This article attempts to outline the most important assumptions of the work of Kokyu Studio led by Przemysław Błaszczak and Joanna Kurzyńska and based at the Grotowski Institute in Wrocław in Poland. The Studio’s educational and artistic programme is founded on the idea of a ‘place of practice’, which captures the philosophical, practical, aesthetic, and ethical horizon of the activities common to all members of the Studio. The regularity of practice, exposure to long working processes, and the improvement of the quality of movement, which are rooted in several traditions and methods of work, allow practitioners to study their own development and integrate various sources of knowledge. Reflections here also ask questions about the place and application of such a model of work in the context of contemporary challenges for actor-performer training.

There is no all-encompassing or universally accepted definition of the difficult airway, and it has traditionally been approached as a problem chiefly rooted in anesthesiology. However, with airway obstruction reported as the second leading cause of mortality on the battlefield and first-pass success (FPS) rates for out-of-hospital endotracheal intubation (ETI) as low as 46.4%, the need to better understand the difficult airway in the context of the prehospital setting is clear. In this review, we seek to redefine the concept of the “difficult airway” so that future research can target solutions better tailored for prehospital, and more specifically, combat casualty care. Contrasting the most common definitions, which narrow the scope of practice to physicians and a handful of interventions, we propose that the difficult airway is simply one that cannot be quickly obtained. This implies that it is a situation arrived at through a multitude of factors, namely the Patient, Operator, Setting, and Technology (POST), but also more importantly, the interplay between these elements. Using this amended definition and approach to the difficult to manage airway, we outline a target-specific approach to new research questions rooted in this system-based approach to better address the difficult airway in the prehospital and combat casualty care settings.

By limiting its objective to correcting dysmorphisms of the dento-alveolar arches, current treatment of malocclusions loses a great deal of effectiveness that technical procedures might otherwise achieve. An inadequate understanding of the mechanics of the facial envelope can allow the dysmorphisms and breathing dysfunctions associated with malocclusions to persist.

However, the oral fissure has a profound impact on the mechanical behavior of the facial envelope. Like an operational command, it transforms the local mechanics of the facial envelope by creating a phenomenon of a concentration of stress and deformations whose manifestations are visible not only on facial soft tissues, but also on their cartilage and osseous supports. This phenomenon also influences the physiology of the facial muscles by distorting them as they are forced to adapt to the fissure, and by guiding the functional adaptations of the envelope.

Basically, the impact of this phenomenon on the structural organization of the facial envelope is transformed by the oronasal morphophysiologic integration of the structures of the face and practitioners must necessarily adapt their therapy to address these problems. Finally, the functional relationship between the nasal mucosa and the cavernous sinus increasingly broadens orthopedic perspectives for therapy that will most importantly encompass the cephalic hypothalamic-pituitary axis.

The effectiveness of a procedure appropriately initiated by practitioners of DFO due to their specific expertise will require them to exercise a greater attentiveness to the global functionality of this complex into which the face is integrated.

To better understand behavioural and genetic influences upon breathing, the breathing patterns of 8 pairs of monozygous (MZ) twins were measured under 4 behavioural conditions; relaxed without standardisation; eyes closed; eyes open; and reading. Breathing was quantified by inspiratory and expiratory durations (TI, TE), tidal volume (VT) and derived variables. Airflow shape was normalised and quantified using 8 dimensions. Reading caused breathing to increase by > 500 ml/min compared to the other four conditions. Differences in breathing between combinations of two conditions were compared by testing whether the differences within an individual were smaller than the differences between random pairs of individuals from the same 16 subjects. For almost all respiratory variables, and whatever the behavioural condition, there were highly significant similarities within an individual (p < 0.00025 on 32/80 comparisons). Under each condition, the differences within MZ twin-pairs were compared to the differences within random-pairs from the same subject population. There were highly significant similarities within twin-pairs for the airflow shape across all conditions. However, TI, TE and VT failed to consistently show significant similarities within twin pairs. Hence, an individual's airflow shape appears to be a fundamental characteristic which is conserved when behavioural condition and level of ventilation changes. Further, MZ twins have similar airflow shapes – whatever the behavioural situation. Hence, behavioural influences upon airflow shape act upon monozygous twin pairs in similar ways, or such influences were negligible under the conditions of the present study.