Malcolm McClay, Pliner professor of art/sculpture, was awarded an LSU Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research “Big Ideas in Arts and Humanities” grant for $25,000 investing in the project Unwinding the Universe. The interdisciplinary project team includes Stephen David Beck, professor of music; Elia Soto, assistant professor of psychology; Travis Brisini, assistant professor of communication studies; and Jeff Becker, a director, designer and sculptor.
Unwinding the Universe will address Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and other neurodivergent characteristics as both a lived experience and a prevalent neurodevelopmental condition through a series of live performances, panel discussions, and participatory research that leads to peer-reviewed articles and conference presentations. The performance will be presented to the audience from the point of view of four disciplines: visual/performance art, behavioral science and psychology, music, and theater.
“The four involved PIs bring different skills and experiences to the project, and that diversity of knowledge and approach from their respective field of study will naturally contribute to a set of performances and other deliverables that effectively express the challenges and conditions that impact those on the neurodivergent spectrum,” McClay said.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a prevalent neurodevelopmental condition characterized by inattention and hyperactive-impulsive behaviors (APA, 2023). Most recent estimates suggest that approximately 1 in 9 children meet diagnostic criteria for ADHD. While primarily considered a childhood disorder, salient and closely associated functional impairments of ADHD persist throughout the lifespan, including academic, social, emotional, and occupational outcomes. Only 30% of children with ADHD will go on attend higher education and those that do are three times more likely to drop out of college than their neurotypically developing peers.
“Drawing inspiration from those with ADHD that have managed to overcome and embrace the many cognitive and sensory/perceptual differences they experience is crucial and an impactful first step towards broadening our understanding of ADHD, reducing stigma, and, ultimately, improving life outcomes,” the researchers wrote.
The central deliverable of the project is a performance artwork written and performed by McClay, with sound design and performance by Dr. Beck, and directed by Becker. Work-in-progress performances will be held May/June 2025 at Coates Hall Black Box, with the final production at Catapult Theater, New Orleans, in December 2025. The performances will be followed by a panel session led by Dr. Soto, with experts on ADHD. Additional participatory research will lead to a scholarly article publication of findings regarding audience members understanding of ADHD knowledge and stigma. Dr. Brisini, as a performance theorist and academic journal editor, will produce an article that places the performance in a contemporary and historical context as part of the multidisciplinary arts-based research movement.
About the Research Team
Malcolm McClay (PI), professor in the LSU School of Art, was born in Northern Ireland, and his creative practice is informed by the strong performance art scene that emerged there during the political upheaval known as “the troubles.” Recent projects revisit mythological, monastic, and domestic sites in Ireland. These sites are mined for their potential to act as arenas for durational performance rituals that explore notions of connection and disconnection, both with the natural world and with aspects of the self. The Celtic notion of the ‘thin place’, a space where the veil between the temporal and celestial worlds has grown thin, provides a way of thinking through these ideas, anchoring the invisible and the elusive in actual sites and in the body itself. Through documented performances and multi-media installations, McClay consistently exposes the tension between two conflicting mental states, that of stressed distraction, and a more focused state of contemplation. This has led him to explore the roots of this dichotomy through the lens of his own ADHD.
“My role in this project is to present the lived experience of someone with ADHD through live performance in terms of the difficulties but also the strength-based approaches to ADHD. All of the objects, movements, sounds, and text created for this performance are designed to present the most direct and powerful means of communicating this experience to the audience on a visceral level by taking the metaphorical and making it a physical, tangible experience,” he said.
Dr. Stephen David Beck (Co-PI) is a composer of electroacoustic and acoustic music and is the Derryl & Helen Haymon Professor of Music at the LSU School of Music. He also holds a joint appointment with the Center for Computation & Technology. His recent compositional interests have focused on immersive audio works using granular synthesis to break down spoken text into small 50ms chunks and reorder, reintegrate, and rebuild them to create new sounds and sonic landscapes across large speaker arrays. Beck will produce the various soundscapes central to the sound design of the project and will coordinate the sound during all performances. He will record McClay speaking the narratives that will be part of the overall performance and using that material to create multiple sections using the granular decomposition-recomposition techniques he has focused on over the past few years. The goal will be to make the vocal sounds both intelligible and unintelligible, creating a sense of confusion, distraction, and periodic clarity. The work will be produced for a 5.1 surround sound system, with five speakers placed around the audience and one subwoofer for low-frequency sounds. This will move the audience closer to the sound design and to the language of the performer. The result will be an original sound composition created and recorded for the performance.
Dr. Elia F Soto (Co-PI) is a McNair Scholar and assistant professor in the department of psychology at LSU. Her programmatic line of research focuses on understanding, assessing, and targeting underlying neurocognitive mechanisms associated with neurodevelopmental disorders and related functional outcomes. She has specific clinical expertise in ADHD cognitive and perceptual differences across the lifespan and research proficiency in data collection and analysis of survey data. Evidenced by her strong records of collaboration across over 25 publications, her expertise on this grant will serve two goals: 1) facilitating the dissemination of ADHD and neurodiversity topics to the general public readily and accurately and 2) evaluating the utility of an ADHD- inspired live performance to both increase knowledge of and reduce stigma of ADHD to the general public. To these ends, Dr. Soto will play a moderating role in assisting with recruiting mental health specialists as panelist speakers and collaborating with project members to ensure an accurate representation of ADHD and associated topics on all project materials. Additionally, Dr. Soto will be instrumental in research data collection of audience members’ knowledge and beliefs of ADHD symptomatology before and after each live performance using a brief 5–10-minute digital survey. Data collected from the proposed grant will serve to produce scholarly forums, including manuscript and poster publications, to examine the impact of a live performance illustrating the unique visual and auditory sensory and perceptual experiences to bring awareness to the lived experiences of people with neurodevelopmental conditions, such as ADHD. After each performance, a panel of experts led by Dr. Soto will engage in discussion with the audience on the significance and impact of the work to both answer their questions and glean how they responded and understood what they had just experienced.
Dr. Travis Brisini (Co-PI) is a performance studies scholar and Assistant Professor in the department of communication studies whose arts-based research focuses on the exploration of scientific topics through live performance and performative writing. Brisini’s research in performance theory and methodology is underpinned by posthumanist and new materialist onto-epistemological commitments and uses the adaptation of scientific fact and story for the stage to expand and aestheticize these topics.
He serves a variety of roles on this project team. Given the nature of his research—at the intersections of science and live performance—and his recent lengthy tenure as an academic journal editor, his primary contribution will be writing and aiding others in writing, peer-reviewed academic publications, catalog entries, and other forms of public scholarship concerning the project. In particular, Brisini will be key in framing this performance and its associated publications, lectures, and outreach efforts as part of a multidisciplinary arts-based research movement that currently enjoys significant prestige in international qualitative research circles. Moreover, neurodiversity—understood both from a psychobiological as well as ethical and normative philosophical framework—is a topic of increasing prominence in the arts, in no small part due to increasing diagnostic testing and decreasing social stigma. The rise of a “neuro mixed academia,” therefore, represents a chance not only for public outreach and personal affirmation but also the exploration of embodied, sculptural, aesthetic artworks inextricably informed and rooted in neurodiversity. Brisini’s own performance work—both as a solo performer and as the director of large-cast original devised performances—complements his role as a dramaturgical and theoretical wordsmith and will allow him to aid in the rehearsal and staging of the performance.
Jeff Becker is a director, designer, and sculptor based in New Orleans. In 1990 along with Malcolm McClay, he co-founded CRISUS, a site-specific performance group that utilized innovative kinetic sets, sculpture, film and machines. He is a founding member of “Catapult”, a collective performance laboratory dedicated to nurturing original design-driven performance and socially active art, serving the New Orleans theater community and colleagues nationally and abroad. Jeff Becker has not only directed McClay’s performances for the past 30 years, he has served as an advisor and collaborator through all aspects of the development process. He has been an advisor on this project since its inception and will serve as the artistic director of the live performance Unwinding the Universe.
2025 Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research Awards
The LSU Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research has invested $1.8 million in seed funding for interdisciplinary research and creative works to solve problems and improve lives.
“Since the launch of LSU’s Provost’s Fund for Innovation in Research (PFIR) in 2022, the initiative has provided more than $5 million to support interdisciplinary research aligned with President Tate’s Scholarship First Agenda,” said Roy Haggerty, LSU Executive Vice President & Provost. “Through this investment, faculty have advanced research in five priority areas—agriculture, biomedicine and biotechnology, coast and environment, defense and cybersecurity, and energy—addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing Louisiana and beyond.”
See other College of Art & Design faculty who received Provost Fund for Innovation in Research awards:
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