Secondary sources

Secondary Sources, a Dublin Dance Festival 2010 commission, by choreographer Liz Roche that brings together renowned collaborators and performers from the US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Spain and Ireland. Liz Roche creates a tapestry of movements that reflect on the performers' embodied connections between primary and secondary sources of inspiration, exploring the influences that we carry in our bodies that come from other people, places and events. The work began nearly two years ago in New York as a quartet made during a residency at Movement Research NY and has been developing ever since through an on-going process between Liz Roche and an exceptional group of dancers/collaborators who are joined in performance by musician/composers Justin Carroll and Edward RosenBerg with lighting by Nick McCall and costumes by Jeni Roddy."

Emergence and artistic visualisation

This research draws on theories of emergence to inform the creation of an artistic and direct visualization. This is an interactive artwork and drawing tool for creative participant experiences. As is discussed, emergence is characteristically creative. It is also debated across and within disciplines, resulting in a range of understandings as well as models. This paper shows how one field’s understanding of emergence (complexity theory) can be used to facilitate emergence in another domain (design research) and, importantly provide the opportunity for someone to act creatively. This paper begins with a brief review of some theories of emergence to show how they interrelate and can effect the perception of emergent structures in an observer, and, correspondingly, the design for creative experience. This is subsequently demonstrated in the second section of the paper where an interactive artwork and drawing application, Of me with me, is presented. This artwork by the author was created during collaboration with community artists from Cerebral Palsy League. The discussion covers the application of emergence theories to create this visualization in order facilitate the perception of structures and creative behaviours in a participant and to facilitate self-efficacy in the community artist user group.

12 minute dances

A collection of short works which are the result of a year-long period of movement reflection and investigation by Liz Roche with a core group of Rex Levitates dancers. The works appear as a wash of colour, movement, rhythm and emotion; human embodiment as a dynamic event. The audience completes the picture. A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer - Mark Rothko (Painter, 1903 - 1970)."

Social turkey

Social Turkey is a short digital dance video developed over a series of weekly meetings with a group of sprightly and defiant sixty-plus year olds resident in Limerick. Very early in the process artist Ciara Finnegan and choreographer Jenny Roche found each individual expressing a wonderful enthusiasm for dance, an eagerness to perform and a healthy refusal to conform to stereotypes of aging. Finnegan was keen that this project should support an exchange of ideas rather than employ a top-down directorial structure. While Roche devised the fundamentals of the dance and Finnegan manned the camera, each participant contributed thereafter - improvising on a step sequence and collaborating on patterns that ultimately determined much of the look of the result. The work seeks to amplify the represented interests of a wider community while celebrating the vivacity of the particular group and the sheer fun of the collaboration.

“My hands are plunged in oranges”…: an experiential account of a working process

This presentation incorporated the live performance throughout, by the author, of movement from “The All Weather Project” by Liz Roche. Movement sections are indicated by italics. “I am going to start by dancing for you… Movement: Live performance of solo approximately 10 minutes in duration This is the introduction... Through my PhD research, I am examining the choreographic process from the perspective of the independent contemporary dancer, through embodying this role as a researcher/participant. My methodological frameworks, which utilise video documentation and journal writing, could be characterised as ethnographic, multi-modal embodied theorising, leading to “multi-dimensional theorising” (I adopt this term from Susan Melrose). In this way, I am unwinding the embodied practice of dancing, through the co-existent layers of experience, towards forming a theoretical understanding of the issues that arise for the dancer. The issues that I have identified as relevant to my research are those relating to the dancer’s ‘moving identity’ or way of moving, as a mutable and adaptable form that must alter and re-adjust to each different choreographic engram or movement vocabulary, that she/he encounters. I am examining this interplay between stability and change. I also reflect on the impact of destabilisation and flux on the dancer’s identity in a wider sense, as she/he relates outwardly to signifying factors within the social strata. Today I am going to bring you through a reflection on the working process of a dance piece as experienced from the inside. By doing so, I hope to capture and elucidate the multi-dimensional layers which existed for me within this process. Through displaying these fragments together, I endeavour to invoke the ‘totality’ of the experience...

Multiliteracies pedagogy : creating claymations with adolescent, post-beginner English language learners

In addressing literacy in high school education, it is important to foreground the particular issues faced by growing numbers of English Language Learners (ELLs). In our increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, this is a matter for all literacy teachers, as well as ELL specialists. In Australia, teachers of ELLs are experimenting with Multiliteracies pedagogy which provides rich opportunities to explore language learning experiences and outcomes that stretch beyond exercises in reproduction in written and oral modes only. This paper documents the practice of a high school teacher who uses a claymation project, producing a movie by stop-motion filming of clay figures, with a class of low-level English literacy learners. Drawing on observations of three particular students, the paper outlines a number of possibilities of this approach for English language learners. These include increased individual agency; enhanced engagement through collaboration; and the opportunity to explore various elements of multimodal text design.

Structure and function of DsbA, a key bacterial oxidative folding catalyst

Since its discovery in 1991, the bacterial periplasmic oxidative folding catalyst DsbA has been the focus of intense research. Early studies addressed why it is so oxidizing and how it is maintained in its less stable oxidized state. The crystal structure of Escherichia coli DsbA (EcDsbA) revealed that the oxidizing periplasmic enzyme is a distant evolutionary cousin of the reducing cytoplasmic enzyme thioredoxin. Recent significant developments have deepened our understanding of DsbA function, mechanism, and interactions: the structure of the partner membrane protein EcDsbB, including its complex with EcDsbA, proved a landmark in the field. Studies of DsbA machineries from bacteria other than E. coli K-12 have highlighted dramatic differences from the model organism, including a striking divergence in redox parameters and surface features. Several DsbA structures have provided the first clues to its interaction with substrates, and finally, evidence for a central role of DsbA in bacterial virulence has been demonstrated in a range of organisms. Here, we review current knowledge on DsbA, a bacterial periplasmic protein that introduces disulfide bonds into diverse substrate proteins and which may one day be the target of a new class of anti-virulence drugs to treat bacterial infection. Antioxid. Redox Signal. 14, 1729–1760.

DSB proteins and bacterial pathogenicity

If DNA is the information of life, then proteins are the machines of life — but they must be assembled and correctly folded to function. A key step in the protein-folding pathway is the introduction of disulphide bonds between cysteine residues in a process called oxidative protein folding. Many bacteria use an oxidative protein-folding machinery to assemble proteins that are essential for cell integrity and to produce virulence factors. Although our current knowledge of this machinery stems largely from Escherichia coli K-12, this view must now be adjusted to encompass the wider range of disulphide catalytic systems present in bacteria.

Human glutathione S-transferase T1-1 enhances mutagenicity of 1,2-dibromoethane, dibromomethane and 1,2,3,4-diepoxybutane in Salmonella typhimurium

The rat theta class glutathione S-transferase (GST) 5-5 has been shown to affect the mutagenicity of halogenated alkanes and epoxides. In Salmonella typhimurium TA1535 expressing the rat GST5-5 the number of revertants was increased compared to the control strain by CH2Br2, ethylene dibromide (EDB) and 1,2,3,4-diepoxybutane (BDE); in contrast, mutagenicity of 1,2-epoxy-3-(4'-nitrophenoxy)propane (EPNP) was reduced. S.typhimurium TA1535 cells were transformed with an expression plasmid carrying the cDNA of the human theta ortholog GST1-1 either in sense or antisense orientation, the latter being the control. These transformed bacteria were utilized for mutagenicity assays. Mutagenicity of EDB, BDE, CH2Br2, epibromohydrin and 1,3-dichloroacetone was higher in the S.typhimurium TA1535 expressing GSTT1-1 than in the control strain. The expression of active enzyme did not affect the mutagenicity of 1,2-epoxy-3-butene or propylene oxide, GSTT1-1 expression reduced the mutagenicity of EPNP. Glutathione S-transferase 5-5 and GSTT1-1 modulate genotoxicity of several industrially important chemicals in the same way. Polymorphism of the GSTT1 locus in humans may therefore cause differences in cancer susceptibility between the two phenotypes.