Faculty Research and Publications
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- ItemHell is other girls: belonging and identity in three plays by Joan MacLeod(University of Toronto Press, 2002) Scott, ShelleyA good number of books published around the turn of the millennium attempt to address the complexities of feminist identity for young women, suggesting that girls have a wider array of possible identities and empowering identifications than ever before. Yet we live in a time when there is a great deal of tension between the variety of role models available to girls, on the one hand, and the stultifying restrictions of a culture that still makes them unable to value and emulate any but the most conventional and conventionally beautiful of those models, on the other.
- ItemBodies, form and nature: three Canadian plays and reproductive choice in the 1990s(Liverpool University Press, 2004) Scott, ShelleyThis article will deal with the ways in which three contemporary English-Canadian women playwrights have explored issues of reproductive choice in their creative work. In Susan G. Cole's comedy A Fertile Imagination, a lesbian couple attempts to have a child through artificial insemination. In Linda Griffiths' intimate character study The Darling Family, subtitled 'a duet for three', a couple grapples with the implications of an abortion. Deanne Taylor's musical fantasy, 2nd Nature, positions a woman's experience of her body and childbearing capacity as a force opposed to industrialized urban life. Despite the fact that all three of these plays deal with 'real' issues, it is not surprising that their authors have stayed away from traditional theatrical realism. In these three plays, the authors are attempting to make the audience look at 'nature' in a new way, and each is well aware that experiments with form will be the most important means of achieving a fresh perspective.
- ItemDesdemona, Juliet and Constance meet the third wave(O.I.S.E., 2006) Scott, ShelleyIn this article, the author explores a product of Canadian theatre, the play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) by Ann-Marie MacDonald, and demonstrates how its continuing popularity may be due to an engagement with sexual politics and postmodernism the author considers fundamental to third-wave feminism.
- ItemEmbodiment as a healing process: Native American women and performance(Arizona University Press, 2009) Scott, Shelley
- ItemFinding Regina: third wave feminism and regional identity(Canadian Plains Research Centre Press, 2011) Scott, Shelley
- ItemNightwood Theatre, Asian Canadian women, and China Doll: the ties that bind(Playwrights Canada Press, 2011) Scott, Shelley
- ItemCourting Johanna: adapting Alice Munro for the stage(Peter Lang, 2015) Scott, Shelley
- ItemSharon Pollock and the scene of the crime(University of Calgary Press, 2015) Scott, Shelley
- ItemUnraveling mysteries of personal performance style; biomechanics of left-hand position changes (shifting) in violin performance(PeerJ, 2015) Visentin, Peter; Li, Shiming; Tardif, Guillaume; Shan, GongbingInstrumental music performance ranks among the most complex of learned human behaviors, requiring development of highly nuanced powers of sensory and neural discrimination, intricate motor skills, and adaptive abilities in a temporal activity. Teaching, learning and performing on the violin generally occur within musico-cultural parameters most often transmitted through aural traditions that include both verbal instruction and performance modeling. In most parts of the world, violin is taught in a manner virtually indistinguishable from that used 200 years ago. The current study uses methods from movement science to examine the “how” and “what” of left-hand position changes (shifting), a movement skill essential during violin performance. In doing so, it begins a discussion of artistic individualization in terms of anthropometry, the performer-instrument interface, and the strategic use of motor behaviors. Results based on 540 shifting samples, a case series of 6 professional-level violinists, showed that some elements of the skill were individualized in surprising ways while others were explainable by anthropometry, ergonomics and entrainment. Remarkably, results demonstrated each violinist to have developed an individualized pacing for shifts, a feature that should influence timing effects and prove foundational to aesthetic outcomes during performance. Such results underpin the potential for scientific methodologies to unravel mysteries of performance that are associated with a performer’s personal artistic style.
- ItemThe influence of X-factor (trunk rotation) and experience on the quality of the badminton forehand smash(De Gruyter Open, 2016) Zhang, Zhao; Li, Shiming; Wan, Bingjun; Visentin, Peter; Jiang, Qinxian; Dyck, Mary; Li, Hua; Shan, GongbingNo existing studies of badminton technique have used full-body biomechanical modeling based on three dimensional (3D) motion capture to quantify the kinematics of the sport. The purposes of the current study were to: 1) quantitatively describe kinematic characteristics of the forehand smash using a 15-segment, full-body biomechanical model, 2) examine and compare kinematic differences between novice and skilled players with a focus on trunk rotation (the X-factor), and 3) through this comparison, identify principal parameters that contributed to the quality of the skill. Together, these findings have the potential to assist coaches and players in the teaching and learning of the forehand smash. Twenty-four participants were divided into two groups (novice, n = 10 and skilled, n = 14). A 10-camera VICON MX40 motion capture system (200 frames/s) was used to quantify full-body kinematics, racket movement and the flight of the shuttlecock. Results confirmed that skilled players utilized more trunk rotation than novices. In two ways, trunk rotation (the X-factor) was shown to be vital for maximizing the release speed of the shuttlecock – an important measure of the quality of the forehand smash. First, more trunk rotation invoked greater lengthening in the pectoralis major (PM) during the preparation phase of the stroke which helped generate an explosive muscle contraction. Second, larger range of motion (ROM) induced by trunk rotation facilitated a whip-like (proximal to distal) control sequence among the body segments responsible for increasing racket speed. These results suggest that training intended to increase the efficacy of this skill needs to focus on how the X-factor is incorporated into the kinematic chain of the arm and the racket.
- ItemWhat about performers do free jazz improvisers agree upon? A case study(Frontiers Media, 2017) Pras, Amandine; Schober, Michael F.; Spiro, NetaWhen musicians improvise freely together-not following any sort of script, predetermined harmonic structure, or "referent"-to what extent do they understand what they are doing in the same way as each other? And to what extent is their understanding privileged relative to outside listeners with similar levels of performing experience in free improvisation? In this exploratory case study, a saxophonist and a pianist of international renown who knew each other’s work but who had never performed together before were recorded while improvising freely for 40 min. Immediately afterwards the performers were interviewed separately about the just-completed improvisation, first from memory and then while listening to two 5 min excerpts of the recording in order to prompt specific and detailed commentary. Two commenting listeners from the same performance community (a saxophonist and drummer) listened to, and were interviewed about, these excerpts. Some months later, all four participants rated the extent to which they endorsed 302 statements that had been extracted from the four interviews and anonymized. The findings demonstrate that these free jazz improvisers characterized the improvisation quite differently, selecting different moments to comment about and with little overlap in the content of their characterizations. The performers were not more likely to endorse statements by their performing partner than by a commenting listener from the same performance community, and their patterns of agreement with each other (endorsing or dissenting with statements) across multiple ratings—their interrater reliability as measured with Cohen’s kappa—was only moderate, and not consistently higher than their agreement with the commenting listeners. These performers were more likely to endorse statements about performers’ thoughts and actions than statements about the music itself, and more likely to endorse evaluatively positive than negative statements. But these kinds of statements were polarizing; the performers were more likely to agree with each other in their ratings of statements about the music itself and negative statements. As in Schober and Spiro (2014), the evidence supports a view that fully shared understanding is not needed for joint improvisation by professional musicians in this genre and that performing partners can agree with an outside listener more than with each other.
- ItemGame development: Linda Griffiths' Games: who wants to play?(Playwrights Canada Press, 2018) Scott, Shelley
- ItemMusical style affects the strength of harmonic expectancy(Sage, 2019) Vuvan, Dominique T.Research in music perception has typically focused on common-practice music (tonal music from the Western European tradition, ca. 1750–1900) as a model of Western musical structure. However, recent research indicates that different styles within Western tonal music may follow distinct harmonic syntaxes. The current study investigated whether listeners can adapt their harmonic expectations when listening to different musical styles. In two experiments, listeners were presented with short musical excerpts that primed either rock or classical music, followed by a timbre-matched cadence. Results from both experiments indicated that listeners prefer V-I cadences over bVII-I cadences within a classical context, but that this preference is significantly diminished in a rock context. Our findings provide empirical support for the idea that different musical styles do employ different harmonic syntaxes. Furthermore, listeners are not only sensitive to these differences, but are able to adapt their expectations depending on the listening context.
- ItemProbe tone paradigm reveals less differentiated tonal hierarchies in rock music(University of California Press, 2021) Vuvan, Dominique T.; Hughes, BrynKrumhansl and Kessler’s (1982) pioneering experiments on tonal hierarchies in Western music have long been considered the gold standard for researchers interested in the mental representation of musical pitch structure. The current experiment used the probe tone technique to investigate the tonal hierarchy in classical and rock music. As predicted, the observed profiles for these two styles were structurally similar, reflecting a shared underlying Western tonal structure. Most interestingly, however, the rock profile was significantly less differentiated than the classical profile, reflecting theoretical work that describes pitch organization in rock music as more permissive and less hierarchical than in classical music. This line of research contradicts the idea that music from the common-practice era is representative of all Western musics, and challenges music cognition researchers to explore style-appropriate stimuli and models of pitch structure for their experiments.
- ItemDo we really want to keep the gate threshold that high?(2021) Brooks, Grace; Pras, Amandine; Elafros, Athena; Lockett, MonicaDrawing upon the survey instruments of Lewis and Neville [1], Nadal [2], and Yang and Carroll [3], we conducted an online survey that captured experiences of discrimination and microaggressions reported by 387 recording engineers, producers, and studio assistants living in 46 different countries. Our statistical analyses reveal highly significant and systemic gender inequalities within the field, e.g., cisgender women experience many more sexually inappropriate comments (p < e-14, large effect size) and unwanted comments about their physical appearance (p < e-12, large effect size) than do cisgender men, and they are much more likely to face challenges to their authority (p < e-13, large effect size) and expertise (p < e-10, large effect size). A comparison of our results with a study about women’s experiences of microaggressions within STEM academia [3] indicates that the recording studio workplace scores 33% worse on the silencing and maginalization of women, 33% worse on gender-related workplace microaggressions, and 24% worse on sexual objectification. These findings call for serious reflection on the part of the community to progress from awareness to collective action that will unlock the control room for women and other marginalized groups of studio professionals.
- ItemProcess and relationship: a walking-dialogue(Litwin Books, 2023) Cowan, Sandra A.; van Leeuwen, MiaAs an interdisciplinary duo from an academic library background and a performing arts background, we underwent a process of recording a series of dialogues about our respective research practices in and between our fields. As we conversed, we walked in separate locations while remaining connected by our phones, permitting us to explore a kinetic and spontaneous approach as a mode of inquiry. An experiment and intended provocation to demonstrate that, just as there are other ways to research, there are other ways of knowing, generating, and presenting ideas that articulate the value of alternative methods within the academy, specifically within the realm of arts-based research. Troubled by the fact that what we perform and produce as research is not easily sanctioned as “research” within the library or the academy, we discuss what it is about these arts-based methods of experimentation, creation, practice, and knowledge-seeking that we find so generative and value so highly. The main themes that we circled and returned to throughout this walking-dialogue fell into the following categories: embodiment on a local, living landscape; fragmentation, collage, and the interstices of juxtaposition; unknowing, failure and doubt; and diverse ways of knowing.