Stockholm University of the Arts

“Edu-choreographing” is a play with the post-qualitative concept <italic>edu-crafting</italic> offered by Carol A. Taylor in 2018. Post-qualitative research challenges and expands qualitative research, especially in destabilizing the subject, making it a relational, becoming, embodied and affective subject that is changing <italic>with</italic> the research phenomena and <italic>with</italic> the world. New concepts are created within post-qualitative research to seek to express this relational ontology, destabilization, and entanglement. Edu-crafting - a combination of “education” and “crafting” - is one such concept which has caught our interest. To craft is to design, to create, to let something take shape. We understand Taylor’s edu-crafting as a way of a) focusing on education as something that can be crafted, and b) intense pedagogical entanglements where the teacher is actively crafting the pedagogies, but also, at the same time, the teacher is being crafted right back from the ongoing flow of the pedagogical event. The students, as well as other aspects like spaces, time, discourses, and materials like arts materials, entangle with and have agency on the ongoing crafting of the teaching pedagogies.

The training of high-quality, robust machine learning models for speech-driven 3D facial animation requires a large, diverse dataset of high-quality audio-animation pairs. To overcome the lack of such a dataset, recent work has introduced large pre-trained speech encoders that are robust to variations in the input audio and, therefore, enable the facial animation model to generalize across speakers, audio quality, and languages. However, the resulting facial animation models are prohibitively large and lend themselves only to offline inference on a dedicated machine. In this work, we explore on-device, real-time facial animation models in the context of game development. We overcome the lack of large datasets by using hybrid knowledge distillation with pseudo-labeling. Given a large audio dataset, we employ a high-performing teacher model to train very small student models. In contrast to the pre-trained speech encoders, our student models only consist of convolutional and fully-connected layers, removing the need for attention context or recurrent updates. In our experiments, we demonstrate that we can reduce the memory footprint to up to 3.4 MB and required future audio context to up to 81 ms while maintaining high-quality animations. This paves the way for on-device inference, an important step towards realistic, model-driven digital characters.

This article is meant to serve as a guide for developing a short-term (typically 2 to 3 weeks long) faculty-led study abroad program. I will focus solely on my work in Stockholm, Sweden during summer 2023. This article will be particularly helpful to faculty members who are new to developing their own study abroad programs. I have six suggested steps for developing a successful faculty-led program. These six steps include: thinking about what you want for students and your own career; building on-campus partnerships; Recruiting and supporting students as early as possible; making the program itinerary interactive and rewarding for your students; preparing students for international travel; reflecting at the conclusion of the program while continuing to build long-term relationships with global partners.

This article follows the becoming-artographic of four colleagues working within the field of dance pedagogy at Stockholm University of the Arts. The four colleagues – Tone, Camilla, Stina and Madelaine - are part of a larger professional learning community of staff that together has carried out a large change project restructuring the BA program in Dance Pedagogy with an A/R/Tographic approach, emphasising the artist, researcher and teacher in dance pedagogy. To qualify staff to work with A/R/Tography the open course A/R/Tography in Theory and Practice in Higher Education (7,5 ECT) was developed. The four authors of this article were all involved in the first round of the open course, and the course is the entanglement from which the four colleagues har explored the question that guides this article: How is A/R/Tography being developed for the field of dance pedagogy at the local context of Stockholm University of the Arts in an ongoing collaborative learning community of teachers at the institution? Their exploration has resulted in three artographic expositions, which this article travels into. The exploration is based in a diffractive methodology, and thinks-with theory from artography and expanded choreography. The insights arrived at are discussed as values, performative pedagogy, expanded choreography, a researching approach as choreographers/researchers/teachers, and professional development among staff in higher dance education. Photo: Camilla Reppen

This chapter contributes to the discussion on moving in and through site-specific and urban space; at the cusp between higher dance education and everyday life, creating a post-Certauian tear through space and time as a call for agency. It draws from my Ph.D. research Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, where I propose an experience of society from within a Japanese practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. Gender is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body. The original practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage. My research asks whether suriashi also could be a method for agency to act, as being active, or to activate, and temporally alter spaces outside the theatre; i.e. the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical context. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. Suriashi performed in urban spaces was able to unfold and identify new relations between aesthetic practice and politics, between movements and monuments in the city as a way to critique the unequal distribution of power, and by looking for new ways to protest/resist peacefully. I assess this from three of my many experiments with slow suriashi walkings. The first one is Suriashi Intervention, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. This experiment did two things: it engendered the city’s unacknowledged dance archive, while performing critique of the unequal distribution of funding of the arts. The second experiment is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. It showed how artistic methods are necessary when democracy collapses. The third experiment regards introducing suriashi as methodology to master students of Contemporary Performative Arts at University of Gothenburg. Here, suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces, necessary for the art student. To further contextualize, I interlace my arguments through positionings by sociologist Doreen Massey.

The arts program has been available for Swedish upper secondary school students since the beginning of the 1990s. The program, which has a nationally standardized curriculum, has become one of the most popular study programs. Currently, the upper secondary school system is subject to reform. This article examines students' experiences of choosing theatre as their main subject in upper secondary education. A preliminary analysis is presented which is based on data from an open-ended inquiry answered by thirty students. The students' responses actualize the dimension between drama as personal development and theatre as artistic performance. There seems to be consensus about theatre studies generating both personal development and specific skills. The students also appreciate the variation and stimulation that theatre brings compared with “ordinary” school subjects. This is true even for less-motivated students who claim that theatre helps them to make it through upper secondary school. “Theatre is underestimated—it does more for you than you believe” (Swedish upper secondary school student).

Summary. The life span of the erythrocytes of healthy and of tumour‐bearing mice was determined with glycine‐2–14C as a tracer. The rate of destruction of the erythrocytes of healthy mice was found to be a function of the age of the erythrocytes. The average life span of the erythrocytes of healthy male TE mice varied between 40–46 days, the mean value was 42 days. The rorresponcling figure for healthy male C3H mice was 40 days. After the transplantation of an Ehrlich ascites carcinoma growing in the solid form, the average life span of the erythrocytes formed in healthy male TE mice was shortened to 26 days. The erythrocytes of cancerous mice were found to be destroyed at random. Their mean survival time was 14 days in inale TE mice bearing Ehrlich ascites carcinoma growing in the solid form and 16 days in female C3H mice bearing spontaneous mammary carcinoma. The rates of haemoglobin and red corpuscle formation and destruction were about 3 times the rates in healthy mice.

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