Books by Alex Mermikides
Performance and the Medical Body, 2016
This edited collection focuses on performance practice and analysis that engages with medical and... more This edited collection focuses on performance practice and analysis that engages with medical and biomedical sciences. After locating the 'biologization' of theatre at the turn of the twentieth century, it examines a range of contemporary practices that respond to understandings of the human body as revealed by biomedical science.
PERFORMANCE, MEDICINE AND THE HUMAN, 2020
This book explores parallels between two ancient practices - performance and medicine – that are ... more This book explores parallels between two ancient practices - performance and medicine – that are currently coming together in unprecedented ways on theatre stages, in arts and health initiatives, in healthcare education and in medical settings. This convergence sheds new light on what it means to be human at a time when the 'concept of the human' is being 'exploded' (Braidotti, 2013).
Papers by Alex Mermikides
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2018
Intellect Books, Apr 1, 2022
Intellect Books, Apr 1, 2022
Here's What I Did with My Body One Day features a sharp and witty script that helps propel a... more Here's What I Did with My Body One Day features a sharp and witty script that helps propel a detective thriller story about genetics and inheritance. The set provides an elegant neutral space that becomes animated by projections to create settings in and around Paris. The media ...
Careful (2016 - ) is a performance created by Chimera, a research network led by Alex Mermikides ... more Careful (2016 - ) is a performance created by Chimera, a research network led by Alex Mermikides and operating out of Kingston University. Chimera explores performance-making that engages with aspects of the medical domain, including biomedical science; illness experiences; and medical practices. While our previous project, bloodlines, centred on patients’ perspectives of deep illness, Careful now turns the focus from the patient to the healthcare worker, specifically nurses. Created in collaboration with the colleagues in the nursing department, it explores nursing as a performance and performance as a form of caregiving. A programme of arts-based training for nurses is currently being developed alongside the performance. The first phase of Careful was supported with public funds through the Arts Council of England. Nursing faces chronic under-recruitment, high drop out and poor resourcing that risk atrocities in patient care such as those described in the Francis Report (2016). Nu...
Introduction: Dramatic representations of cancer patients play an important role in engaging the ... more Introduction: Dramatic representations of cancer patients play an important role in engaging the public. However, mainstream formats such as Hollywood film, risk sentimentalising the subjective experience of the patient and ‘dumbing down’ the science. This research tests how an ‘alternative’ form of live performance engages audiences. Materials (or patients) and methods: A performance (entitled bloodlines) was created through ‘devising’, that is, through group collaboration rather than from an individually authored play script. This methodology encouraged knowledge exchange within the creative team (a survivor of adult leukaemia, his stem cell donor, medical experts and artists) and resulted in an unconventional dramatic form combining lectures and dance. Six public performances took place between July 2013 and April 2014 in the United Kingdom and Belgium. Audience responses were gathered through post-show questionnaires. Results: Analysis of qualitative data indicates that the perf...
This paper addresses the Performing Care symposium project to rethink performance as a practice o... more This paper addresses the Performing Care symposium project to rethink performance as a practice of caregiving. The project evaluation supports the view that performance can enhance healthcare practices. For example, the use of performance in nurse education allows nurses to look at caring and themselves in a different way. It also suggest that exposure to the practices and values of nursing can allow performance practitioners to reconceive performance as a care based discipline.
This chapter offers a survey and analysis of women’s representation within, and experiences of, d... more This chapter offers a survey and analysis of women’s representation within, and experiences of, devising practice in the UK today. Recognizing the role played by feminism in the emergence of devising practices in the 1970s, the chapter tests the extent to which the practice continues to offer opportunities for women’s self-representation and authorship. To what extent do contemporary female practitioners continue to regard devising as a methodology through which they can operate more “feminine” models of organization and as an opportunity for self-representation? How do the forms employed by today’s devising women reflect their perspectives on society? Drawing on interviews with a representative sample of female devisers, the chapter considers the intersections between ideology, collaborative methodologies, and dramaturgies from the perspective of the contemporary British female devising practitioner.
Learning with hidden variables is a central challenge in probabilistic graphical models that has ... more Learning with hidden variables is a central challenge in probabilistic graphical models that has important implications for many real-life problems. The classical approach is using the Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. This algorithm, however, can get trapped in local maxima. In this paper we explore a new approach that is based on the Information Bottleneck principle. In this approach, we view the learning problem as a tradeoff between two information theoretic objectives. The first is to make the hidden variables uninformative about the identity of specific instances. The second is to make the hidden variables informative about the ob served attributes. By exploring different tradeoffs be tween these two objectives, we can gradually converge on a high-scoring solution. As we show, the result ing, Information Bottleneck Expectation Maximization (IB-EM) algorithm, manages to find solutions that are superior to standard EM methods.
Introduction People Show in Rehearsal: People Show #118 The Birthday Tour S. Behrndt Station Hous... more Introduction People Show in Rehearsal: People Show #118 The Birthday Tour S. Behrndt Station House Opera J. Kelly The Making of Faulty Optic's Dead Wedding: Inertia, Chaos and Adaptation T. Moss Devising and Advocacy: The Red Room's Unstated G. White The Distance Covered: Third Angel's 9 Billion Miles from Home P. Stainer Delirium: in rehearsal with theatre O H. Freshwater Clash and Consensus in Shunt's 'big shows' and the Lounge A. Mermikides Sculpting the Territory: Gecko's The Arab and The Jew in Process J. Smart
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2016
This paper presents a hardware processor for 100 Gbps wireless data link layer. A serial Reed-Sol... more This paper presents a hardware processor for 100 Gbps wireless data link layer. A serial Reed-Solomon decoder requires a clock of 12.5 GHz to fulfill timings constraints of the transmission. Receiving a single Ethernet frame on a 100 Gbps physical layer may be faster than accessing DDR3 memory. Processing so fast streams on a state-of-the-art FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) requires a dedicated approach. Thus, the paper presents lightweight RS FEC engine, frames fragmentation, aggregation, and a protocol with selective fragment retransmission. The implemented FPGA demonstrator achieves nearly 120 Gbps and accepts bit error rate (BER) up to 2𝑒 -3. Moreover, redundancy added to the frames is adopted according to the channel BER by a dedicated link adaptation algorithm. At the end, ASIC synthesis results are presented including detailed statistics of consumed energy per bit.
Nature, 1967
Can empathy be taughtand if so, how? That question has taxed nurse educators, particularly since ... more Can empathy be taughtand if so, how? That question has taxed nurse educators, particularly since the NMC's renewed emphasis on compassionate care. It was addressed in an unusual way on 5 June, when 500 student nurses attended a performance of Careful at the Rose Theatre, Kingston. Created by Dr Alex Mermikides, theatre expert at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, in collaboration with staff and students in the nursing department at Kingston University and St George's, University of London, Careful puts its audience in the role of patients. The five nurse characters address the audience directly, alternatively comforting, persuading, informing, encouraging, teasing and, in one case, berating them. On the cardiac ward, nurse Helena is driven to distraction by Mr Matthews' smoking habit; children's nurse Pip must cannulate a distraught Darren; nurse Dom blames herself for missing vital clues about a diabetic teen; newly qualified nurse Josh is haunted by his first patient; and midwife Archana is utterly exhausted. Each scenario tests the nurse's ability to empathise with their patient. These exchanges are interwoven with dance sequences in which performers enact the unspoken feelings of nurse and patient. Lecturer Sally Richardson commented: Watching the actors perform as nurses reminds us that caregiving, like acting or dance, is a skill, demanding effort, sensitivity, self-awareness and an understanding of other people's perspectives and positions.
This book explores parallels between two ancient practices - performance and medicine – that are ... more This book explores parallels between two ancient practices - performance and medicine – that are currently coming together in unprecedented ways on theatre stages, in arts and health initiatives, in healthcare education and in medical settings. This convergence sheds new light on what it means to be human at a time when the 'concept of the human' is being 'exploded' (Braidotti, 2013).
Performance and the Medical Body
Nature Immunology
Drama out of a crisis: the cultural sector responds to healthcare professionals impacted by COVID... more Drama out of a crisis: the cultural sector responds to healthcare professionals impacted by COVID-19 Support for healthcare workers impacted by COVID-19 comes from the performing arts. I n the UK, as in other countries, there is increasing concern for healthcare workers directly impacted by the coronavirus epidemic. Anger about the insufficient supplies of personal protective equipment is fueled by the growing tally of COVID-19-related deaths regularly reported in the media (https://www.bbc. com/news/health-52242856). There are worrying predictions that those working in COVID-19 wards will experience post-traumatic stress disorder (https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/health/ coronavirus-uk-nhs-intensive-care-nursesdoctors-ptsd-a9450731.html). Even those not on the frontline are experiencing disorientating changes to their working lives or training. If there is any consolation in this difficult situation, it lies in the outpouring of public support for a group of professionals that has tended to be overlooked and undervalued. This was amply demonstrated by the flood of donations collected for Captain John Moore's sponsored walk (https://www. justgiving.com/fundraising/tomswalk) of his own garden; over £1.5 million was raised for National Health Service (NHS) charities. It is also apparent in the weekly rituals of applause (https://clapforourcarers.co.uk/) for health and social care workers-claps, clanging of pots and pans and spontaneous choruses of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Now, support for healthcare workers has also come from an unexpected source-those in the performing arts. Performing Medicine (https:// performingmedicine.com/) is a charitable organization led by the theatre company Clod Ensemble. For over 20 years, it has provided arts-based training for medical students and professionals. Their pioneering work was recognized in two recent reports on arts and health-Creative Health
British Journal of Nursing
Medical Humanities, 2016
We report a survey of audience members' responses (147 questionnaires collected at seven performa... more We report a survey of audience members' responses (147 questionnaires collected at seven performances) and 10 in-depth interviews (five former patients and two family members, three medical practitioners) to bloodlines, a medical performance exploring the experience of haematopoietic stem-cell transplant as treatment for acute leukaemia. Performances took place in 2014 and 2015. The article argues that performances that are created through interdisciplinary collaboration can convey otherwise 'inaccessible' illness experiences in ways that audience members with personal experience recognise as familiar, and find emotionally affecting. In particular such performances are adept at interweaving 'objectivist' (objective, medical) and 'subjectivist' (subjective, emotional) perspectives of the illness experience, and indeed, at challenging such distinctions. We suggest that reflecting familiar yet hard-to-articulate experiences may be beneficial for the ongoing emotional recovery of people who have survived serious disease, particularly in relation to the isolation that they experience during and as a consequence of their treatment.
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Books by Alex Mermikides
Papers by Alex Mermikides