Searching for resonance: scientific patterns in Complicite's Mnemonic and A Disappearing Number

Abstract

After the international success of Mnemonic, Complicite have once again brought science and drama together in a new theatre piece, A Disappearing Number. Both plays place scientists in the limelight, though their 'scientific' content is very different: Mnemonic was based on the discovery of a Neolithic man in the Alps, and used neurology and archaeology to explore notions of memory and history; A Disappearing Number focuses on our fascination with infinity, and dramatises the 'mysterious and romantic mathematical collaboration' between G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The two pieces are, however, remarkably similar in plot and structure, and in their common exploration of the metaphorical and theatrical potential of scientific discourse. Moreover, they both use science as a narrative tool to explore our relation to time and mortality. This review presents them in parallel and examines the particular integration of ideas and aesthetics which characterises Complicite's work: a tireless search for connections, and a constant translation of ideas between different theatrical languages, be they verbal, visual or musical.     

Theatre,mathematics, and the aesthetics of infinity: Complicite’s A Disappearing Number

ABSTRACT

Complicite's A Disappearing Number is one of the best examples of contemporary plays that use theatrical strategies to convey complex scientific ideas. Complicite uses performance to stage the complex mathematical concepts of partition and infinite convergent series, taking inspiration from the statement by renowned British mathematician G. H. Hardy that “a mathematician... is a maker of patterns”. As well as performativity, other elements in the play contribute to performing mathematics on the stage, elements such as time and space, narrative structure, thematic content, and characterization. Complicite introduces a complex pattern that runs throughout the play to connect these elements to form a complete whole. These elements effectively work with each other to release a set of clues that guide the audience towards decoding the play's pattern. This study provides an in-depth analysis of these connections and the complex process of decoding the pattern in the play.     

Reviews

Abstract

Since the beginning of the 1970s the women's/feminist theatre has gained a dominant position on the European and the American stage. Women have stormed the postmodern stage either as solo dramatists and artists or as collaborative teams, forging a new female theatre language and training audiences to new ways of theatre reception. The publication of Lizbeth Goodman's Contemporary Feminist Theatres: To Each Her Own (Routledge, 1993), one in a long series of recent studies on women's theatre, already heralded an advanced epoch of a polyvocal feminist theatre embracing a multiplicity of female differences along the paradigms of gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity. Within the dynamic spectrum of development and intercultural exchange that ensued in the field of women's theatre the Greek women's contribution is faceless and anaemic. The situation is both distressing and calling for systematic research, especially since the scanty sociological studies concerning the position of women in contemporary Greece are inadequate in throwing full light on such a complicated problem. In 1992 Savas Patsalidis made the first serious attempt to analyse the foetal state of women's theatre in Greece in his article ‘Greek Female (Feminist?) Theatre: A Preliminary Approach', published in the Greek journal Utopia (4, Nov.-Dec. 1992, 105–38). My own interest in the issue in my capacity as a feminist and drama critic springs from my long-standing research in British women's theatre and my understandable comparative inquiry, as a Greek national, into the causes that might have led to the striking absence of an analogous phenomenon in my native country. I have deliberately used the word immaterial in the title of this paper in order to suggest, on the one hand, the relative lack of a distinct theatre discourse of women as speaking subjects and moving bodies on stage, inscribing female experience and female desire, and, on the other hand, the unimportance, in terms of power, of women theatre practitioners as still very few of them hold key positions in theatre institutions and the theatre industry.     

Seeds: Contracting the Audience in a Play about Science

Abstract

In pursuing the question ‘what can scientists learn from theatre?’ Particularly, ‘what can scientists, as scientists, learn from theatre?’ this paper argues that science lacks a normative framework that theatre is capable of providing. Despite science’s well-earned epistemic reputation, there is adequate reason to question its ethical reputation, particularly at the point where cutting edge scientific technology impacts society. I consider science as operating in four categories: the scientific method; the scientific hypothesis; the scientific experiment; and the scientist’s personal character. The realms of the scientist’s hypothesis and personal character are those where social pressures are reciprocally exerted, where imaginative play mentality and epistemic values are most in evidence. Theatre can examine these realms effectively because it is able to use narratives that appeal not only to logical and social moral judgements but to emotional and visceral responses, so as to situate science in the social context in which the pressures of law, funding, experimentation, society, and personal ambition converge in ‘the game of life’.

This can be seen in the theatrical process known as ‘contracting with the audience’. I point out a spectrum of traditional narrative tropes by which science makes “contracts with” audiences. The paper draws on theories of entrainment and theatrical game-play from Peter Stromberg and Philippe Gaulier, as well as my own practice and research into the process of contracting with the audience, to propose how to reach beyond tradition and to shift normalising contracts “outside the box”. To illustrate my proposition, I examine the play Seeds by Annabel Soutar as directed by Chris Abraham for Crow’s Theatre and Theatre Porte Parole. Seeds follows the controversial court battles of Saskatchewan farmer Percy Schmeiser against agricultural-biotech corporation Monsanto, which sued him for patent infringement of its Genetically Modified Organism Roundup Ready Canola. Seeds helps its audience define a public arena for discourse even as it brings to our attention the factors that make this difficult to do, while making an excellent contribution to the genre of ‘Documentary Theatre’. It is a successful contract with the audience that creates a public forum for discussion about contemporary ethical debates in science, thereby merging artistic ambiguity and scientific theory.     

Writing from the margins: Marina Carr's early theatre

This article analyses Marina Carr's first four plays: Low in the Dark (1989), The Deer's Surrender (1990), This Love Thing (1991) and Ullaloo (1991). It aims to show how Carr seeks to eschew the mimetic conventions of what can be seen as a dominant, patriarchal theatre establishment, marking (and possibly maintaining) her marginal position as a theatre-maker at the time. I argue that Carr, at this point in her career, was engaged in distinctly feminist theatre practices. Materialist feminist discourse provides a useful framework for understanding what the emergent dramatist was trying to achieve and the meaningful possibilities of her work. A study of this phase of Carr's career, encompassing all four works preceding The Mai, has not been offered in research on the dramatist to date. In addition to expanding the history of feminist theatre practice in Ireland, it promotes an enriched understanding of Carr's theatre as a whole.     

Feminist geography in the UK: the dialectics of women-gender-feminism-intersectionality and praxis

Abstract

Feminist praxis has always been about both the individual and the collective; one of the revolutionary and utopian promises of feminism is that of being, bringing, and working together. This piece provides a brief account of some of the significant scholarship and collective activities within British feminist geography over the last twenty five years, with a particular focus on the work of the Women and Geography Study Group/Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. We underscore the importance of intersectional approaches to scholarship and praxis in UK feminist geographies in this period, and in going forward, as well as signalling some of the dialectical opportunities and tensions arising from this approach.     

Science Adviser to Government

Abstract

That Government works at all, should surprise us; it invariably has to deal with most difficult questions involving many imponderables, particularly in the technological field. Rendering scientific advice in the Ministry of Defence and other British Government Departments involves the conveying of various shades of uncertainty; invariably a difficult task not made easier by the lack of scientific background of senior politicians and senior civil servants. The sources and the costs of scientific knowledge are here discussed and two problem areas in the British Government system pointed out; as remedy a 'New Science Education' is advocated.     

Imperial Liberalism and Institution Building at the End of Empire in Africa

ABSTRACT

This article discusses political liberalism at the end of empire in British Africa through analysis of British ideas about institution building below the level of parliamentary democracies. It suggests that while processes of institution-building have largely been discussed through the prism of development, they also constitute fruitful sites for the exploration of British ideas about the nature of politically-liberal systems. I argue that new articulations of an imperial liberalism during decolonisation had an energising effect on some Britons within domestic institutions whose expertise was called upon to assist with the development of successor institutions in emergent states. As they engaged in a process of institution-building, these individuals acted in ways that were not only determined by Western liberalism, but also by distinctive British ideas of the appropriate relationship of institutions to the state. I suggest, however, that while their approach to institution building in emergent states reflected deep rooted convictions about the kind of institutions that were essential to the operation of politically liberal systems, these ideals were in tension with more self-interested concerns which could in practice compromise efforts to replicate British institutions.     

Divided sisterhood? Nationalist feminism and feminist militancy in England and Ireland

ABSTRACT

The generally accepted story is that British militant suffragists performed an unexpected and abrupt move away from the feminist movement and towards a fiercely jingoistic nationalist campaign once the war began in 1914. Yet, given the nature of exchanges between Irish and British militant feminists, Irish feminists should not have been surprised by this turn from gender solidarity to English nationalism. In this article, I argue that Irish-British militant feminist entanglements worked to expose the powerful role that English nationalism played in suffrage politics at a time when nearly all the focus was on the disruptive influence of Irish nationalism.     

DISOBEDIENT BOYS AND PROMISCUOUS GIRLS

ABSTRACT

Since the 1990s, numerous public investigations have been carried out around the world on the abuse of children in out-of-home care. In the case of Iceland, commissions were appointed by the Icelandic government in 2007 to examine the historical abuse of children and youth in institutions monitored by local or state authorities during the second half of the 20th century. All the institutions subject to national investigations in Iceland were created during the postwar era, the earliest one in 1947. This article addresses the discourse on institutions and out-of-home care from a long-time perspective. It is shown that ideas on those institutions came to the fore during the early 20th century and were closely linked to progressive ideas on child welfare at the time. World War II and the British occupation of Iceland shaped the views on institutional care, and the postwar era was a period of intensive institutionalization of children and youth. The study also shows that the rhetoric concerning disobedient youth was heavily gendered. Whereas boys were accused of petty larceny, truancy and vagrancy, the main evils of girls were related to their morals, promiscuity being their chief vice.     

Ways of Writing in Post-Medieval and Historical Archaeology: Introducing Biography

Abstract

Archaeologists use writing as an important method of communicating results and interpretations, but have only recently started to consider what this implies about their research, and the effect that any style of writing has on the intended audience. Whilst public interpretation has widened forms of discourse to include narrative, performance and biography, few such academic and professional outputs have been attempted in British post-medieval archaeology, although in the wider discipline of North American historical archaeology there has been some experimentation. It is argued that biography offers new ways of encountering data, as well as opening up different modes of interpretation and communication within professional and academic arenas.     

The militarisation of aerial theatre: air displays and airmindedness in Britain and Australia between the world wars

ABSTRACT

Aerial theatre, the use of aviation spectacle to project images of future warfare, national power and technological prowess, was a key method for creating an airminded public in the early twentieth century. The most significant and influential form of aerial theatre in interwar Britain was the Royal Air Force Display at Hendon, in which military aircraft put on impressive flying performances before large crowds, including an elaborate set-piece acting out a battle scenario with an imaginary enemy. Hendon was emulated by other air displays in Britain and in Australia, even civilian ones. Indeed, the inability of the much smaller Royal Australian Air Force to regularly project spectacle on the scale of Hendon across a much larger nation created a gap which civilian aviation organisations then tried to fill. Hendon thus helped to propagate a militarised civilian aerial theatre, and hence airmindedness, in both Britain and Australia.     

Sexual Selection,Automata and Ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

Abstract

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings.     

Performing Science (Not Ethics) in Analogue’s 2401 Objects

Abstract

The postdramatic theatre is explored as an alternative ethics of re-presentation in 2401 Objects by Analogue in relation to its stance on medicine and the neurosciences and to theatrical representation. The dual characters Henry Molaison/Patient HM are deconstructed as objects and the presentation of memory is deconstructed as an embodied but intangible artifact of performance. How Analogue ‘frame’ HM’s doctors and their own performance through the metaphor of the cryomicrotome and the Project HM of the Brain Observatory as a performance in its own right is examined.     

The Karaghiozis Performance in Nineteenth-Century Greece

Abstract

Out of the vacuum of the sparsely developed dramatic environment of nineteenth-century Greece grew a performance totally unrelated to the largely literary and western-European oriented theatre of Athens under the influence of the king and his court. It was a performance which, unlike the literary theatre, aroused the interest of the common man through its use of folk tales, anecdotes, songs, dialects, costumes and characters as the basis of its presentation. Originating in the Turkish folk form Karagöz, the Greek performance, called Karaghiozis, found its roots in an entertainment with which Greeks both on the mainland and in other parts of the Balkans and Middle East were already familiar.     

Between rejected socialism and desired capitalism: social sciences’ discourse on the transformation in Poland

The transformation of the socialist societies of Central and Eastern Europe has been commonly described as a transition from a planned economy to a market economy and from a (semi)authoritarian system to a liberal democracy. According to this perspective, the implementation of new political and economic institutions was supposed to free the – so far suppressed – nature of all societies to become capitalist democracies. Such a vision of transformation dominated Polish public and academic discourse. It has been challenged by critics, who emphasized that transformation is an ambiguous process taking place at the level of social life rather than a macro-institutional level. Nevertheless, new concepts often reproduced characteristics of the rejected approach – a tendency to build dichotomous models based on simplified images of a pathological socialist legacy on one hand and of desired capitalist order on the other. Only recently a shift in the transformation discourse might be observed. The best examples are studies employing ethnographic methods, which focus on the level of everyday practices, and study how systemic changes were experienced by social actors. The article is an analysis of the social sciences’ discourse on transformation in the context of the broader public discourse in Poland. It depicts the transitology paradigm and its critique evolving from institutional and cultural perspectives. The focus is on concepts of homo sovieticus, ‘winners and losers’, learned helplessness and the like. Finally, the implications of ethnographic approaches are discussed. The case provokes questions about the role of social scientists in the vital processes of their own society.     

Mobilising non-participant youth: using sport and culture in local government policy to target social exclusion

ABSTRACT

The role of sport and cultural practices in policy initiatives tends to be assessed in both cases in terms of their assumed social benefits. However, the areas of sport and culture are often understood separately in research. Through an analysis of interviews with key local policy-makers and civil servants in two Swedish municipalities, the aim of this article is to explore how sport and culture are formed as means to promote social policy objectives regarding young people. In addition, we reflect on the political significance of this in relation to the development of local policy. The analysis demonstrates how a discourse of urban segregation and unequal opportunities underpins actions to mobilise non-participant and at-risk youth. This is achieved by establishing centres for sport and culture, and by enabling an educational approach which focuses on participation, empowerment and good citizenship. Reasons for mobilising practices involving culture and sport overlap, though each area of policy appears to be differently underpinned by discourses of enlightenment and conformity. Differences in emphasis between the discourses on sport and culture are discussed in relation to scientific discourse on the social utility of each policy area.     

Understanding interdisciplinarity in its argumentative context: thought and rhetoric in the perception of academic practices

ABSTRACT

The meaning and value of interdisciplinarity can be described in several, at times even contradictory, ways. Yet, little is known about how these play a role in individuals’ argumentation and everyday thinking. Drawing on Michael Billig’s rhetorical psychology, this paper explores how individuals draw on meanings, values, and connotations of interdisciplinarity to construct arguments and counter-arguments about this practice. This approach sheds light on the contradictions that surround interdisciplinarity, and thus on the rhetorical context in which its meaning is constituted. The value of rhetorical psychology for the study of interdisciplinarity is demonstrated through the analysis of the discourse of 27 interviews with researchers and administrators from a large British university. The analysis identifies 12 interpretative repertoires interviewees use to argue and to think about interdisciplinarity. Highlighting these repertoires and the contradictions between them is relevant for stimulating individuals’ reflexivity, critical thought, and decision-making regarding disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity.