Devising ridiculusmus’ total football: A schematic reading of performance process.

This article critically reflects on a series of drawings created during the devising process for Ridiculumus’ Total Football (2012). Ridiculusmus' production, a narrative of a non-sporty bureaucrat tasked with harnessing the enthusiasm of football fans in the interests of national cohesion, examines the impossibility of thorough incorporation of a national body within the Olympic mo(ve)ment. Based on an existing convention among football commentators for contextualizing and narrating team play, a series of photographs of sketches-in-process discussed here capture the marks of live notation as an urgent activity during devising. As such the reader has access to a snapshot from Ridiculusmus’ rehearsal methods and process. The paper analyses the notation devices employed in the sketches arguing that the approximate qualities of sketched notation, and its failed totality, capture the tone of comedy in this work about masculine hubris. While the sketches attempt to keep pace with the spontaneity of tactics devised by performers, the paper argues that performance systems and dance notation that have paid attention to architecture and spatial arrangement as a score do not generally notate intention or strategy. The paper presents the idea that the sketches document a multiplicity of tactics, and footballing metaphor in process. The notation can be understood both as documentation of movement and a contribution to a theatrical and scenographic discourse that is concerned with more than a simple ‘blocking.’ The paper discusses the origins of ‘self-blocking’ in this production, its relation to a priori analysis of character and to unpredictable elements of game-playing in a piece about football. The paper discusses the way in which Ridiculumus tackle the inherent rigidity of the British class system through a metaphorical critique of the ‘4 4 2’ team formation in football. With its wasteful habit of long ball passes, the formation has proven vulnerable against continental versatility, just as a bureaucratic class that resists meritocracy will not withstand more imaginative social structures elsewhere in the world. Finally, the article, which includes original photographs and diagrams, suggests that similar crude schema indicate a potential for digital software to expand on the score/ing function of dance notation and may be appropriate for devising in contemporary theatre

'It blows my mind' : intoxicated performances by Ridiculusmus

Give Me Your Love by Jon Haynes and David Woods, Artistic Directors of Ridiculusmus, is the second in a trilogy Dialogue As The Embodiment of Love, to be presented in 2018, a series of plays investigating innovative mental health therapies. Give Me Your Love is a response to the first UK trials of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for chronic treatment resistant PTSD. The work has been made in partnership with psychologists Peter Kinderman and Anne Cooke, and Ben Sessa, the lead researcher of clinical trials in the UK. This article includes extracts of a dialogue between the two writer-performers reflecting on their personal and collective efforts to conjure, channel and recreate intoxication. It considers the affective interplay between therapists and client in the clinical therapy process, and a conterminous interaction between performers and audience in the production. In the play two Welsh squaddies attempt a homemade version of the trials that they have missed out on. With one performer in a cardboard box and the other locked outside of the performing area, Woods and Haynes channel physical and psychological recreations of their research, attempting to take their audiences on an experiential immersion but also exposing the theatrical context. Aspects of dramaturgy and staging that play with transitions and interruptions in consciousness are also considered here. In Give Me Your Love, the ‘absence’ of the complete actors’ bodies foregrounds, amongst other things, the experience of the present audience, in their box. Set against a critical response to the work that it does or does not ‘blow [me] away’ (a hipster update on the 1960s account of experiences that could ‘blow [my] mind’) the article thus considers the performance, as a form of public engagement

A Ridiculusmus virtual trilogy: grief, laughter and the performance.In Die! Die! Die! Old People Die!

In May 2020, David Woods and Jon Haynes, performers and artistic directors of Ridiculusmus, presented the trilogy ‘Dialogue As The Embodiment of Love’ in the form of a three-day online seminar series, via the online conference platform Teams. It featured a live online ‘directors’ commentary’, of each of the productions in the trilogy, alongside a screening of extracts on Youtube with David Woods in Melbourne and Jon Haynes in London. This is a discussion paper highlighting themes in Day 3 of the seminar series On the final day of the series, Woods and Haynes discussed the content of four out of seven extracts in the above Youtube Playlist, taken from the 82 minute ‘epic’ performance of Die! Die! Die! Old People Die! (DDDOPD), the longest play in the trilogy. The item here is the documentation of the 3 day symposium. This is supporting document contains a summary list of points in the directors’ discussion around each clip. The reader will probably appreciate listening to the accounts of the creative process directly from the directors in the Vimeo seminar recording above. The video clips of the production that I edited are not available on the Vimeo link but have been released as evidence of the Trilogy format. The play is an appropriate focal point for the discussing the outcomes of trilogy as a whole, because it marks a shift in the preoccupations in the previous two works and in my commentary I argue that Ridiculusmus’ dramaturgical approach offers an important element in provoking affective responses as part of the ‘treatment’ of issues associated with death and bereavement

Harbouring public good mutants within a pathogen population can increase both fitness and virulence

This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record.Existing theory, empirical, clinical and field research all predict that reducing the virulence of individuals within a pathogen population will reduce the overall virulence, rendering disease less severe. Here, we show that this seemingly successful disease management strategy can fail with devastating consequences for infected hosts. We deploy cooperation theory and a novel synthetic system involving the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae. In vivo infections of rice demonstrate that M. oryzae virulence is enhanced, quite paradoxically, when a public good mutant is present in a population of high-virulence pathogens. We reason that during infection, the fungus engages in multiple cooperative acts to exploit host resources. We establish a multi-trait cooperation model which suggests that the observed failure of the virulence reduction strategy is caused by the interference between different social traits. Multi-trait cooperative interactions are widespread, so we caution against the indiscriminant application of anti-virulence therapy as a disease-management strategy.Natural Environment Research Council NE/E013007/3Natural Environment Research Council Doctoral training grantEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Doctoral training grant studentshipEuropean Research Council no. 294702 GENBLASTEuropean Research Council no. 647292 MathModEx

Individuals with unilateral transtibial amputation exhibit reduced accuracy and precision during a targeted stepping task

Accurate foot placement is important for dynamic balance during activities of daily living. Disruption of sensory information and prosthetic componentry characteristics may result in increased locomotor task difficulty for individuals with lower limb amputation. This study investigated the accuracy and precision of prosthetic and intact foot placement during a targeted stepping task in individuals with unilateral transtibial amputation (IUTAs; N=8, 47±13 yrs), compared to the preferred foot of control participant’s (N=8, 33±15 yrs). Participants walked along a 10-metre walkway, placing their foot into a rectangular floor-based target with dimensions normalised to a percentage of participant’s foot length and width; ‘standard’ = 150%x150%, ‘wide’ = 150%x200%, ‘long’ = 200%x150%. Foot placement accuracy (relative distance between foot and target centre), precision (between-trial variability), and foot-reach kinematics were determined for each limb and target, using three-dimensional motion capture. A significant foot-by-target interaction revealed less mediolateral foot placement accuracy for IUTAs in the wide target, which was significantly less accurate for the intact (28±12mm) compared to prosthetic foot (16±14mm). Intact peak foot velocity (4.6±0.8m.s-1) was greater than the prosthetic foot (4.5±0.8m.s-1) for all targets. Controls were more accurate and precise than IUTAs, regardless of target size. Less accurate and precise intact foot placement in IUTAs, coupled with a faster moving intact limb, is likely due to several factors including reduced proprioceptive feedback and active control during prosthetic limb single stance. This could affect activities of daily living where foot placement is critical, such as negotiating cluttered travel paths or obstacles whilst maintaining balance