The Place From Which I See is a practice-led investigation into performance improvisation in which I have asked the question: ‘What is the role of vision in understanding solo performance improvisation as a form of composition?’ The research is encompassed and presented in two different, but interwoven, modalities, which function as a total thesis. These are: (1) a written thesis, which is divided into the four main chapters outlined in the Introduction and (2) a sharing of studio-based investigations and performances - included on the accompanying DVD - and a live performance. This sharing of practical work is designed to illuminate how the practice has functioned as a methodology for research and as a means of embodying and making public the research outcomes. Together, it is intended that these different articulations form a clear and useful prism through which the practical and theoretical terrain of the project can be distilled. In this thesis I argue that working pragmatically and creatively with vision within the specificity of the immediate space and situation of performance can function as an efficacious means of understanding solo improvised performance as a form of composition, and the research offers five strategies that collectively function as a template of approaches for generating and shaping improvisational material. The strategies have been developed through instigating a practice/theory feedback loop with the phenomenology and artistic paradigm offered by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I introduce his model of painterly composition as a particular rubric of what I call vision/action responsiveness against which I situate my own compositional approaches. I also outline five of the key ideas that infuse both this rubric and his phenomenology more generally - the significance of the entwining of a ‘questioning’ vision with movement; the chiasm; the visible; the ‘invisible’ and the ‘I can’ - and illuminate the way in which the practice has been developed and refined through a pragmatic interaction with these ideas. The thesis also outlines how these aspects of the phenomenological discourse have been re-framed through this interaction with the practical investigations and I situate my working of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas within the context of other treatments within both dance and theatre. More broadly, I relate this doctorate’s methodological approach and aesthetic concern with vision as a core compositional tool in and for performance to the compositional strategies, aesthetics, methodologies and philosophies of a range of other practitioners, locating the research within the wider field of improvisational performance. As an outcome, this research offers the template of strategies, layered with my particular re-framings of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as an original contribution to the practice and discourse of solo performance improvisation.

This thesis uses studio practice, scholarly research, close reading of text, performance observation and conversation with practitioners to establish diverse readings of Sarah Kane’s Cleansed. It includes original material from the 2012 productions of Cleansed in Japan (Kamome-za Fringe Theatre), and in Ireland (Bare Cheek Theatre). It notes practice on Cleansed in gallery spaces (Cast-Off Drama, UK). It offers a dramaturgical approach to workshopping the play from a feminist and queer position, informed by theories of gender and transgender, and the marginalised, loving and delinquent practice of clowning. The research discusses principles of breath, voice and sexuate difference drawing primarily on the philosophies of Luce Irigaray, on the voice practice of Cicely Berry and the clown teaching of Sue Morrison. The work challenges the ‘in-yer-face’ theatre discourse on Kane arguing that it represents a McDonaldization of its subject matter, and an insidious trivialisation of her texts. It offers new thinking on the opening night of Blasted (1995), suggesting that the ‘furore’ was fuelled by collective male hysteria and superstition; its roots centred in mourning. Analysing Cleansed in relation to Edward Bond’s Saved and Lear, it explores tropes of ghosts, stitching and the silent scream, and argues that Kane militates for gynocentric time and becoming. It analyses the symbol of the perimeter fence as a feature of 1980s Britain, noting the strength of binary associations configured in it with reference to both English football hooliganism (male) and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (female). It argues that Kane sets up heteronormative binaries in Cleansed to debate and contest them. A key conclusion of the thesis is that Cleansed politically addresses and dramatises issues of transgender experience presenting accounts of gender violence, mutability, transitioning, the sharp fractures and silences of gender dysphoria, but also, ultimately, queer desire, love and optimism.

Proprioception is both the means by which people naturally have a pre-reflective awareness of their bodies, and the mechanism by which performers (and others) can develop advanced levels of bodily awareness in the service of physical skill and psychophysical fluency. These two qualities are amongst the most important for contemporary performers, and this thesis demonstrates how an understanding of proprioception and its enhancement provides a strong foundation for performance training. The original contribution to knowledge in this thesis is to cross epistemological boundaries and bring the scientific research, theory and discourse to the field of actor training, where previously this has not been done. This thesis synthesises theories and definitions of proprioception to provide a clear and comprehensive overview, establishes the functions that proprioception performs, maps relationships between proprioception and related terms and concepts, and argues that proprioception provides a comprehensive model for a core physiological foundation for physical performance training. The research questions under investigation are ‘Can proprioception in physical performers be improved and if so, how will increased proprioception be of benefit to the performer?’ Two research studies are carried out to investigate whether proprioception could be improved in physical performers after targeted proprioceptive training. The studies also explore what benefits the performers accrued during the training and how improved proprioception manifested in their levels of performance. The studies show that proprioception can be improved in performers after participating in proprioceptive training, and demonstrate, explore and evidence that this improvement brings an enhancement in physical performance. Methodologically, an approach is proposed to evaluate training practices which is based in a practice led research paradigm. This research is of interest to actors who use their bodies for specialist skilled movement in training and performance and who undertake a physical approach to their work, and particularly pertinent to actor trainers, providing a rationale to inform, support and enhance training methodologies.

The terrorist attacks in the United States of September 11, 2001, were unprecedented in the modern era, and they heralded a new era in politics as the Bush Administration pursued rigorous security policies at home and staged military operations in Afghanistan, and subsequently Iraq. Witness testimonies, and newspaper articles in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, revealed that many of those watching coverage of the attacks on television temporarily mistook the reporting for a Hollywood block-buster, an indication that there was some kind of relationship between 9/11 and Hollywood film-making. This thesis contends that films produced in 9/11’s wake were influenced by the attacks and the response that followed, particularly as they demonstrate either an endorsement or challenge to the Bush Administration, and thus can be interpreted politically. This thesis makes specific reference to a number of key issues that demonstrate how Hollywood dealt with 9/11. Firstly, the industry found itself unsure what films were suitable for release in the new context of victimhood; it co-operated with government officials to help in the post-9/11 effort, while many individuals responded to the emergency with fund-raising and other activities. The issue of how Hollywood narrativised the emotional and psychological consequences of the attacks is also addressed with particular focus on how film can act as a memorial. A key feature of both post-9/11 culture and cinema is a fresh apprehension of the real. In this thesis, the issue of ‘the real’ is studied in two distinct areas: realist aesthetics in fiction film, and how the choice of a particular realism has a particular ideological significance; and the growth of the documentary feature film. If Hollywood’s attention to realist aesthetics meets a certain need for facts and knowledge in a period of crisis, then the desire to ‘understand’ is also addressed by genre’s treatment of American myth. In the case of post-9/11, focus on the Western demonstrates how the issues of ‘strong’ masculinity and ‘Otherness’ of race, are dealt with by Hollywood. One of the prevailing myths surrounding the official 9/11 story is that the latent heroism of the ordinary American citizen was revealed. Here, post-9/11 heroism is analysed with reference to the numerous films based on comic-books, specifically those featuring superheroes that expose particular psychological phenomena peculiar to post-9/11 America. Finally, the concept of the global nature of 9/11 with reference to how Hollywood deals with American catastrophe in a global context, how an American event is represented by non-American film-makers, and how global events are represented by non-American film-makers but viewed through the paradigm of 9/11 is discussed. This thesis, then, studies the political and ideological functions and implications of American film after 9/11 through discourses of ‘the real’ and key issues of self-censorship, co-operation, victimhood, masculinity, race, repression, trauma, and heroism.

The present dissertation investigates the process of transmission of hieroglyphs from Egypt to Early-Modern Europe. This phenomenon has been studied by Egyptologists and Art Historians, mostly from a historical and descriptive standpoint, but here an original theoretical perspective was adopted: Grammatology or the study of writing. In order to understand this process of stimuli diffusion, and its outcome, it was deemed necessary to delve into both the Egyptian writing-system and the hieroglyphic phenomenon in the Renaissance, which led the dissertation to be divided into two parts. The First Part is devoted to The Ancient Hieroglyph: Chapter One addresses the mechanics of Egyptian hieroglyphs, their grammatological functions and the outline of a theory for the text-image dynamics in this context; Chapter Two examines the terminology of “hieroglyph” in Egypt, and its conceptual difference from the Greek and Contemporary views on the matter; Chapter Three describes the historical development of the Egyptian writing and a hypothesis for the emergence of a “hieroglyphic hermeneutics”; Chapter Four is dedicated to Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica, which is regarded as the main vector of diffusion between Ancient and Modern hieroglyphic traditions. The Second Part focuses on The Early-Modern Hieroglyph: Chapter Five outlines the early process of diffusion and the first ideas of hieroglyph in the Renaissance; Chapter Six discusses the creation of new hieroglyphic codes; Chapter Seven tackles the role of hieroglyphs in the birth of the emblematic tradition and its continuous relationship on different culture levels; Chapter Eight look into the Spanish jeroglificos, regarding it as a hybrid genre of hieroglyphs and emblems; Chapter Nine explores the impact of Renaissance hieroglyphs on the cultural perception of writing; and finally, in Chapter Ten, the process of convergence between hieroglyphs, alchemical iconography and emblems is analysed in the light of the previous chapters. It was found that there is an objective relationship between Ancient and Modern hieroglyphs, not easily perceptible and often downplayed as a result of a certain logocentrism, but of great importance – especially in terms of its impact on the establishment of a European text-image tradition. Another conclusion is that, if Renaissance scholars, artists and poets thought it possible to write through images, and in fact created speaking pictures, visual compositions can be considered as a form of writing - being therefore a potential subject of Grammatology. This finding does not exclude other instruments of analysis, but creates a number of theoretical solutions in the field of text-image studies that have been employed in the present study.

This thesis seeks to interrogate the presence and purposes of intertextuality in the work of contemporary French filmmaker Claire Denis, with specific focus on Michael Riffaterre’s theories of ungrammaticality, and Paul Ricoeur’s work on discourse as event or performance. Neither Riffaterre nor Ricoeur’s theories of intertextuality have been engaged in much depth in the study of cinema. Denis’s œuvre, which is composed mainly of feature films, but also includes short films, documentaries, music videos and collaborations on exhibitions and live concerts, is vastly intertextual, engaging with other moving image media, music, visual art, philosophy, poetry and literature, and media coverage of real events. In current criticism, Denis and many of her fellow contemporary French female filmmakers are more commonly referred to through a gender-neutral prism of auteurism rather than with reference to their gender, which may be read as a means for a female director to disengage with any categorisation of her work as resolutely female-centric. The auteur label is problematic, however, as it tends to suggest a state of creative isolation and supremacy, where the author’s recognizable creative voice as it appears throughout their work is more important than any other element of a film. This description sits particularly uneasily with the work of Denis, for whom collaboration and intertextual engagement with other sources is vital; this is evident in Denis’s consistent highlighting of the importance of her regular collaborators’ contributions to her work, and the texts with which her films engage, in interviews. Interviews with Denis, therefore, will form as important an element of my primary research material as her corpus of films and other works. In the introduction to this thesis, I will highlight some of the main themes and concerns of Denis’s work, namely foreignness, intrusion and the body, and introduce the corpus of critical work which has explored them. Such themes will certainly arise in my work, but will always be explored through the foregrounding of Riffaterre and Ricoeur’s theories of intertextuality. I will then proceed to briefly examine how Denis may be read as an intertextual auteur, though the phrase may as yet seem something of an oxymoron. The main body of the thesis thereafter will be used to search Denis’s œuvre for intertexts, aligning specific films and other creative endeavours together wherever they share particular themes or may be read productively through a particular theory of intertextuality. My aim, eventually, will be to examine how this intertextual richness may lead to a re-evaluation of Denis not as an auteur in the conventional sense, but as one for whom collaboration and textual openness are crucial.

This thesis suggests that a range of major and some minor Scottish nineteenth-century artists’ approaches to figurative art, c.1800-1900, were informed by, and in some cases decisively influenced by, the prevalence of naturalism as fostered by the Trustees’ Academy, Edinburgh. The Trustees’ Academy was selected as a case study for this thesis due to its prominent position in art education as a leading Scottish institution, particularly for the first half of the nineteenth century. Despite scholars noting the far-reaching influence of certain nineteenth-century Scottish artists, such as David Wilkie, discussions of Scottish figurative painting predominantly focus on the personal development of artists’ oeuvres or artists, and grouped generally by style or chronology. Moreover, there is no dedicated published study on the nineteenth-century history of the Trustees’ Academy and its pedagogical methods; similarly, the discussions of Scottish naturalism have formed part of larger contributions related to specific artists and movements. This thesis presents new research from unpublished archive papers related to the Trustees’ Academy in the National Archives of Scotland, and it adopts a contextual and comparative approach by exploring the history of the TA and its pedagogical approaches in relation to wider trends in Scottish art and as relevant in England and abroad. Following discussions established by Duncan Macmillan and John Morrison, it suggests that naturalism developed in Scottish figurative painting as a conceptual motif and as a stylistic tool. The conceptual strand was rooted in poetry, which explored both the ‘Celtic’ and ‘pastoral’, with each being evocative of a romanticised, ‘natural’ way of life. This thesis proposes that naturalism, as a style, was more fully developed in the nineteenth century, in part developed by artists’ pursuit of personal depictions of Scotland’s land and people. Naturalism, as posited by this thesis, was part of Scotland’s wider search, post-Union, for its national identity within its ‘union-nationalist’ framework. By elucidating this new approach in Scottish artists’ depictions of the figure, this study aims to enhance our understanding of Scottish nineteenth-century systems of art education and approaches by artists to the model, and to contribute to research on Scottish national identity in nineteenth-century painting.

This thesis investigates the distinct contributions of artists who engage the public with climate data, exploring the role of the artists and the value of their contributions by focusing on two studies of artist-led projects. The first investigates how the author’s own artist led collective, Active Ingredient, engaged the public with climate data through a touring interactive artwork. The second study explores the design of an online platform for capturing, authoring and ‘performing’ climate data. This platform was developed and tested by Active Ingredient in collaboration with researchers from the University of Nottingham, and then used by other artists to engage with climate data. The studies reveal how the artistic projects were designed and experienced, through a mixed methods approach requiring the author to shift perspectives in order to investigate her own arts practice alongside the work of other artists in this field. The findings from these studies suggest that the artists adopt a distinctive voice that fosters an emotional engagement with climate data, rather than an informative or persuasive one, that goes beyond ‘environmental knowing’ towards human-scale, embodied, localized and personalized sense making. This research reveals how the artists use the key strategies of performing data, sensory experience and multiple interpretations to provoke these emotional responses. Highlighting the challenges and opportunities of engaging temporal structures and narratives to represent climate data; treating the data as a new material that is embedded into the artworks and embodied in various sensory forms; abstracting and juxtaposing multiple, contrasting and yet related datasets so as to invite comparisons, while opening up spaces between them for interpretation and dialogue. This results in a discussion of the role of technology within the artistic process, how the artists walk a line between authenticity and emotional engagement in their interpretations of climate data and the importance of an ongoing dialogic collaboration between the artists, researchers and climate scientist that support authentic and meaningful engagements with climate data. The research presents rich descriptions of the artists’ strategies for engaging the public with climate data and revealing that artists have a distinctive and powerful role to play in relation to climate change and sustainability; one that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Climate Science need to understand as they continue to move into this territory, and where HCI in particular might ultimately learn about how to bring an emotional treatment to many other forms of data.

Venice has dominated the study of Ottoman-Italian cultural exchange in the Renaissance period, both in publications and, more recently, exhibitions. However, Venice did not have the monopoly in terms of relations with the Ottomans. This thesis looks further afield than Venice and beyond Gentile Bellini’s 1479-81 sojourn in Istanbul, arguably the best-known instance of such intercultural exchange, to reveal the complexity and diversity of Ottoman-Italian contacts and its varied cultural repercussions. This thesis considers the period 1453-1512 covering the reigns of Mehmed II and Bayezid II. It is not a study of cultural exchange through the trade of luxury goods, but instead focuses on the consequences of specific encounters that are mostly diplomatic. These encounters are explored in four case studies: Rimini, Venice, the Papal States and Mantua. Preferring microhistory to large historical generalisations, the scale of investigation in each section is limited to a particular moment of interaction between that region and the Ottoman Empire, and focuses on the individuals involved. Events are considered from both the Italian and Ottoman perspectives in order to reach a more rounded understanding of this complex meeting of cultures. It looks beyond painted and medallic portraits and demonstrates that Ottoman-Italian interaction can be perceived across a range of media. The marks left on Italian visual culture by relations with the Ottomans are revealed to have been as varied as each individual state’s experience. Comparison of each state’s connections with the Ottomans reveals significant differences in their dealings but also highlights certain common aspects such as the role of individuals as channels of exchange, the categories of objects which travelled across Europe and the manner in which cultural and technological exchange were often entwined. By bringing together three other city-states apart from Venice in a single narrative, this thesis provides a more nuanced account of the rich and varied forms of cultural exchange that have long been overshadowed by Bellini’s portrait.

The traditional notion of material authenticity as being the physical and aesthetic evidence of the artist’s hand in the ‘original’ materials is outmoded. With the changed nature of art must come a rethinking of the concept of authenticity. Authenticity was and is often discussed in relation to attribution, and is traditionally linked with the artwork’s material presence. This thesis questions that assumption, drawing on the literature of philosophy that describes authenticity as someone’s ‘true essence’ in order to propose the significance of the interrelation of the artwork’s multiple attributes to the work’s identity. The artist’s voice has been a crucial source in this re-evaluation, with the voices of Scottish artists, or artists represented by a Scottish gallery or collection, building a picture of the way practitioners think about the significance of materials to their work. These contemporary primary sources have been contextualised with artists’ voices from published compendiums and international case studies. They have revealed the general pragmatism of artists’ approaches, particularly in relation to their creative processes. Therefore, this thesis has based its discussion around seemingly incongruous approaches: a conceptual framework and artists’ practices. However, these poles are reconciled by rooting the investigation at the point of the artwork’s creation. This has meant placing weight on the artist’s intentions for the work and his or her decision-making process, rather than the subsequent interpretations of curators and conservators that inevitably inform the artwork’s institutional afterlife. Doing so has led to a greater understanding of artists’ conceptions of material significance and their thoughts on the identity of their works. This inevitably bears implications for the preservation and display of contemporary art.