they are working across three continents on a range of competition-winning projects. Several of these are in sensitive and/or symbolic sites that include three UNESCO World Heritage sites, including the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo, the Giants Causeway Visitor Centre in Northern Ireland, and the new Rhine Bridge near Lorelei.
Our dialogue led us to discussing the universal languages of projective geometry and number are been shared by architects and related professionals. In the work of heneghan peng, the specific embodiment of these geometries is carefully calibrated by the choice of materials and the detailed design of their physical performance on site. The stone facade of the Giant’s Causeway Visitor Centre takes precise measure of the properties of the volcanic basalt seams from which it is hewn. The extraction of the stone is the subject of the pavilion wall drawings which record the cutting of stones to create the façade of the causeway centre.
We also identified water as an element which is shared across the different sites. Venice is a perfect place to take measure of this element which suggests links to another site – the Nile Valley which was enriched by the annual flooding of the River Nile. An ancient Egyptian rod for measuring the water level of the Nile inspired the design of the Nilometre - a responsive oscillating bench that invites visitors to balance their respective weights. This action embodies the ways of thinking that are evolving to operate in the globalised world, where the autonomous architectural object is dissolving into an expanded field of conceptual rules and systems. The bench constitutes a shifting ground located in the unstable field of Venice. It is about measurement and calibration of the weight of the body in relation to other bodies; in relation to the site of the installation; and in relation to water. The exhibit is located in the Artiglierie section of the Arsenale. Its level is calibrated against the mark of the acqua alta in the adjacent brickwork of the building which embodies a liminal moment in the fluctuating level of the lagoon.
The weights of bodies, the level of water, changes over time, are constant aspects of design across cultures and collectively they constitute a common ground for architecture - a ground shared with other design professionals. The movement of the bench required complex engineering design and active collaboration between the architects, engineers and fabricators. It is a kind of prototype – a physical object produced from digital data that explores the mathematics at play – the see-saw motion invites the observer to become a participant, to give it a test drive. It shows how a simple principle can generate complex effects that are difficult to predict and invites visitors to experiment and play with them.

Impact of a play-based curriculum in the first two years of primary school: literacy and numeracy outcomes over seven years

In 2000–2002 an innovative early years curriculum, the Enriched Curriculum (EC), was introduced
into 120 volunteer schools across Northern Ireland, replacing a traditional curriculum similar to
others across the UK at that time. It was intended by the designers to be developmentally appropriate
and play-based with the primary goal of preventing the experience of persistent early failure in
children. The EC was not intended to be a literacy and numeracy intervention, yet it did considerably
alter pedagogy in these domains, particularly the age at which formal reading and mathematics
instruction began. As part of a multi-method evaluation running from 2000–2008, the research
team followed the primary school careers of the first two successive cohorts of EC children, comparing
them with year-ahead controls attending the same 24 schools. Compared to the year-ahead control
group, the findings show that the EC children’s reading and mathematics scores fell behind in
the first two years but the majority of EC children caught up by the end of their fourth year. Thereafter,
the performance of the first EC cohort fell away slightly, while that of the second continued to
match that of controls. Overall, the play-based curriculum had no statistically significant positive
effects on reading and mathematics in the medium term. At best, the EC children’s scores matched
those of controls.

“Do You Want to See My Hornpipe?”: The Traditional Irish Dancing Body at Play in the Work of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne.

This chapter considers the radical re-imaginings of traditional Irish step dance in the recent works of Jean Butler and Colin Dunne. In Butler's Does She Take Sugar (2007) and Dunne's Out of Time (2008), the Irish step dancing body is separated from its historical roots in nationalism, from the exhibitionism required by the competitive form, and from the spectacularization of the commercialized theatrical format. In these works, which are both solo pieces performed by the choreographers themselves, the traditional form undergoes a critical interrogation in which the dancers attempt to depart from the determinacy of the traditional technique, while acknowledging its formation of their corporealities; the Irish step dance technique becomes a springboard for creative experimentation. In order to consider the importance of the creative potential revealed by these works, this chapter will contextualize them within the dance background from which they emerged, outlining the history of competitive step dancing in Ireland, the "modernization" of traditional Irish dance with the emergence of Riverdance (1994), and the experiments of Ireland's national folk theatre, Siamsa Tíre.

Home Is Where the Self Is: Monodrama, Journey-Play Structure, and the Modernist Fairy Tale

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of two of the most beloved works of children’s literature ever produced. L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wizard of Oz and Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 play each gave rise to many adaptations, including, well beloved film versions, and both have become a deeply ingrained part of the cultural memory and construction of childhood in both Europe and the United States. And while these works are deeply original in content and detail, the structure of these works harkens back to the form of the journey play (traceable, on some level, back to the medieval morality play Everyman), a form that had undergone a considerable revival in the second half of the nineteenth century in the work of writers such as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. This article explores the structural and conceptual links between Baum and Maeterlinck’s children’s classics, Ibsen’s Norwegian folk play Peer Gynt, and August Strindberg’s Lucky Per’s Journey and The Road to Damascus, Part I. In these works, the protagonists, disenchanted with their homes or current situations, set out on an epic journey in which they come upon characters and situations that act as commentary upon their situations before the journey. Ultimately, the characters return to where they started, with the journey seeming to have been a dream or merely a pointless excursion. But in these journeys of self-discovery, the protagonist that emerges at the end has undergone a significant transformation, a process at the heart of all of these works.

Pool Evolution: A Parallel Pattern for Evolutionary and Symbolic Computing

We introduce a new parallel pattern derived from a specific application domain and show how it turns out to have application beyond its domain of origin. The pool evolution pattern models the parallel evolution of a population subject to mutations and evolving in such a way that a given fitness function is optimized. The pattern has been demonstrated to be suitable for capturing and modeling the parallel patterns underpinning various evolutionary algorithms, as well as other parallel patterns typical of symbolic computation. In this paper we introduce the pattern, we discuss its implementation on modern multi/many core architectures and finally present experimental results obtained with FastFlow and Erlang implementations to assess its feasibility and scalability.

'Pues tanto se esconde': Elusion at (inter)play in Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés

El conde Partinuplés (first published 1653) is one of only two extant plays written by the Sevillan poet/dramatist Ana Caro Mallén de Soto (‘la décima musa sevillana’). Despite McKendrick's dismissal of the play as ‘extremely bad’, it has been the object of substantial critical scrutiny since the 1970s, impelled in great part by the production of modern editions (Luna and Delgado) and by Kaminsky's bio-biographical study (1973). Two responses have dominated: analysis of the play's imaginative reconceptualization of source material (most notably the Classical myth of Cupid and Psyche as contained in Apuleius and transmitted via the anonymous French chivalric romance Portonopeus de Blois; and more contemporary models, such as Calderón's La vida es sueño); discussions of the play from a gender/feminist perspective. There is some inevitable entanglement in these approaches, areas of ideological concurrence, but also of contradiction. This article will offer a critical synthesis of these lines of enquiry around an analysis of the play's patterns of non-identical repetition and, following Hubert's theory of ‘double movement’, will move beyond these to consider the generative and potentially transcendent nature of the interplay of inscription (text) and transcription (interpretive performance). A subversive strategy of elusion underpins this interference, a dynamic, mobile frame within which ‘envidia’ (‘celos’) functions as a prominent dramatic catalyst, directed outwards, and mobilized both as a potent catalyst for the female dramatist's artistic creativity and as an antagonistic interrogation of broader socio-cultural forms of inequality. The play's (new) marvellous versions and inversions expand the functions of the sign beyond Renaissance resemblance and repetition, challenging its promotion of unity and stable identity, and opening up an interactive space between the represented (world/product) and the representing (stage/process). The power of authorities, as figured in/through the dramatic and rhetorical devices of the play, is self-consciously precarious, but it is this very anxious articulation that challenges the very authority of power.