The Erotic Voyeur: Sensorial Spectatorship in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man

The cultural industries often privilege the use of sight and sound as our main areas of experience. This is especially the case in theatre criticism; but what of taste, smell and touch? Punchdrunk’s manipulation of sensorial experience allows their immersive performance to become both an enticing and destabilizing theatrical arena for the audience. The performance of intimacy constructed through the use of nostalgia triggering aromas, invitations to explore the set and performers bodies through touch, and the inclusion of one-on-one encounters between performers and audience members, all allow the actor/spectator to be seduced by the “story-world” of The Drowned Man. With the hyper-reality achieved through the film noir soundscape and the chaotic dance theatre sequences created by the performers, the spectator can delve into a fantasy world of menace and eroticism. This article examines the role of the spectator as erotic voyeur in Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man. Through an examination of the company’s use of interactive, sensorial experience where audience members are invited to touch, inhabit and investigate the world around them, Punchdrunk invite the audience to become a part of the world and yet remain separate from it, reinforcing the erotically charged voyeuristic realm of the production

Touching Past Lives: Sensorial Spectatorship in the Paston Footprints Project

Drama Lead for Heritage Lottery Fund project in rural Norfolk with the Paston Heritage Society including a number of immersive performances at heritage sites across Norfolk (including Mannington Hall, Oxnead Hall, Norwich, and the Norwich Castle Museum)

Affectual Dramaturgy for Augmented Reality Immersive Heritage Performance

This paper introduces the concept of Affectual Dramaturgy as a lens for creating digitally mediated immersive performances in the context of cultural heritage. In doing so we bring together two disciplines, smartglass Augmented Reality design (AR) and immersive heritage performance, with the aim to innovate experiences built for heritage sites. For both disciplines, immersive experience building uses interactive methods to engage the public with the tangible and intangible heritage of a site. Immersive heritage performance incorporates narrative-led, affective, and ludic techniques found in virtual and live immersive and participatory theatre practice. Smartglass AR experiences communicate to the viewer how a place was in the past by means of superimposing on the physical space virtual material accompanied with audio. However, often, the orchestration of the virtual material does not take the context into account and the superimposition of digital information misses an opportunity to connect into the existing narrative of the site tapping into its rich dramatic potential. This article explores how AR design and live performance can blend together through embodied storytelling techniques designed to draw the public’s attention to their sensorial experience of the site, and offer them a deeper understanding of the place’s history, which we refer to as affectual dramaturgy. By fusing embodied, affectual, and sensorial experience into the public’s engagement with the site, this article explores how interdisciplinary collaborations between theatre and AR design may create innovative tools and methods to tell stories of the past for the 21st century museums

Knock Me Down

An Immersive Performance at the Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon Ireland, interweaving stories from the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. Including real-life experience, personal narratives, theatre, video, and song. The performance will engage in safe socially distanced measures according to government guidelines, using them as part of the story

Freelancers in the Dark: The Economic, Cultural, and Social Impact of Covid-19 on UK Theatre Workers Final Report

This report captures an extraordinary moment in time for the UK theatre industry. However, as we discovered, it also reveals the pre-existing issues found within the industry that left the UK theatre sector vulnerable to devastating consequences for theatre workers lives and livelihoods during Covid-19. As we have shown, those consequences greatly impacted all areas of the UK theatre industry and its freelance theatre workforce. When this project was conceived in the Spring of 2020, we had no idea that by March 2022, we would still be suffering sector uncertainty caused by wave after wave of Covid-19 variants. This report is an archive of sorts, mapping out the evolution of UK freelance theatre workers’ experiences over a 2-year period beginning in February 2020. Experiences of volatility, struggle, opportunity, resilience, community, activism, and creativity are all to be found in the lived realities of the freelance theatre workforce documented in these pages. In the end, this is not solely a research study, but a co-created testament of how the pandemic shone a light on the hopes and fears of the theatre workforce (both freelance and organisations) at a moment in time where radical change was seen as possible in the midst of, arguably, the most long-term crisis to hit the UK theatre industry since the English Civil War in the 17th century. Through the honesty and generosity of our research participants, we were able to offer a reflection and analysis of all that makes the UK theatre industry to me, and the freelancers who occupy 88% of its workforce, endless sources of resilience, creative thinking, and collective support

Executive Summary: Therapeutic Monitoring of Vancomycin for Serious Methicillin- Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Infections: A Revised Consensus Guideline and Review of the American Society of Health- System Pharmacists, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society, and the Society of Infectious Diseases Pharmacists

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154898/1/phar2376.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/154898/2/phar2376_am.pd

Enhancing Discovery of Genetic Variants for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Through Integration of Quantitative Phenotypes and Trauma Exposure Information

Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health / U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (Grant No. R01MH106595 [to CMN, IL, MBS, KJRe, and KCK], National Institutes of Health (Grant No. 5U01MH109539 to the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium ), and Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (Young Investigator Grant [to KWC]). Genotyping of samples was provided in part through the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics at the Broad Institute supported by Cohen Veterans Bioscience . Statistical analyses were carried out on the LISA/Genetic Cluster Computer ( https://userinfo.surfsara.nl/systems/lisa ) hosted by SURFsara. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank resource (Application No. 41209). This work would have not been possible without the financial support provided by Cohen Veterans Bioscience, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics at the Broad Institute, and One Mind. Funding Information: MBS has in the past 3 years received consulting income from Actelion, Acadia Pharmaceuticals, Aptinyx, Bionomics, BioXcel Therapeutics, Clexio, EmpowerPharm, GW Pharmaceuticals, Janssen, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and Roche/Genentech and has stock options in Oxeia Biopharmaceuticals and Epivario. In the past 3 years, NPD has held a part-time paid position at Cohen Veterans Bioscience, has been a consultant for Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, and is on the scientific advisory board for Sentio Solutions for unrelated work. In the past 3 years, KJRe has been a consultant for Datastat, Inc., RallyPoint Networks, Inc., Sage Pharmaceuticals, and Takeda. JLM-K has received funding and a speaking fee from COMPASS Pathways. MU has been a consultant for System Analytic. HRK is a member of the Dicerna scientific advisory board and a member of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology Alcohol Clinical Trials Initiative, which during the past 3 years was supported by Alkermes, Amygdala Neurosciences, Arbor Pharmaceuticals, Dicerna, Ethypharm, Indivior, Lundbeck, Mitsubishi, and Otsuka. HRK and JG are named as inventors on Patent Cooperative Treaty patent application number 15/878,640, entitled “Genotype-guided dosing of opioid agonists,” filed January 24, 2018. RP and JG are paid for their editorial work on the journal Complex Psychiatry. OAA is a consultant to HealthLytix. All other authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest. Funding Information: This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health/ U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (Grant No. R01MH106595 [to CMN, IL, MBS, KJRe, and KCK], National Institutes of Health (Grant No. 5U01MH109539 to the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium), and Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (Young Investigator Grant [to KWC]). Genotyping of samples was provided in part through the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics at the Broad Institute supported by Cohen Veterans Bioscience. Statistical analyses were carried out on the LISA/Genetic Cluster Computer (https://userinfo.surfsara.nl/systems/lisa) hosted by SURFsara. This research has been conducted using the UK Biobank resource (Application No. 41209). This work would have not been possible without the financial support provided by Cohen Veterans Bioscience, the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Genetics at the Broad Institute, and One Mind. This material has been reviewed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. There is no objection to its presentation and/or publication. The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting true views of the U.S. Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. We thank the investigators who comprise the PGC-PTSD working group and especially the more than 206,000 research participants worldwide who shared their life experiences and biological samples with PGC-PTSD investigators. We thank Mark Zervas for his critical input. Full acknowledgments are in Supplement 1. MBS has in the past 3 years received consulting income from Actelion, Acadia Pharmaceuticals, Aptinyx, Bionomics, BioXcel Therapeutics, Clexio, EmpowerPharm, GW Pharmaceuticals, Janssen, Jazz Pharmaceuticals, and Roche/Genentech and has stock options in Oxeia Biopharmaceuticals and Epivario. In the past 3 years, NPD has held a part-time paid position at Cohen Veterans Bioscience, has been a consultant for Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, and is on the scientific advisory board for Sentio Solutions for unrelated work. In the past 3 years, KJRe has been a consultant for Datastat, Inc. RallyPoint Networks, Inc. Sage Pharmaceuticals, and Takeda. JLM-K has received funding and a speaking fee from COMPASS Pathways. MU has been a consultant for System Analytic. HRK is a member of the Dicerna scientific advisory board and a member of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology Alcohol Clinical Trials Initiative, which during the past 3 years was supported by Alkermes, Amygdala Neurosciences, Arbor Pharmaceuticals, Dicerna, Ethypharm, Indivior, Lundbeck, Mitsubishi, and Otsuka. HRK and JG are named as inventors on Patent Cooperative Treaty patent application number 15/878,640, entitled ?Genotype-guided dosing of opioid agonists,? filed January 24, 2018. RP and JG are paid for their editorial work on the journal Complex Psychiatry. OAA is a consultant to HealthLytix. All other authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Society of Biological PsychiatryBackground: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is heritable and a potential consequence of exposure to traumatic stress. Evidence suggests that a quantitative approach to PTSD phenotype measurement and incorporation of lifetime trauma exposure (LTE) information could enhance the discovery power of PTSD genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Methods: A GWAS on PTSD symptoms was performed in 51 cohorts followed by a fixed-effects meta-analysis (N = 182,199 European ancestry participants). A GWAS of LTE burden was performed in the UK Biobank cohort (N = 132,988). Genetic correlations were evaluated with linkage disequilibrium score regression. Multivariate analysis was performed using Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS. Functional mapping and annotation of leading loci was performed with FUMA. Replication was evaluated using the Million Veteran Program GWAS of PTSD total symptoms. Results: GWASs of PTSD symptoms and LTE burden identified 5 and 6 independent genome-wide significant loci, respectively. There was a 72% genetic correlation between PTSD and LTE. PTSD and LTE showed largely similar patterns of genetic correlation with other traits, albeit with some distinctions. Adjusting PTSD for LTE reduced PTSD heritability by 31%. Multivariate analysis of PTSD and LTE increased the effective sample size of the PTSD GWAS by 20% and identified 4 additional loci. Four of these 9 PTSD loci were independently replicated in the Million Veteran Program. Conclusions: Through using a quantitative trait measure of PTSD, we identified novel risk loci not previously identified using prior case-control analyses. PTSD and LTE have a high genetic overlap that can be leveraged to increase discovery power through multivariate methods.publishersversionpublishe

Potential causal association between gut microbiome and posttraumatic stress disorder

Background: The causal effects of gut microbiome and the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are still unknown. This study aimed to clarify their potential causal association using mendelian randomization (MR). Methods: The summary-level statistics for gut microbiome were retrieved from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of the MiBioGen consortium. As to PTSD, the Freeze 2 datasets were originated from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Working Group (PGC-PTSD), and the replicated datasets were obtained from FinnGen consortium. Single nucleotide polymorphisms meeting MR assumptions were selected as instrumental variables. The inverse variance weighting (IVW) method was employed as the main approach, supplemented by sensitivity analyses to evaluate potential pleiotropy and heterogeneity and ensure the robustness of the MR results. We also performed reverse MR analyses to explore PTSD’s causal effects on the relative abundances of specific features of the gut microbiome. Results: In Freeze 2 datasets from PGC-PTSD, eight bacterial traits revealed a potential causal association between gut microbiome and PTSD (IVW, all P < 0.05). In addition, Genus.Dorea and genus.Sellimonas were replicated in FinnGen datasets, in which eight bacterial traits revealed a potential causal association between gut microbiome and the occurrence of PTSD. The heterogeneity and pleiotropy analyses further supported the robustness of the IVW findings, providing additional evidence for their reliability. Conclusion: Our study provides the potential causal impact of gut microbiomes on the development of PTSD, shedding new light on the understanding of the dysfunctional gut-brain axis in this disorder. Our findings present novel evidence and call for investigations to confirm the association between their links, as well as to illuminate the underlying mechanisms

The past is myself : constructions of history and memory in the Abbey 2004 Centenary

THESIS 8676The purpose of this thesis is to position the events of the 2004 centenary of the Irish National Theatre Society, known as abbeyonehundred, within the context of Irish institutional and cultural history. Interdisciplinary in scope, this thesis investigates the conflicting aims and policies of the public, the press, the government and its cultural institutions in regards to not only stage representations of national identity, but also concerns over public funding and the arts that affect the contemporary artistic community in Ireland today. Rather than study the Abbey apart from other cultural institutions, I engage with the discourse of institutional amnesia common among companies in periods of crisis. Though focusing primarily on the Irish National Theatre Society, 1 draw comparisons between events at the Abbey in 2004 with controversies from other institutions such as the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the National Concert Hall in Ireland, as well as the Royal Opera House and Royal National Theatre in the United Kingdom, to provide a broader view of issues systemic to large, cultural arts organizations. As my thesis argues, the mythmaking surrounding the Irish National Theatre Society as a unique and separate force amongst Irish institutions is reinforced by the Abbey?s commemorative practice and has been used as a validation of the company?s survival amongst frequent financial and artistic crises. However, the government?s relationship to arts funding and the Irish emphasis on culture for national significance remain equally noteworthy and intertwined with the challenges facing the Abbey in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries