No Woman’s Land - Walking as a Dramaturgical Device in Performance of Maternal Migration

The practice research project No Woman’s Land NWL (2015-2017) explored the historical performance walk as a methodology to develop a dramaturgy of migration in reference to kinesthetic empathy. The project explored whether the re-tracing of the 220-mile walk undertaken by Rippel’s grandmother Lucia in 1945 from Brzeźnica Poland to Pulspforde, Germany could produce a change of the performer’s body through an “authentic” physical experience, marked by exhaustion and the somatic memory of endurance. The project explored a dramaturgy of migration, the maternal body and authenticity in performance through the inclusion of real (hi)stories and the embodied experience of a migratory walk. In Zoo Indigo’s performative response to the walk, No Woman’s Land (NWL 2016), the duo re-engaged with the experienced endurance. Throughout the piece the performers (and sometimes audience members), walked on treadmills through digital projections of past and present landscapes. This article discusses the performance walk as a methodology towards a dramaturgy of migration, enabling an authentic representation of the migrant mother through the staging of the exhausted female body, the interweaving of documentary footage, and the real act of walking

Maternal Ruptures/Raptures: Leakages of the Real

Julia Kristeva describes the hallucinatory state between the real and the symbolic as rapture: “The rapture of the hallucination originates in the absence of boundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 207). The real can only be accessed through this hallucinatory rapture: Floating in isolation, this vision of an unnamed real rejects all nomination and any possible narrative. Instead it remains enigmatic, setting the field of speech ablaze only to reduce it to cold ashes, fixing in this way a hallucinatory and untouchable jouissance. (Kristeva 1986: 227) The symbolic order of language is described by Kristeva as ‘cold ashes’, a mere residue of the flames of the real. The real according to Kristeva remains untouchable, a notion similar to Lacan’s “encounter with the real”, which is always “a missed encounter” (Lacan 2004 [1977]: 55). The 2,000 word provocation proposed for Performance Research will argue that the maternal in performance has the capacity to set representation ablaze, to rupture the symbolic and to infuse performance with the rapturous sparks of the real. The provocation will utilise Zoo Indigo’s PaR performances Under the Covers (2009), which presents the performers’ babies via live video link, and Blueprint (2012), featuring the performers’ real-life mothers on SKYPE video call, as case studies to argue that the non-performance of motherhood can enable the emergence of the real in theatre. Kristeva depicts motherhood as the maternal time, “the slow, difficult and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself” (Kristeva 1981: 31). Lisa Baraitser describes these interruptions as “breaches, tears or puncturings to the mother’s durational experiences bringing her back “again and again” into the realm of the immediate, the present, the here-and-now of the child or infant’s demand” (Baraitser 2009: 110). This immediacy responding to the corporeal urges of the child render the maternal encounter real. This provocation aims to argue that the maternal encounter in Zoo Indigo’s performances causes a transcendence towards the real, with reference to psychoanalysis, specifically the writings by Julia Kristeva and Lisa Baraitser. Kristeva notes: “Milk and tears […] are the metaphors of nonspeech, of a ‘semiotics’ that linguistic communication does not account for” (Kristeva, in Oliver 2002: 322). The release of breast milk is beyond the symbolic order, it transports us to Kristeva’s semiotic, the non-symbolic, the real. The provocation will analyse the leakage of breast milk in Under the Covers, when performers experienced the let-down reflex and release of milk when seeing their babies on screen, and the leakage of tears in Blueprint, in the moments when mothers and daughters returned to a maternal encounter beyond the symbolic. The provocation will argue that real mother-child relationships in performance remain unperformed and beyond representation, and that the maternal fluids of blood, milk and tears erupting in Zoo Indigo’s work cause a momentary leakage of the real into the symbolic framework of theatre

Loss and Being Lost: Performing Precarity through Multilingual Text, Song and Music in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way

This article examines the function of music and multilingualism in Zoo Indigo’s Don’t Leave Me This Way. Through an engagement with live music, song and multilingual spoken text, an “affective potential of tonality” (Fischer-Lichte 120) is explored to express themes of precarity. The use of multilingualism functions “to upset the position of dominant language” (Byczynski 33), further highlighting a cultural precarity in a Brexit-ridden Britain. Drawing upon Butler’s constructivist view of performativity, the authors reflect on a narrative of loss and being lost communicated and understood through a dramaturgical framework of multilingualism, mother tongues, live music, pre-recorded sounds and song

Efficacy and tolerability of α-galactosidase in treating gas-related symptoms in children: a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Gas-related symptoms represent very common complaints in children. The reduction of gas production can be considered as a valuable target in controlling symptoms. α-galactosidase has been shown to reduce gas production and related symptoms in adults. To evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of α-galactosidase in the treatment of gas-related symptoms in pediatric patients. METHODS: Single center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel group study performed in tertiary care setting. Fifty-two pediatric patients (32 female, age range 4–17) with chronic or recurrent gas-related symptoms were randomized to receive placebo (n = 25) or α-galactosidase (n = 27). Both treatments were given as drops or tablets, according to body weight for 2 weeks. The primary endpoint was the reduction in global distress measured by the Faces Pain Scale-Revised (FPS-R) at the end of treatment compared to baseline. Secondary endpoints were the reduction in severity and frequency of gas-related symptoms as recorded by parents and/or children. RESULTS: α-galactosidase significantly reduced global distress (p = 0.02) compared to placebo. The digestive enzyme decreased the number of days with moderate to severe bloating (p = 0.03) and the proportion of patients with flatulence (p = 0.02). No significant differences were found for abdominal spasms and abdominal distension. No adverse events were reported during treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Although larger and longer trials are needed to confirm this result, α-galactosidase seems to be a safe, well tolerated and effective treatment for gas-related symptoms in the pediatric population. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT0159593

Nitrogen supply method affects growth, yield and must composition of young grape vines (Vitis vinifera L. cv Alicante Bouschet) in southern Brazil.

The aim of this study was to evaluate yield and chemical composition of the must in grapevines subjected to Nitrogen (N) supply methods in sandy soils. The vineyard cultivar was ?Alicante Bouschet? (Vitis vinifera L.) grafted on 1103 Paulsen rootstock, in southern Brazil. The treatments consisted of the application of 20+20 kg N ha−1 without irrigation (NWI), 20+20 kg N ha−1 followed by irrigation (NFI), 20+20 kg N ha−1 via fertigation (NF), 20 kg N ha−1 via fertigation (½NF), and a control (C) without N application. The study was conducted during four crop seasons. Leaves were collected at flowering and veraison to determination N concentration. Stem diameter, grape yield and its components were determined. In the must were evaluated the total soluble solids (TSS), pH, total titratable acidity (TTA) and total anthocyanins (TA). The concentration of nitrate and ammonium in soil solution was determined. N application followed by irrigation or N supplied via fertigation provided to the vines larger stem diameters and leaf N concentrations, in most crop seasons. Grapevines submitted to N application via fertigation or followed by irrigation presented higher yields than conventional application without irrigation, and between two and three times higher than the control. N supply methods little affected total soluble solids contents. The application of N to the soil, regardless of the N supply method, decreased the anthocyanin concentration in the grape must, due to the dilution effect on the pulp/skin ratio, promoted by the yield increase

The Medical Segmentation Decathlon

International challenges have become the de facto standard for comparative assessment of image analysis algorithms given a specific task. Segmentation is so far the most widely investigated medical image processing task, but the various segmentation challenges have typically been organized in isolation, such that algorithm development was driven by the need to tackle a single specific clinical problem. We hypothesized that a method capable of performing well on multiple tasks will generalize well to a previously unseen task and potentially outperform a custom-designed solution. To investigate the hypothesis, we organized the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) - a biomedical image analysis challenge, in which algorithms compete in a multitude of both tasks and modalities. The underlying data set was designed to explore the axis of difficulties typically encountered when dealing with medical images, such as small data sets, unbalanced labels, multi-site data and small objects. The MSD challenge confirmed that algorithms with a consistent good performance on a set of tasks preserved their good average performance on a different set of previously unseen tasks. Moreover, by monitoring the MSD winner for two years, we found that this algorithm continued generalizing well to a wide range of other clinical problems, further confirming our hypothesis. Three main conclusions can be drawn from this study: (1) state-of-the-art image segmentation algorithms are mature, accurate, and generalize well when retrained on unseen tasks; (2) consistent algorithmic performance across multiple tasks is a strong surrogate of algorithmic generalizability; (3) the training of accurate AI segmentation models is now commoditized to non AI experts

Risk accelerators in disasters : insights from the typhoon Haiyan response on humanitarian information management and decision support

Published version of a chapter in the book: Advanced Information Systems Engineering. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07881-6_2Modern societies are increasingly threatened by disasters that require rapid response through ad-hoc collaboration among a variety of actors and organizations. The complexity within and across today's societal, economic and environmental systems defies accurate predictions and assessments of damages, humanitarian needs, and the impact of aid. Yet, decision-makers need to plan, manage and execute aid response under conditions of high uncertainty while being prepared for further disruptions and failures. This paper argues that these challenges require a paradigm shift: instead of seeking optimality and full efficiency of procedures and plans, strategies should be developed that enable an acceptable level of aid under all foreseeable eventualities. We propose a decision- and goal-oriented approach that uses scenarios to systematically explore future developments that may have a major impact on the outcome of a decision. We discuss to what extent this approach supports robust decision-making, particularly if time is short and the availability of experts is limited. We interlace our theoretical findings with insights from experienced humanitarian decision makers we interviewed during a field research trip to the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan