Dancing horses and reflecting humans

In October 2012, German dancer and philosopher Aurelia Baumgartner presented her 90-minute production Tanzende Pferde: Spiegelungen im Raum/Dancing Horses: Reflections in Space. Set in an arena, with a raised stage and a projection screen in the background, it provided a performed anthology of the relationship between human and horse. In the article, Meyer-Dinkgräfe discusses the production based on viewing a 40-minute DVD edited by Baumgartner from footage from two cameras recorded during the two 90-minute performances. The author’s testimony is complemented by Baumgartner’s comments and the context of critical literature exploring the relation of performance and animals that has emerged over the past fifteen to twenty years

(Un)Conditional Sample Generation Based on Distribution Element Trees

Recently, distribution element trees (DETs) were introduced as an accurate and computationally efficient method for density estimation. In this work, we demonstrate that the DET formulation promotes an easy and inexpensive way to generate random samples similar to a smooth bootstrap. These samples can be generated unconditionally, but also, without further complications, conditionally utilizing available information about certain probability-space components.Comment: published online in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistic

Spiritual aspects of operatic singing: Klaus Florian Vogt

The singing of German tenor Klaus Florian Vogt (b. 1970) initially puzzled, and continues to fascinate those who hear his voice on stage and through transmissions and recordings. In this paper Meyer-Dinkgräfe provides a brief biography of Vogt, followed by an account, based on interviews with Vogt (including my own), on how he relates to his major roles, his voice, his acting and experiences with director’s theatre, his way of preparing for a role in rehearsals and on a day of performance. The paper also discusses how Vogt relates his experience of singing to that of flying a plane, his political views on the need for opera in the regions, his thoughts on the differences between singing in a fully staged opera and an aria recital, how he experiences singing, and the impact on it of orchestra and conductor, magic moments, and anecdotes of unexpected events in performance. These two sections provide sufficient information to allow the readers to form their own image of Vogt. In the third section, I address the reception of Vogt’s voice and singing in the media, and provide a context of spirituality to account further for the exceptional nature of Vogt’s voice and singing; here I also relate information provided in the first two sections to the development and expression of spirituality

Opera and spirituality

Research into opera audiences has taken up a predominance of emotion in opera lovers’ responses to opera, in particular, and music in general (including opera). For the field of music psychology, there has been increased interest in strong emotions in relation to music, physically manifested as, for example, chills, shivers down or up the spine, or an increase of the heart rate. Spiritual experiences feature among the range of strong emotions thus identified. It is on those that I focus in this article. Not only opera audiences report spiritual experiences: opera singers do so as well. Some contextual frameworks have been developed to explain such spiritual experiences, predominantly for audiences, but they are also relevant for singers. While the libretto is in many cases not likely to support the onset and development of spiritual experiences, some opera librettos might be argued to provide such support. In this article, I discuss spiritual experiences reported by singers and review the literature on spiritual experiences reported by audience members in relation to opera, proposing, along the way, relevant additions to the clarification of terminology for, and the explanation of, such experiences. Finally I add a section on the importance of mise-en-scène in relation to the potential of a libretto to induce and maintain spiritual experiences in opera

Observing theatre: spirituality and subjectivity in the performing arts

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe and co-authors take the exploration of the subjective dimension of theatre, its spiritual context, its relation to consciousness and natural law, further than ever before, thanks to the context provided by the thinking of German geobiologist Hans Binder. We present relevant aspects of Binder’s approach as precisely as possible, then take Binder’s approach for granted to tease out the implications of that approach to the issues of theatre, including nostalgia, intercultural theatre, theatre criticism, dealing with demanding roles, the canon, theatre and philosophy, digital performance, practice as research, and applied theatre. Overall, the book proposes an overarching emphasis on the importance of living in the present and the concomitant need to abandon obsolete but still powerful patterns of the past. In this context, theatre, according to Binder, has a global responsibility for the new world in which humans are liberated from the scourge of the past. Theatre has the power and thus the responsibility to be path-breaking for a new “fiction”, to show to people, in a playful and creative manner, the direction in which the new consciousness can move. (Publisher

Quantum Dilaton Gravity in Two Dimensions with Fermionic Matter

Path integral quantization of generic two-dimensional dilaton gravity non-minimally coupled to a Dirac fermion is performed. After integrating out geometry exactly, perturbation theory is employed in the matter sector to derive the lowest order gravitational vertices. Consistency with the case of scalar matter is found and issues of relevance for bosonisation are pointed out.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures, v2: final version, added references, sec. 2 partially rewritten, some amendments, to be published in Class. Quant. Gra

Ramifications of Lineland

A non-technical overview on gravity in two dimensions is provided. Applications discussed in this work comprise 2D type 0A/0B string theory, Black Hole evaporation/thermodynamics, toy models for quantum gravity, for numerical General Relativity in the context of critical collapse and for solid state analogues of Black Holes. Mathematical relations to integrable models, non-linear gauge theories, Poisson-sigma models, KdV surfaces and non-commutative geometry are presented.Comment: 45 pages, 3 eps figures, proceedings contribution to 5th Workshop on Quantization, Dualities & Integrable Systems in Denizli, Turkey; v2: added refs. and a comment on phase transitions: v3: minor cosmetic chang

Expanding Thurston Maps

We study the dynamics of Thurston maps under iteration. These are branched covering maps $f$ of 2-spheres $S^2$ with a finite set $\mathop{post}(f)$ of postcritical points. We also assume that the maps are expanding in a suitable sense. Every expanding Thurston map $f\: S^2 \to S^2$ gives rise to a type of fractal geometry on the underlying sphere $S^2$. This geometry is represented by a class of \emph{visual metrics} $\varrho$ that are associated with the map. Many dynamical properties of the map are encoded in the geometry of the corresponding {\em visual sphere}, meaning $S^2$ equipped with a visual metric $\varrho$. For example, we will see that an expanding Thurston map is topologically conjugate to a rational map if and only if $(S^2, \varrho)$ is quasisymmetrically equivalent to the Riemann sphere $\widehat{\mathbf{C}}$. We also obtain existence and uniqueness results for $f$-invariant Jordan curves $\mathcal{C}\subset S^2$ containing the set $\mathop{post}(f)$. Furthermore, we obtain several characterizations of Latt\`{e}s maps.Comment: 492 pages, 51 figure