Entering the Heart of Experience: First Person Accounts in Performance & Spirituality

In this paper, Middleton and Chamberlain introduce the inaugural publication of "Perspectives on Practice," which will be a new and ongiong section in "Performance and Spirituality" that will publish academically rigorous, first-person accounts of intersections between performance and spirituality. In this article, the authors take up arguments for the development of a rigorous first-person methodology for consciousness research and apply them to the study of performance and spirituality. They outline the implications of adopting and including the first person perspective in performance research, and then explore its applicability to the particular case of the enquiry into relationships between performance and spirituality. They argue that the promotion of rigorous and contextualised first-person accounts can provide this field of study with significant data; high-quality descriptions of what Varela and Shear called “The View from Within.” Such descriptions could provide detailed insights into, for example, the nature of the performative phenomena which yield spiritual experience. Further, we shall explore the extent to which the adoption of the first-person mode of enquiry can increase, as well as illuminate, the experience in question

Dialogical approaches to helping people who hear distressing voices: what are they and how do they work?

Section A is a scoping review of relational, dialogical approaches to helping people who hear distressing voices which are a new wave of therapeutic approaches which encourage and actively support dialogue between people and their voices. The review examines six extant dialogical approaches according to their similarities and differences in theory and implementation, together with empirical evidence of effectiveness. Section B is a qualitative study which presents findings on a novel, dialogical approach stemming from the Hearing Voices Movement, The ‘Talking with Voices’ (TwV) approach. The study explored experiences of the TwV approach from the perspectives of 10 voice hearers and also 10 of their voices using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. Results are presented according to participants’ experiences of change as a result of the approach, along with consideration of barriers of and facilitators to change. The findings provide support for the acceptability of dialogical approaches for helping people who hear distressing voices. The study itself also demonstrates how perspectives of voice hearers and voices can be centred in future evaluation in this are

Exact Algorithm for Sampling the 2D Ising Spin Glass

A sampling algorithm is presented that generates spin glass configurations of the 2D Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass at finite temperature, with probabilities proportional to their Boltzmann weights. Such an algorithm overcomes the slow dynamics of direct simulation and can be used to study long-range correlation functions and coarse-grained dynamics. The algorithm uses a correspondence between spin configurations on a regular lattice and dimer (edge) coverings of a related graph: Wilson's algorithm [D. B. Wilson, Proc. 8th Symp. Discrete Algorithms 258, (1997)] for sampling dimer coverings on a planar lattice is adapted to generate samplings for the dimer problem corresponding to both planar and toroidal spin glass samples. This algorithm is recursive: it computes probabilities for spins along a "separator" that divides the sample in half. Given the spins on the separator, sample configurations for the two separated halves are generated by further division and assignment. The algorithm is simplified by using Pfaffian elimination, rather than Gaussian elimination, for sampling dimer configurations. For n spins and given floating point precision, the algorithm has an asymptotic run-time of O(n^{3/2}); it is found that the required precision scales as inverse temperature and grows only slowly with system size. Sample applications and benchmarking results are presented for samples of size up to n=128^2, with fixed and periodic boundary conditions.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, 1 table; minor clarification

Different Patterns of Association of Body Fat Percent and Body Mass Index with Pre-adolescent and Adolescent Asthma: a Cross-sectional Study Amongst Cypriot Schoolchildren

IEA-EEF European Congress of Epidemiology, Porto, Portugal, September 201

Irrational mode locking in quasiperiodic systems

A model for ac-driven systems, based on the Tang-Wiesenfeld-Bak-Coppersmith-Littlewood automaton for an elastic medium, exhibits mode-locked steps with frequencies that are irrational multiples of the drive frequency, when the pinning is spatially quasiperiodic. Detailed numerical evidence is presented for the large-system-size convergence of such a mode-locked step. The irrational mode locking is stable to small thermal noise and weak disorder. Continuous time models with irrational mode locking and possible experimental realizations are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; revision: 2 figures modified, reference added, minor clarification

Collectivity and agency in remembering and reconciliation.

This paper examines how British war veterans fold together war time and post war experiences in practices of remembering and reconciliation. We examine these practices as networks of association between British ex-servicemen (veterans) and the people, places and circumstances associated with their experiences as prisoners in Japan during WW2. We focus on the experience of World War 2 British ex-servicemen (veterans) who were prisoners of war in Far East. During their period of captivity they worked to build Thai-Burma Railway before transfer to a copper mine in Japan. Some 50 years later they participated in a "reconciliation trip" to Japan. We discuss two related issues. First, how and in what ways are the post war lives and war time experiences of these veterans gathered up in the emergent collectivity of such practices? In other words in what ways do these practices emerge and sustain themselves as a process of collection and dispersion of circulating reference in networks of association between people places and things. Second, we examine how accounts of redemption (claims to the consequences of experience as being other than you would expect them to be) create the basis for emergent forms of agency and settlement in expanding networks of remembering and reconciliation

Buddhist Mindfulness and Psychophysical Performance

This is a very brief introductory sketch of some historical and cultural context for the relationship between Buddhism and western theatre practices in the early 20th century. As we’ve been asked to make sure that our presentation requires little specialist knowledge of our field, I will be simplifying and there will inevitably be important omissions and, perhaps some over-generalizations but, I hope, no fundamental errors

Mapping Mindfulness-based Performance

In this paper, I report on the University of Huddersfield's Mindfulness and Performance Project (MAP)2, outlining the field of practice that the project was designed to profile, and exploring some of the implications of what we might call 'mindfulness-based performance'. Framing this work within the context of the growing literature on clinical and therapeutic 'mindfulness-based interventions' I explore definitions of mindfulness, and consider how contemplative science might influence and guide emergent work in the theatre. Noting the emergence of a new discipline of Contemplative Studies, I also suggest that mindfulness-based performance has a significant role to play in current research and practice regarding mindfulness applications in the broader culture