Trying to make more sense: an introduction, beginning and reflection of a dialogic performance

The contributions to the first issue of volume 2, Figure of the sensible, explore discursive and bodily practices and aims to make sense of the nature of these sensible differences in articulation. The interplay of exactly the relations between signs and bodies emerges as figure of the sensible. A figure indexes the sense through its relation and context and more often than not this makes the sensation intelligible. For that matter the ‘sensible’ refers to what is capable of being apprehended by the senses in its double meaning: as a relation of sensation, and of sense pertaining to the ethical, representational and aesthetic regimes (Rancière, 2000). This intricate reticulation of meaning eludes simple placement or anchoring. Instead, this issue is a versatile collection of traces that elaborate the complex process of sense-making, effecting a profound investigation of the sensible between the lines of practice and theory. An assemblage of five approaches to the “figure of the sensible” is introduced in this first special issue of activate, which weaves together a fabric of relational choreographic movements. Hosting a get-together on unruled pages, this issue is written to be read between the lines of practice and theory. In this collection of various text(ure)s, the topology of the sensible is opened for fragile interrelations, prolific contaminations, unforeseen revelations, and perhaps at times gentle provocations, always exploring the interplay of signs and bodies

Face to Facelessness: Imagined Intimacies and Socially Distant Desires

This paper revisits a performance titled Falling in Love Again - and Again which was first performed in 2014 as part of a series of works I created questioning relational intimacy and proximity in public space. During Falling in Love Again - and Again participants were invited to explore public space with the intention of anonymously falling in love with strangers. The details of these encounters were shared with me as the leader of the piece via mobile phone text messages, but never with the subjects of the participants' desires. Understanding the dynamics of intimacy and proximity in 2014 was a very different experience to how I understand them in 2021. The Covid-19 pandemic, social distancing, and two periods of lockdown has drastically influenced how relationality and physically being in the world with others is performed. This paper is concerned both with the intimate and proximate dynamics of relational bodies during that performance as I understood it then, and, as a consequence, how we might understand relational proximity and intimacy now. Critical points of departure for the paper include art historian Grant Kester's writing on conversational art practices and his framing of dialogic encounters through the use of Jeffrey T. Nealon's Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998). Models of 'dialogical' experience and 'responsibility', as situated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas respectively (Nealon, 1998, cited in Kester, 2004, 118) are used in this article to frame a rethinking of the dynamics and ethics of face to face contact and physical proximity, as bodies in space maintain distance from one another, connected only by our digital devices and our imaginations. The voyeuristic practices of Sophie Calle and Vito Acconci converge with theatre makers Forced Entertainment's 'writing over' of place (Kaye, 2000) to explore imaginary relational connectivity. The writing of geographer Doreen Massey supports this framing through the use of Massey's thoughts on the fictional poetics of social interactions and 'stories so far' (Massey, 2005). Ultimately the paper asks what happens when we are required to imagine being with others in physically distant and imaginary ways with only our mobile devices as depositories for our fictional desires

Bites of Passage: Thresholds, Permeability and Hand-Fed Food for Thought

This paper will discuss two performances created between 2013 and 2014 titled Host and Host(s) that explored how openness and trust are gained through the promise of hospitality. These performances saw strangers open the borders that separate the inside and outside of their bodies to allow hand-fed food to cross their accepting thresholds in return for personal narratives. Openness suggests potential passage into or through something, and here there is literal openness as the permeable body opens to receive the food on the spoon. The body as site becomes accessible once trust has been gained, and an emotional openness plays out as audienceparticipants both mentally and physically open up to their host. The paper will explore social thresholds through the analysis of performance using Marie-Eve Morin and Jacques Derrida’s writing on the conditionality and thresholds of hospitality. Morin comments that the threshold ‘functions both as the place of closure and the place of openness’ (Morin, 2015: 31), and, underpinned by Nick Kaye’s positioning of site as a process rather than fixed location, these movements between being open and closed frame processes of becoming social with strangers. Doreen Massey’s ideas on social ‘throwntogetherness’ are interwoven with this framing as intimate personal details are exchanged through the collision of trajectories in social space. Massey proposes that ‘we understand space as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist’ (Massey, 2005: 9). This framing of coexistent space converges with Marc Augé’s positioning of place and non-place to propose an interrelationality that opens new dialogues and modes of participation

Re-imagining Social Space through an openness to the Becoming of Place

One of the challenges that makers of site specific performance face is how to qualify and articulate site specificity, in an era where prevalent discourses and practices argue less for substantive and fixed understandings of location, and more for fluid and mulitiplicitous senses of place. As a maker of site specific performance I find myself embracing the idea that our senses of place, and in turn our identities that are affected by the spaces we encounter, are in constant states of becoming. This acknowledgment liberates our imaginings of place from the hegemonic clutches of received tacit agreements, and opens them up to creative spatial possibilities. Rather than accept the negativity of Marc Augé’s observation that we spend more of our time in non-places and states of transit, I am interested in exploring the positive potential of a closer inspection of the specifics of these fluid states, positioning site itself as the transitory process, which is in turn productive of culture and identity. I would argue that by composing situations that combine performative approaches to dialoguing experience, with everyday modes and technologies of communication, a re-imagining of social space can occur. In For Space Doreen Massey argues ‘not just for a notion of becoming’ but instead ‘for the openness of that process of becoming’ (Massey 2005: p21). This paper discusses the methodologies and findings of a research practice that seeks to explore how form might made from an openness to processes of becoming, asking how, by perceiving place nomadically, the performative potentials of place might be revealed

A chemical survey of exoplanets with ARIEL

Thousands of exoplanets have now been discovered with a huge range of masses, sizes and orbits: from rocky Earth-like planets to large gas giants grazing the surface of their host star. However, the essential nature of these exoplanets remains largely mysterious: there is no known, discernible pattern linking the presence, size, or orbital parameters of a planet to the nature of its parent star. We have little idea whether the chemistry of a planet is linked to its formation environment, or whether the type of host star drives the physics and chemistry of the planet’s birth, and evolution. ARIEL was conceived to observe a large number (~1000) of transiting planets for statistical understanding, including gas giants, Neptunes, super-Earths and Earth-size planets around a range of host star types using transit spectroscopy in the 1.25–7.8 μm spectral range and multiple narrow-band photometry in the optical. ARIEL will focus on warm and hot planets to take advantage of their well-mixed atmospheres which should show minimal condensation and sequestration of high-Z materials compared to their colder Solar System siblings. Said warm and hot atmospheres are expected to be more representative of the planetary bulk composition. Observations of these warm/hot exoplanets, and in particular of their elemental composition (especially C, O, N, S, Si), will allow the understanding of the early stages of planetary and atmospheric formation during the nebular phase and the following few million years. ARIEL will thus provide a representative picture of the chemical nature of the exoplanets and relate this directly to the type and chemical environment of the host star. ARIEL is designed as a dedicated survey mission for combined-light spectroscopy, capable of observing a large and well-defined planet sample within its 4-year mission lifetime. Transit, eclipse and phase-curve spectroscopy methods, whereby the signal from the star and planet are differentiated using knowledge of the planetary ephemerides, allow us to measure atmospheric signals from the planet at levels of 10–100 part per million (ppm) relative to the star and, given the bright nature of targets, also allows more sophisticated techniques, such as eclipse mapping, to give a deeper insight into the nature of the atmosphere. These types of observations require a stable payload and satellite platform with broad, instantaneous wavelength coverage to detect many molecular species, probe the thermal structure, identify clouds and monitor the stellar activity. The wavelength range proposed covers all the expected major atmospheric gases from e.g. H2O, CO2, CH4 NH3, HCN, H2S through to the more exotic metallic compounds, such as TiO, VO, and condensed species. Simulations of ARIEL performance in conducting exoplanet surveys have been performed – using conservative estimates of mission performance and a full model of all significant noise sources in the measurement – using a list of potential ARIEL targets that incorporates the latest available exoplanet statistics. The conclusion at the end of the Phase A study, is that ARIEL – in line with the stated mission objectives – will be able to observe about 1000 exoplanets depending on the details of the adopted survey strategy, thus confirming the feasibility of the main science objectives.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Effective health care for older people living and dying in care homes: A realist review

Background: Care home residents in England have variable access to health care services. There is currently no coherent policy or consensus about the best arrangements to meet these needs. The purpose of this review was to explore the evidence for how different service delivery models for care home residents support and/or improve wellbeing and health-related outcomes in older people living and dying in care homes. Methods: We conceptualised models of health care provision to care homes as complex interventions. We used a realist review approach to develop a preliminary understanding of what supported good health care provision to care homes. We completed a scoping of the literature and interviewed National Health Service and Local Authority commissioners, providers of services to care homes, representatives from the Regulator, care home managers, residents and their families. We used these data to develop theoretical propositions to be tested in the literature to explain why an intervention may be effective in some situations and not others. We searched electronic databases and related grey literature. Finally the findings were reviewed with an external advisory group. Results: Strategies that support and sustain relational working between care home staff and visiting health care professionals explained the observed differences in how health care interventions were accepted and embedded into care home practice. Actions that encouraged visiting health care professionals and care home staff jointly to identify, plan and implement care home appropriate protocols for care, when supported by ongoing facilitation from visiting clinicians, were important. Contextual factors such as financial incentives or sanctions, agreed protocols, clinical expertise and structured approaches to assessment and care planning could support relational working to occur, but of themselves appeared insufficient to achieve change. Conclusion: How relational working is structured between health and care home staff is key to whether health service interventions achieve health related outcomes for residents and their respective organisations. The belief that either paying clinicians to do more in care homes and/or investing in training of care home staff is sufficient for better outcomes was not supported.This research was funded by National Institute of Health Research Health Service Delivery and Research programme (HSDR 11/021/02)

Hello, I Love You

Commissioned by Hatch for Embrace Arts Centre, Hello, I Love You sees artist Steve Fossey invite participants to call him up and spend 10 minutes on the phone with him as he attempts to make them fall in love with him. The artist and his participant sit opposite one another but are distant enough that things don't feel too awkward. A rope connects the pair which they hold onto in a further attempt to unite. The piece explores intimacy and what it is to say share histories of loves won and lost with those you have never met before

The Revealing of the Self Through Being in Place

The Revealing of the Self Through Being in Place, conference paper given at Journeys Across Media, Department of Film, Theatre and Television Annual Conference, University of Reading, UK (2012

A Psycho-therapeutic Travelogue

I will bring some past accounts of places I have experienced and will enter into a dialogue with myself and others about those places. The event of the In Dialogue conference will reveal what more can be known about places there and then through being there together here and now. The dialogue will serve as a psycho-therapeutic travelogue as senses of self become a little clearer through working things out in dialogue. I will try and be honest, although sometimes one doesn’t get what one expects by bearing ones soul. This perhaps depends on how able we are to reveal the ontologies of place together in the present moment. I will employ elements of the stream of consciousness and the improvisational in an attempt to locate agency, but I am all too aware that as soon as we think we have got a grip on what a place really means to us, the stability of agency shifts again. I guess the best that I can offer is two or three half decent stories of self. A dialogic social space will be created that even the audience members who remained silent can say they were producers of. For that moment, in that space, we can perhaps lay claim to the formation of a community, hoping, in the words of Jean Luc-Nancy, ‘to be receptive to the meaning of our multiple, dispersed, mortally fragmented existences, which nonetheless only make sense by existing in common'

Drawing Breathe and Remaining Visible

Drawn to Time, selected by guest curator Susan Kemenyffy, accompanies the Drawing Research Network‘s 2021 Temporal Drawing series of research presentations organised by the Drawing Research Group (DRG) at Loughborough University