'Dancing the Downward Slide: Spaces of Affective Adjacency in Rian and Bird with Boy'

This chapter examines how the choreography of affect in two dance theatre works creates a space of affective adjacency—a space in which the building of an alternative structure of feeling and an alternative economy of the body can be experienced. Focusing on the choreographic use of repetition in Junk Ensemble’s Bird With Boy (2011) and Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre’s Rian (2011), it shows how the work required to build an alternative affective space can become visible. Although affect is most often viewed as a preconscious, ephemeral phenomenon (a passage of intensities), that can have little or no lasting impact on socio-political action, theorists such as Megan Watkins have argued for a consideration of the ‘cumulative aspects of affect’. Highlighting Spinoza’s distinction between affectus (the capacity for a body to affect and be affected), and affectio (the impact the affecting body leaves on the affected), Watkins points out that affectio can ‘leave a residue’ allowing for the ‘capacity of affect to be retained, to accumulate, to form dispositions and thus shape subjectivities’. The choreography of repetition in Bird With Boy and Rian presents sites for an examination of this accumulation of affect and its capacity not only to form and shape dispositions, but also, as Lauren Berlant suggests, ‘to move along and make worlds, situations, and environments’.

The PVC Beret

Dip moulded plastic beret. One of a series starting from Jelly Beret 1997.This was made with a UK with the design company Inflate. This 2009 iteration of the PVC beret chosen for Stephen Jones Hat Anthology V&A, the first millinery exhibition of millinery design held at V&A. Whereas traditional millinery is known for its rather staid and bourgeois Stephen Jones selected chose this hat for its edgy sub cultural capital.This is reflected in the choices of materials and beret style with a reference to the Bohemien Parisienne avant garde revisited in 1960s London and made new for 21st century NY "Jelly Beret" the very first prototype of a plastic millinery Reviewed in Vogue UK, this travelling exhibition went from London, New York, Sydney to add exists at the V&A as a touring show. An accompanying catalogue by Oriole Cullen and Stephen Jones discusses the significance of innovative and original millinery design international design culture today.

"You Don't Have to be Filmish": The Toronto Jewish Film Festival

The Toronto Jewish Film Festival is a one-week celebration of Judaism and Cinema that occurs in downtown Toronto, at the Bloor Cinema, early every May. The folkloristic literature on festival notes that these kinds of events are ways that communities and groups celebrate themselves, and although film festivals are frequently excluded from consideration of traditional festivity, I shall demonstrate that such an omission is unfortunate, since like traditional festivity, film festivals, in particular ethnic film festivals, explore the same issues of liminality for the celebrating culture.

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe.

Contemporary Art UK (Art World Series)

Adventures Close to Home: the British art scene from “then” to “now” is an introductory essay to the forthcoming Art World Series published by Blackdog to cover contemporary art in the United Kingdom. Previous titles have looked at North America, South America and Eastern Europe.

9 Lives of the Black Cat

This is a short essay included in the accompanying booklet for Arrow Video's Blu-ray collection titled "Edgar Allan Poe's Black Cats": The Black Cat (Lucio Fulci, 1981) & Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I have the Key (Sergio Martino, 1972)

The Essay as Art Form

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

The Copenhagen Consensus Conference 2016: children, youth, and physical activity in schools and during leisure time

From 4 to 7 April 2016, 24 researchers from 8 countries and from a variety of academic disciplines gathered in Snekkersten, Denmark, to reach evidence-based consensus about physical activity in children and youth, that is, individuals between 6 and 18 years. Physical activity is an overarching term that consists of many structured and unstructured forms within school and out-of-school-time contexts, including organised sport, physical education, outdoor recreation, motor skill development programmes, recess, and active transportation such as biking and walking. This consensus statement presents the accord on the effects of physical activity on children's and youth's fitness, health, cognitive functioning, engagement, motivation, psychological well-being and social inclusion, as well as presenting educational and physical activity implementation strategies. The consensus was obtained through an iterative process that began with presentation of the state-of-the art in each domain followed by plenary and group discussions. Ultimately, Consensus Conference participants reached agreement on the 21-item consensus statement.