Captain Cook's country dance

James Cook was born into a working class family and rose to become a national hero, one of the greatest explorers of all time. He was celebrated in the popular culture through dance, music, song, and theatre. Today little is remembered of these highly esteemed works, although they remained well-known in the nineteenth-century.

Fluid States: Performances of Unknowing - The LOG

The LOG is the online edited proceedings of PSi#21 Fluid States: Performances of Unknowing, a festival-style series of conferences, symposia and performances across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Pacific and the Americas throughout 2015, incorporating texts, images, videos and other correspondence and commentary from literally hundreds of the world's top drama, theatre, performance and cultural studies scholars.

Reengaging, reenacting and reenvisaging discourses of disaster through public space performance: Austerity, art, and the art of protest

This paper offers a mediation on disaster, recovery, resilience, and restoration of balance, in both a material and a metaphorical sense, when ‘disaster’ befalls not the body politic of the nation but the body personal. In the past few decades, of course, artists, activists and scholars have deliberately tried to avoid describing personal, physical and phenomenological experiences of the disabled body in terms of difficulty and disaster. This has been part of a political move, from a medical model, in which disability, disease and illness are positioned as personal catastrophes, to a social model, in which disability is positioned as a social construct that comes from systems, institutions and infrastructure designed to exclude different bodies. It is a move that is responsible for a certain discomfort people with disabilities, and artists with disabilities, today feel towards performances that deploy disability as a metaphor for disaster, from Hijikata, to Theatre Hora. In the past five years, though, this particular discourse has begun rising again, particularly as people with disabilities fact their own anything but natural disasters as a result of the austerity measures now widespread across the US, UK, Europe and elsewhere. Measures that threaten people’s ability to live, and take part in social and institutional life, in any meaningful way. Measures that, as artist Katherine Araniello notes, also bring additional difficulty, danger, and potential for disaster as they ripple outwards across the tides of familial ties, threatening family, friends, and careers who become bound up in the struggle to do more with less. In this paper, I consider how people with disabilities use performance, particularly public space interventionalist performance, to reengage, renact and reenvisage the discourse of national, economic, environmental or other forms of disaster, the need for austerity, the need to avoid providing people with support for desires and interests as well as basic daily needs, particularly when fraud and corruption is so right, and other such ideas that have become an all too unpleasant reality for many people. Performances, for instance, like Liz Crow’s Bedding Out, where she invited people into her bed – for people with disabilities a symbolic space, which necessarily becomes more a public living room restaurant, office and so forth than a private space when poor mobility means they spend much time it in – to talk about their lives, their difficulties, and dealing with austerity. Or, for instance, like the Bolshy Divas, who mimic public and political policy, reports and advertising paranoia to undermine their discourses about austerity. I examine the effects, politics and ethics of such interventions, including examination of the comparative effect of highly bodied interventions (like Crow’s) and highly disembodied interventions (like the Bolshy Diva’s) in discourses of difficulty, disaster and austerity on a range of target spectator communities.

Performing immobility / protesting immobility: The risks & rewards of public space protest performances

Though there is much interest in mobilities and performing mobilities as a characteristic of modern, urban, social life today, this is not always matched by attention to immobilities, as the flipside of mobility in modern life. In this paper, I investigate public space performances designed to draw attention to precisely this counterpoint to current discourses of mobilities – performances about the socially produced immobilities many people with disabilities find a more fundamental feature of day-to-day life, the fight for mobility, and the freedom found when accommodations for alternative mobilities are made available. Although public policy is increasingly aligned with a social model of disability, which sees disability as socially constructed through systems, institutions and infrastructure deliberately designed to exclude specific bodies – stairs, curbs, queues and so forth – and although governments in the US, UK, and to a lesser degree Australia, New Zealand and other Commonwealth nations aim to address these inequalities, the experience of immobility is still every-present for many people. This often comes not just from pain, or from impairment, or event from lack of accommodations for alternative mobilities, but from fellow social performers’ antipathy to, appropriation of, or destruction of accommodations designed to facilitate access for a range of different bodies in public space, and thus the public sphere. The archetypal instance of this tension between the mobile, and those needing accommodations to allow mobility, is, of course, the antipathy many able bodied people feel towards the provision of disabled parking spaces. A cursory search online shows thousands of accounts of antagonism, vitriol, and even violence prompted by disputes which began when a disabled person asked an able person to exit a designated disabled parking space. For many, it seems, expecting them to pass by such parks so others can experience the mobility they take for granted is too much. In this paper, I examine a number of protest performances in public space in which activist present actions – for example, placing wheelchairs in every regular parking space in a precinct – to give bystanders, passersby and spectators, as well as antagonistic fellow social performers, a sense of what socially produced immobility feels like. I examine responses to such protest performances, and what they say about the potential social, political and ethical impacts of such protests, in terms of their potential to produce new attitudes to mobility, alternative mobility, and access to alternative modes of mobility.

Unfamiliar Destinations

A score investigating issues of mobility, accessing mobility, and alternative mobility.

The last avant-garde?: Disability arts and (rethinking) mobility

Taking as its starting point a remark by Turner Prize nominee Yinka Shonibare that disability arts is “the last avant garde”, this panel focuses on the role of aesthetic experimentation in disability arts and the possible rethinking of the relationship between avant-garde aesthetic strategies and inclusive arts. Points of connection between the avant-garde and disability arts include a rejection of traditional aesthetic forms, the development of aesthetic strategies appropriate to non-normative bodies, politics and populations and the implications of these ideas for the conference themes. This panel is intended as a facilitated discussion involving researchers and artists undertaking work in this area. The panel will begin with some brief provocations reflecting on the implication of Shonibare’s comment. For example, Gerard Goggin will discuss three projects by Antoni Abad with artists and activists with disability in Barcelona, Geneva and Montreal as part of Abad’s Megaphone project, a decade-long, global digital art project. Bree Hadley will speak on performative interventions in public space, performance art, live art, activism and culture hacking by artists with disabilities, such as pwd's online performances, and artist’s performative responses to the austerity agenda in the US, UK, and Australasia. Eddie, Lachlan and Sarah will discuss ideas arising from their work on the project Beyond Access: The Creative Case for Inclusive Arts, which involved research with six Melbourne-based artists/artistic companies with disability, supported by Arts Access Victoria. Chair: Dr Eddie Paterson (School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne) Dr Bree Hadley (Creative Industries, QUT) Professor Gerard Goggin (Professor of Media and Communication and ARC Future Fellow, University of Sydney) Dr Lachlan MacDowall (Head, Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne). Sarah Austin (PhD candidate, Theatre/Centre for Cultural Partnerships, VCA and MCM) Artists (tbc, based on existing relationships with artists developed in the Beyond Access research).

The prankster’s passion: Using theatrical terms to unpack players motivations in popular social performance

Amongst social players, the prank, as a social performance form, holds a lot of potential to impact on personal, relational and social status within a group or between one group and another group. More than simply showing off, a prank in the strictest definition of the term, is a social performance in which one player, a prankster, deploys mischief, trickery or deceit, to cause a moment of anxiety, fear or anger about a happening for another spectator-become-collaborating-player, a prankee – to enhance social bonds, entertain, or comment on a social, cultural or political phenomenon. During a prank, the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to be duped, be a good sport, play along, or even play/pay the prankster back, both become fodder for other spectators and society to scrutinize. In Australia, pranking traditions are popular with many social groups, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. In this paper, I consider whether theatrical terms – theoretical terms from the stage such as actor, acting, objective, arc, performance, audience and emotion, such as those offered by Joseph Roach – are useful in understanding the passion some social players show for pranksterism. Are theatrical terms such as Roach’s as useful as analysts of social self-performance such as Erving Goffman suggest they are? Do they assist in understanding the personal actions, reactions and emotions of prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the power relations between prankster and prankee? Do they assist in understanding the relation between the prank – be it an everyday prank amongst families, friends and coworkers, an entertainment program prank of the sort seen on Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, or an activist pranks perpetrated by a guerrilla artist, ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning dominant social systems back on themselves – the social players, and the public sphere in which the prank takes place? I reflect on how reading pranks as performances, by players, for highly participatory audiences, helps understand why they are so prevalent, and so recurrent across times, cultures and contexts, and also so controversial when not performed well enough – or when performed too well – prompting outrage from the prankster, prankee or society as passionate as any debate about a performance by players in a theatre.

El Motezuma de Vivaldi

This article explores aesthetic and historical aspects of Antonio Vivaldi's (1678- 1741) Motezuma (1733), in three acts, to celebrate this opera revival after the score's discovery and its first premiere at De Doelen theatre, Rotterdam (2005). Particular attention is paid to cultural aspects, regarding the European interpretation of the Conquest of Mexico.

Kielimuurin murtajat : Käännökset arkikeskustelun jäsentäjinä Penedon suomalaisessa siirtokunnassa

Tutkimus käsittelee käännöksiä, joita keskustelijat tuottavat monenkeskisen, kaksikielisen arkikeskustelun aikana toisilleen. Toiset osallistujista ovat kaksikielisiä ja toiset yksikielisiä, ja käännöksiä tuotetaan erityisesti silloin, kun osa puheesta on kielimuurin vuoksi jäänyt yksikielisiltä ymmärtämättä. Käännökset ovat osa kielenvälitystä eli toimintaa, jossa puhuja edesauttaa keskustelukieltä vaihtamalla erikielisten läsnäolijoiden osallistumista keskusteluun tai toimii ei-ammattimaisena tulkkina osapuolten välillä. Keskusteluaineisto on suomen- ja portugalinkielistä. Se on nauhoitettu entisessä suomalaisessa siirtokunnassa Brasilian Penedossa, jossa asuu edelleen noin 20 alkuperäisten siirtolaisten jälkeläistä tai myöhemmin muuttanutta suomenpuhujaa. Tutkimuksessa esitellään lyhyesti Penedoa, sen historiaa ja joitakin penedolaisten puhuman suomen erityispiirteitä, jotka johtuvat kontaktista portugalin kielen kanssa. Työn metodisena ja teoreettisena pohjana ovat pääasiassa keskustelunanalyysi ja vuorovaikutuslingvistiikka, joiden näkökulmasta tarkastellaan käännösten syntaktista muotoutumista meneillään olevan vuorovaikutuksellisen toiminnan tarpeisiin. Puhujat tuottavat käännösten alussa erityisiä syntaktisia rakenteita (lohkorakenne, lohkeama ja topikalisaatio), jotka niin sanotusti lohkaisevat jonkin lausuman elementin sen alkuun. Työn tavoitteena on selvittää, miksi näitä rakenteita esiintyy juuri käännösvuoroissa. Tähän pyritään tarkastelemalla rakenteiden vuorovaikutuksellisia ja syntaktisia ominaisuuksia, jotka mahdollistavat niiden hyödyntämisen kielenvälityksessä. Tyypillisimmin käännösvuoron alkuun lohjennut elementti on edeltävästä puheesta kierrätettävä leksikaalinen substantiivilauseke, joka toimii kiintopisteenä keskustelun eri kielillä tuotettujen osien välillä. Kyseisiä rakenteita on kielitieteellisissä kuvauksissa pidetty usein varsin kiteytyneinä, mutta ne esiintyvät aineistossa hyvin vaihtelevissa muodoissa. Vuorovaikutuslingvistisessä tutkimuksessa onkin käytetty erilaisia lohkeavia rakenteita esimerkkeinä puhehetkessä jäsentyvästä ja sen tarpeisiin muotoutuvasta kieliopista. Työ tuo aihepiiriin lisätietoa, sillä se esittelee lohkeavat rakenteet vuorovaikutuksellisena resurssina uudessa yhteydessä, arkikeskustelun käännöksissä. Rakenteiden esiintyminen kieltä vaihtavissa vuoroissa nostaa huomion kohteeksi sen, miten rakenteissa käytetyt viittausmuodot suhteutuvat edeltävään, erikieliseen keskusteluun. Leksikaalisia substantiivilausekkeita tuottamalla uudet vastaanottajat saatetaan selville puheenaiheesta, ja samalla rakenne, jossa lausekkeet esiintyvät, luo odotuksen vuoron jatkumisesta. Näin syntyy käännös, joka liittyy koherentiksi jatkoksi erikieliselle keskustelulle ja samalla johtaa keskustelua eteenpäin siten, että siihen voi liittyä uusia osallistujia. Meneillään oleva toiminta näkyy kieltä vaihtavien vuorojen muotoilussa: Käännöstä tuottaessaan puhujat orientoituvat ylittämään keskusteluun syntynyttä kielimuuria muun muassa juuri tuottamalla viittaukset leksikaalisina. Kielen vaihtamista hyödyntävä aiemman puheen toisto voi kuitenkin olla myös esimerkiksi koodinvaihtoa, jolla puhuja hakee vastaanottajan palautetta. Silloin kielimuuria ei tarvitse ylittää, ja viittauksia voidaan ongelmitta tuottaa ei-leksikaalisina. Työssä pohditaankin myös varsinaisen kääntämisen suhdetta muuhun eri kielellä tuotetun toiston hyödyntämiseen keskustelussa.

Elämää suuremmat sankarittaret : Suomalaisen teatterin elämäkerralliset taiteilijahahmot vuosina 2000 - 2010

In the first decade of the 21st century, national notables were a significant theme in the Finnish theatre. The lives of artists, in particular, inspired the performances that combined historical and fictional elements. In this study, I focus on the characters of female artists in 18 Finnish plays or performances from the first decade of the 21st century. The study pertains to the field of performance analysis. I approach the characters from three points of view. Firstly, I examine them through the action of performances at the thematic level. Secondly, I concentrate on the forms of relationships between the audience and the half-historical character. Thirdly, I examine the representations of characters and their relationships to the audience using myth as a tool. I approach characters from the frame of feminist phenomenological theatre study but also combine the points of view of other traditions. As a model, I adapt the approach of the theatre researcher Bert O. States, which concentrates on the relation between a play s text and an actor, and between an actor and the public. Furthermore, I use the analysing tools of performance art in an examination of performances counted among the contemporary performance genre. The biographical plays about these artists are concentrated in the domestic sphere and take part in the conversation about the position of women in both the community and private life. They represent the heroines work, love, temptations and hardships. The artists do not carry out heroic acts, being more like everyday heroines whose lives and art were shared with the audience in an aphoristic atmosphere. In the examined performances, criticism of the heterosexual matrix was mainly conservative and the myths of female and male artists differed from each other: the woman artist was presented as a super heroine whose strength often meant sacrifices; the male artist was a weaker figure primarily pursuing his individualistic objectives. The performances proved to be a kind of documentary theatre, a hybrid of truth and fiction. Nonetheless, the constructions of subject and identity mainly represented the characters of the mythical stories and only secondarily gave a faithful rendition of the artists lives. Although these performances were addressed to the general and heterogeneous public, their audience proved to be a strictly predefined group, for which the national myths and the experience of a collective identity emerged as an important theme. The heroine characters offered the audience "safe" idols who ensured the solidity of the community. These performances contained common, shared values and gave the audience an opportunity to feel empathy and to be charmed by the confessions of well-known national characters.

From ‘Afflicted’ to Activists: Structural Violence and Climate Change Discourse in the States of Pernambuco and Paraíba in Northeast Brazil

This study approaches the problem of poverty in the hinterlands of Northeast Brazil through the concept of structural violence, linking the environmental threats posed by climate change, especially those related to droughts, to the broader social struggles in the region. When discussions about potentials and rights are incorporated into the problematic of poverty, a deeper insight is obtained regarding the various factors behind the phenomenon. It is generally believed that climate change is affecting the already marginalized and poor more than those of higher social standing, and will increasingly do so in the future. The data for this study was collected during a three month field work in the states of Pernambuco and Paraíba in Northeast Brazil. The main methods used were semi-structured interviews and participant observation, including attending seminars concerning climate change on the field. The focus of the work is to compare both layman and expert perceptions on what climate change is about, and question the assumptions about its effects in the future, mainly that of increased numbers of ‘climate refugees’ or people forced to migrate due to changes in climate. The focus on droughts, as opposed to other manifestations of climate change, arises from the fact that droughts are not only phenomena that develop over a longer time span than floods or hurricanes, but is also due to the historical persistence of droughts in the region, and both the institutional and cultural linkages that have evolved around it. The instances of structural violence that are highlighted in this study; the drought industry, land use, and the social and power relations present in the region, including those between the civil society, the state and the private agribusiness sector, all work against a backdrop of symbolic and moral realms of value production, where relations between the different actors are being negotiated anew with the rise of the climate change discourse. The main theoretical framework of the study consists of Johan Galtung’s and Paul Farmer’s theory of structural violence, Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society, and James Scott’s theory of everyday peasant resistance.

Inkluderande teaterverksamhet. Nya möjligheter för socialt arbete

I denna pro gradu-avhandling granskas teaterns möjligheter att främja social inklusion. Genom att analysera vad drama och teater kan ge ungdomar och hur social inklusion bland unga i ett samfund kan främjas, belyses även frågan om hur socialt arbete och teater ömsesidigt kan berika varandra. Avhandlingen är en fallstudie av Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, en barn- och ungdomsteater i Tower Hamlets i östra London. Teatern arbetar med barn och unga med ett särskilt fokus på att engagera grupper som ofta marginaliserats, exempelvis på grund av sin kulturella bakgrund eller till följd av funktionshinder. I denna studie är fokus på Half Moons projekt riktade till tonåringar: Careers in Theatre, Speak Up och ungdomsteatergrupperna Lunar och Solar. Studien är kvalitativ och studiens empiriska data har främst samlats in genom deltagande observation, intervjuer och granskning av dokument. Det empiriska materialet visar på Half Moons aktiva arbete för mångfald och för att göra verksamheten och deltagandet tillgängligt för alla barn och unga. Teatern blir en mötesplats genom vilken ungdomarna kan lära sig acceptera och uppskatta mångfalden i samfundet. Teaterarbetet bidrar till en ökad känsla för samfundet och till tolerans och förståelse för andra. Det är en glädjefylld, trygg och meningsfull fritidsverksamhet där nya vänskapskontakter kan knytas och många färdigheter övas inför framtiden. Teaterarbetet ger deltagarna bekräftelse vilket bidrar till att självförtroendet växer. Personalens engagemang och osjälviska arbete för inklusion genomsyrar verksamheten. Möjligheten att ge alla en ny chans och ett jämlikt bemötande är centralt i teaterns arbete. Forskningsresultaten pekar på teaterns potential inom socialt arbete och för att främja inklusion. Teaterns möjligheter att öka klientens delaktighet och utveckla förhållandet mellan socialarbetare och klient visar på betydelsen av etablera dylik verksamhet inom socialt arbete. Att inte låta sig begränsas, utan förutsättningslöst samarbeta över sektorer ökar chanserna att finna nya kreativa idéer och verksamhetsformer.

Sport, body and power: Reassessing the myth of President Kekkonen

Former President of Finland Urho Kekkonen was not only a powerful politician but also a well-known sportsman and keep-fit enthusiast. The president’s sports hobbies were covered and celebrated in the media and thus became an integral part of his public persona. This paper looks at Kekkonen’s athletic and able-bodied image and its significance for his power from the perspective of gender. In his exercise activities, Kekkonen was able to display his bodily prowess and demonstrate his version of masculinity, which emphasized both physical and mental strength. The union of mind and muscle in turn buttressed his political ascendancy. Kekkonen’s athletic body served as a cornerstone of his dominance over his country and, simultaneously, as a shield protecting Finland from both internal and external threats. Furthermore, Kekkonen’s sports performances were essential elements in the myth that was created around the president during his term and which was carefully conserved after his fall from power. Drawing upon scholarship on men and masculinities, this paper reassesses the still-effective mythical image of Kekkonen as an invincible superman. The article reveals the performative nature of his athletic activities and shows that in part, his pre-eminence in them was nothing more than theatre enacted by him and his entourage. Thus, Kekkonen’s superior and super-masculine image was actually surprisingly vulnerable and dependent on the success of the performance. The president’s ageing, in particular, demonstrates the fragility of his displays of prowess, strength and masculinity, and shows how fragile the entanglement of body and power can be.

QUAD: quality assessment of documents

We propose a set of metrics that evaluate the uniformity, sharpness, continuity, noise, stroke width variance,pulse width ratio, transient pixels density, entropy and variance of components to quantify the quality of a document image. The measures are intended to be used in any optical character recognition (OCR) engine to a priori estimate the expected performance of the OCR. The suggested measures have been evaluated on many document images, which have different scripts. The quality of a document image is manually annotated by users to create a ground truth. The idea is to correlate the values of the measures with the user annotated data. If the measure calculated matches the annotated description,then the metric is accepted; else it is rejected. In the set of metrics proposed, some of them are accepted and the rest are rejected. We have defined metrics that are easily estimatable. The metrics proposed in this paper are based on the feedback of homely grown OCR engines for Indic (Tamil and Kannada) languages. The metrics are independent of the scripts, and depend only on the quality and age of the paper and the printing. Experiments and results for each proposed metric are discussed. Actual recognition of the printed text is not performed to evaluate the proposed metrics. Sometimes, a document image containing broken characters results in good document image as per the evaluated metrics, which is part of the unsolved challenges. The proposed measures work on gray scale document images and fail to provide reliable information on binarized document image.