Running in circles, with “music” in mind

What might be some of the implications—for practitioner research into composition, music-making, and performance—of my dogged insistence over the past decade that expert-intuitive process is a vital knowledge practice in art-making? I am aware that some readers, researchers, students, and art-makers might find that observation itself, and/or some of its parts, not only taxing but irrele-vant to her or his own practices and objectives. Some of the terms included in my observation can seem rebarbative, especially to creative practitioners: Why this insistence on “expert,” as in “expert-intuitive”? What should be made of my unadulterated use of the verb “to be”—described by others as “ontologising” (see, for example, Osborne 2000), or to assert existence or being (in place of perception, hypothesis, argument)? And what of “knowledge practice” (or epistemics) when surely what many artists are more concerned with is creativity? Finally, why this insistence on the intuitive—or rather the hyphenated "expert-intuitive”— when research into the nominalised “intuition,” at least, in the late twentieth century, has revealed that uses of the term tend to bring into play notions that are judged to be prejudicial to the pursuit of a reasoned, systematic, and rigorous research undertaking (upon which many judgements of research “quality” and “value” are based)

Positive negatives: or the subtle arts of compromise

How slippery a term 'collaboration' is. Definitions aplenty tend to return to the notion of 'working together' (or 'co-working'), and on this sort of basis we should be able to conclude that in all performance-making collaborations are vital because performance tends to involve the input of a wide range of practitioners, working together. Amongst these practitioners we can list stage, sound and lighting designers, stage manager and many others who work alongside both performers and-in general terms-a lead decision-maker. Does this model fit widespread understandings of the meaning of the terms collaboration or 'Collaborative Theatre' ? The lead decision-maker might be the stage director or choreographer, familiar to many performance-making traditions, or might equally be one key member of a performance collective-as is the case of the long-established and internationally-renowned UK company Forced Entertainment and key decision-maker Tim Etchells, and, in theory at least, the Théâtre du Soleil, Paris, and the central decision-making role of Ariane Mnouchkine. However, few of the chapters included in this collection seem to be concerned with collaborations viewed from this default perspective. Instead, collaborative performance-making in many of these chapters seems to assume the status of a particular genre or mode of performance-making

Creative Writing Research Benchmark Statement

The benchmark guidance for Creative Writing research from the National Association of Writers in Education, the subject association for creative writing

The CS sulphation motifs 4C3, 7D4, 3B3[-]; and perlecan identify stem cell populations and niches, activated progenitor cells and transitional tissue development in the fetal human elbow

We compared the immunohistochemical distribution of (i) the novel chondroitin sulphate (CS) sulphation motifs 7D4, 4C3 and 3B3[-], (ii) native heparan sulphate (HS) and Δ-HS ‘stubs’ generated by heparitinase III digestion and (iii) the HS-proteoglycan, perlecan, in the foetal human elbow joint. Putative stem cell populations associated with hair bulbs, humeral perichondrium, humeral and ulnar rudiment stromal/perivascular tissues expressed the CS motifs 4C3, 7D4 and 3B3[-] as well as perlecan in close association but not co-localised. Chondrocytes in the presumptive articular cartilage of the foetal elbow expressed the 4C3 and 7D4 CS sulphation motifs consistent with earlier studies on the expression of these motifs in knee cartilage following joint cavitation. The present study also indicated that hair bulbs, skin, perichondrium and rudiment stroma were all perlecan rich progenitor cell niches that contributed to the organisation and development of the human foetal elbow joint and associated connective tissues. One of the difficulties in determining the precise role of stem cells in tissue development and repair processes is their short engraftment period and the lack of specific markers which differentiate the activated stem cell lineages from the resident cells. The CS sulphation motifs 7D4, 4C3 and 3B3[-] decorate cell surface proteoglycans on activated stem/progenitor cells and thus can be used to identify these cells in transitional areas of tissue development and in repair tissues and may be applicable to determining a more precise mode of action of stem cells in these processes. Isolation of perlecan from 12-14 week gestational age foetal knee rudiments demonstrated that perlecan in these foetal tissues was a HS-CS hybrid proteoglyca