1,720,976 research outputs found
Soot and Spit
No full textWhat drives a single person to create nearly 20,000 works of art? Celebrating the life of James Castle, one of America's great outsider artists, Our Voices presents the world premiere of acclaimed playwright Charles Mee's Soot and Spit. Born profoundly deaf, Castle never learned to read, write, sign or speak. His art was his language. Bringing his world to life through bluegrass, dance, and multi-media displays of his works, soot and spit enables its audience to experience the "other"- and rejoice in the unquenchable creativity of the human spirit
CUSPIDI
No full textCuspidi is the new play by Valerio Leoni, winner of the Biennale College Theatre call for Directors under 35 for the two-year period 2022/2023. A Roman director, actor and playwright, born in 1988, Valerio Leoni worked as a director while conducting research into theatre in Poland, Germany, Denmark, Spain and Italy. The founder in 2015 of the Agiteatro company, he is the artistic director, along with Sofia Guidi, of the cultural centre Labirion Officine Trasversali, which he founded in Rome in 2018. It was at Labirion that in 2022 Leoni developed the original idea for Cuspidi.
Selected from a shortlist of six candidates because “his artistic career moves beyond and away from a visually and linguistically realistic trajectory to redirect the investigation by instilling into it an emotional tone that can cast light on, move or freeze the bodies and the plurality of their monologuing voices within a mental landscape imagined by Magritte”, Valerio Leoni creates his play around three characters-emotions: A consisting of Screams (Sofia Guidi) which “contains within it the concepts of discomfort, difficulty of living in the world, expressive confusion”; B consisting of Dust (Sara Giannelli), which “maintains its own gaze turned towards the past, remaining disunited”; C consisting of Boxes (Jacopo Provenzano), which “relies on classification and organization as a weapon to defend itself against the chaos of the world”. Self-standing universes, with their own habitat, substance and rhythm, but forced to share the same space, at the end of the play A B C will emerge from their conditions as islands and re-establish a dialogue
Adolescence invites rebellion: Investigating the aesthetics of American culture in Dutch theatre for adolescents
No full textAnswering how the aesthetics of American pop culture seem to have had such an impact on Dutch theatre for adolescents, this study reviews several perspectives on the history of adolescence and the Americanization of Europe which combined to play a crucial role in forming that aesthetic. A general political history begins this thesis by first answering why theatre for youth is popularly practiced in the Netherlands and not in the U.S. This section demonstrates how political structures and economics condition the possibility of national growth in theatre practice through highlighting the relationship of Dutch social arts funding to the growth of certain kinds of theatre that have proven difficult for the commercial U.S. market to develop. Several histories of youth culture are then reviewed looking at the particular social practices in America that seem to have had a universal and simultaneous development in the Netherlands and Europe. Looking at how youth culture has developed transnationally leads up to an examination of the transnational impact on the local development of theatre art in the Netherlands, and furthermore explains how specifically American mass-cultural products have been able to play such a significant role in Dutch theatre arts
Artificial theatre of the absurd
No full textThis chapter looks at how the co-creative gesture of performing theatre with artificial intelligence invokes a quality of the ethical theatre of the absurd by positioning the human creative act in seemingly ‘equal’ relation to an uncaring passive intelligence. Drawing from the experiences of several theatre companies, including Improbotics (an improvisational theatre company that has been developing improvised dramatic works alongside artificial intelligence since 2016), this chapter looks at different applications of co-creativity with AI and how the theatre of the absurd is invoked. It examines the shift from the aesthetic to the ethical absurd, following the development of a theatre script co-writing system, ‘Dramatron’. It investigates how the human body works in service of artificially produced dialogue in the form of a cyborg presenting the meaningless words of a robot inside the meaning making machine of the human. And it explores AI translation tools to extend the framework of absurdity within language. Together, these case studies present a series of human/machine encounters that de-centre the human from the act of creation, pointing to a new kind of literary absurdism that is written in the human-machine encounter
Collaborative storytelling with human actors and AI narrators. Paper type: event report
No full textLarge language models can be used for collaborative storytelling. In this work we report on using GPT-3(Brown et al. 2020) to co-narrate stories. The AI system must track plot progression and character arcs while the human actors perform scenes. This event report detail show a novel conversational agent was employed as creative partner with a team of professional improvisers to explore long-form spontaneous story narration in front of a live public audience. We introduced novel constraints on our language model to produce longer narrative text and tested the model in rehearsals with a team of professional improvisers. We then field tested the model with two live performances for public audiences as part of a live theatre festival in Europe. We surveyed audience members after each performance as well as performers to evaluate how well the AI performed in its role as narrator. Audiences and performers responded positively to AI narration and indicated preference for AI narration over AI characters within a scene. Performers also responded positively to AI narration and expressed enthusiasm for the creative and meaningful novel narrative directions introduced to the scenes. Our findings support improvisational theatre as a useful testbed to explore how different language models can collaborate with humans in a variety of social contexts
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Edge habitats: platforms for exchange between the arts and sciences
No full textA wide range of STEAM collaborations on a variety of platforms are discussed, including strengths, limitations, and ways of developing initiatives. Presenters review past accomplishments, identify present challenges, and articulate future goals for effectively bringing together people from STEM disciplines with experts in the arts. How does one go about creating effective habitats for cutting-edge intersections of art and science? What models are out there? What new models might we wish for and design
Rosetta code: improv in any language
No full textRosetta Code provides improv theatre performers with artificial intelligence (AI)-based technology to perform shows understandable across many different languages. We combine speech recognition, improv chatbots and language translation tools to enable improvisers to communicate with each other while being understood—or comically misunderstood—by multilingual audiences. We describe the technology underlying Rosetta Code, detailing the speech recognition, machine translation, text generation and text-to-speech subsystems. We then describe scene structures that feature the systemin performances in multilingual shows (9 languages).We provide evaluative feedback from performers, audiences, and critics. From this feedback, we draw analogies between surrealism, absurdism, and multilingual AI improv. Rosetta Code creates a new form of language-based absurdist improv. The performance remains ephemeral and performers of different language scan express themselves and their culture while accommodating the linguistic diversity of audience
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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