Browsing by Subject "Performance Studies"

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    The Ethics of Occupation: Appropriation and Alignment as Spatial Practice Among Mapuche Activists and Student Protesters in Santiago, Chile
    (2015-09) McKay, Kelly
    This project is a choreographic and historiographic analysis of practices by which contemporary activists in Santiago, Chile create new embodied frameworks for the production of space. I study the relationship between the ongoing Chilean student rebellion and the Mapuche rights movement by examining divergences between the respective spatial practices of protest undertaken by student protestors and Mapuche activists. By spatial practices, I mean the embodied activities through which people produce and alter space. While student protestors frequently make performative and discursive connections to Mapuche, I question whether these connections constitute political alignments or appropriations of indigeneity. In order to investigate whether student protest practices align with Mapuche activist political projects, I analyze the ways that both student protestors and Mapuche activists enact radical reconfigurations of space in the city of Santiago through their embodied practices. I identify various performative mechanisms by which student protestors and Mapuche activists produce and change space, including (but not limited to) choreographic restructurings, sonic interventions, and embodied reimaginings. My ethnographic work focuses on case studies in order to show the distinct embodied frameworks for the production of space posed by students, often in contrast to those posed by Mapuche. My historiographic work historicizes the spatial practices I identify through an analysis of protest focused on spatiality. While most scholarly treatments of student and indigenous social movements conceive of protest as deliberative political enunciations addressed to a state apparatus, my project proposes an understanding of protest as spatial practice. This focus on space allows for a careful analysis of the differences between the everyday embodied practices of activists in the respective movements.
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    Staging education: practices, problems, and potentials of theatre in education.
    (2012-02) Adams, Charles N., Jr.
    Theatre in Education (TIE) emerged in England in 1965 as a complex convergence of conditions that propelled theatre-based performance practices into school settings, ostensibly as a means for enabling radical educational transformation. However, as a set of practices, TIE exists within a set of contradictions, problematics, and occasional lack of reflexivity that can evacuate its potential for radicality. This historical and historiographic study explores the educational terrain in which TIE navigates, the conditions of its emergence and dissemination, and the narratives that frame its repertoire of practices in order to articulate the problems and problematics that make TIE a risky endeavor. Focusing on four aporias of TIE, the study asks if TIE is worth pursuing in the historical conditions of the United States and other nations in the 21st century, particularly in school(ing) sites that employ high-stakes standardized testing as a Foucauldian form of discipline. The study then makes several proposals for directions TIE practitioners must consider if it is to remain relevant as a transformational practice of theatre and education, including a constant engagement with a postmodern notion of ethics, a focus on a Freirean critical performative pedagogy, and the consistent activation of ludic play and ludic space. While looking to numerous TIE programs that span the history of TIE practices for examples and critiques of the problems and potentials of TIE’s practices from a bricolage of critical lenses including performance studies, historiography, postcolonial theory, Foucauldian analysis of power relations, and critical pedagogies, critical analysis in this study is chiefly rooted in specific case studies, including Pow Wow (1973)and Homelands (1984) from Coventry Belgrade TIE, The Giant’s Embrace (2006), Pow Wow: The Power of the Circle (2005), and Living with Macbeth (2002) from Theatr Powys in Wales, With These Wings I Will … (2007) from the Creative Arts Team in New York, and Parry Jus’ Once (1998) from Arts-in-Action in Trinidad and Tobago.