Titus Anonymous: fragments of...

Welcome to TITUS ANONYMOUS where ‘Rome is Rome is a fiction is Rome.’ During the 2017-18 academic year, Drama students at the University of Northampton (UK) were tasked with deconstructing Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus in a collaborative process with their tutors, who modelled their own creative and professional practices as theatre-makers. The students were challenged with the need to find contemporary relevance and resonance in this early Shakespeare work, which many scholars argue is the bard’s most flawed text. Rossi, who led the process, argues that Titus is the work of a young practitioner experimenting with the form of the revenge tragedy, and establishes ground for absurdist theatre, which wouldn’t take shape until centuries later. The term-long exploration and reconstruction of the text led to our need to grapple with the racist language exchanged between Shakespeare’s Romans and Goths in light of the Black Lives Matter movement; and overt misogyny in both language and action; no longer norms but points of critical debate through the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. To add to the complexity of this process; student learning around professional practices of theatre-making was framed by an experimentation in DIY Theatre aesthetics, working with a limited budget but a wealth of space, a robust costume, props and set stock, and the power of our collective imagination. This text represents ‘fragments of’ the process, including the final script, production design details, reflective essays by students, and introductory essays by Drama tutors, Sarah Mullan and Rory O’Neill, writing from their unique perspective in their roles as Dramaturg and Actor, respectively. These fragments aim to give a sense of the hybridized world that was inspired by the Wild West, Ancient Rome, pop culture and today’s political landscape; while hopefully providing interpretive space for future theatre-makers to develop their own production concept

Crisis theatre and the living newspaper

Crisis Theatre and The Living Newspapers traces a history of the living newspaper as a theatre of crisis from Soviet Russia (1910s), through the Federal Theatre Project of the Great Depression in America (1930s), to Augusto Boal’s teatro jornal in Brazil (1970s), and its resonance with documentary forms deployed in the final years of apartheid in South Africa (1990s), up until the present day in the UK (2020s). Across this Element, the authors are interested in what a transnational and transhistorical examination of the living newspaper through the lens of crisis reveals about the ways in which theatre can intervene in our collective social, economic and political life. By holding these diverse examples together, the authors assert the Living Newspaper as a form of Crisis Theatr

Intolerance of uncertainty in emotional disorders: What uncertainties remain?

The current paper presents a future research agenda for intolerance of uncertainty (IU), which is a transdiagnostic risk and maintaining factor for emotional disorders. In light of the accumulating interest and promising research on IU, it is timely to emphasize the theoretical and therapeutic significance of IU, as well as to highlight what remains unknown about IU across areas such as development, assessment, behavior, threat and risk, and relationships to cognitive vulnerability factors and emotional disorders. The present paper was designed to provide a synthesis of what is known and unknown about IU, and, in doing so, proposes broad and novel directions for future research to address the remaining uncertainties in the literature

A Tale of Two Tails: Exploring Stellar Populations in the Tidal Tails of NGC 3256

We have developed an observing program using deep, multiband imaging to probe the chaotic regions of tidal tails in search of an underlying stellar population, using NGC 3256's 400 Myr twin tidal tails as a case study. These tails have different colours of $u - g = 1.05 \pm 0.07$ and $r - i = 0.13 \pm 0.07$ for NGC 3256W, and $u - g = 1.26 \pm 0.07$ and $r - i = 0.26 \pm 0.07$ for NGC 3256E, indicating different stellar populations. These colours correspond to simple stellar population ages of $288^{+11}_{-54}$ Myr and $841^{+125}_{-157}$ Myr for NGC 3256W and NGC 3256E, respectively, suggesting NGC 3256W's diffuse light is dominated by stars formed after the interaction, while light in NGC 3256E is primarily from stars that originated in the host galaxy. Using a mixed stellar population model, we break our diffuse light into two populations: one at 10 Gyr, representing stars pulled from the host galaxies, and a younger component, whose age is determined by fitting the model to the data. We find similar ages for the young populations of both tails, ($195^{-13}_{+0}$ and $170^{-70}_{+44}$ Myr for NGC 3256W and NGC 3256E, respectively), but a larger percentage of mass in the 10 Gyr population for NGC 3256E ($98^{+1}_{-3}\%$ vs $90^{+5}_{-6}\%$). Additionally, we detect 31 star cluster candidates in NGC 3256W and 19 in NGC 2356E, with median ages of 141 Myr and 91 Myr, respectively. NGC 3256E contains several young (< 10 Myr), low mass objects with strong nebular emission, indicating a small, recent burst of star formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS. 16 pages, 19 figure