Browsing by Subject "Theatre Arts"
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Item “Baroque Venetian Theatre: dialectics of excess and discipline in the sixteenth and seventeenth Centuries.”(2010-06) Daddario, WilliamThis dissertation analyzes the theatre practice of Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante) and the pedagogical strategies of the Society of Jesus (aka the Jesuits) in order to forward a theory of the Baroque as a space of critical tension produced by the clash of disciplinary regimes of governance and excessive artistic expressions. I read Venice through a sceno-historiographical lens and theorize it as a staging area from which acts of Baroque composition unfolded. With a dialectical and philosophical-historical methodology (derived from the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault), I assemble archival traces of Venetian theatre prior to the construction of permanent theatre buildings in order to contribute to the writing focused on sixteenth and seventeenth-century Venetian theatre, of which currently little exists. Theatre, then, appears in this dissertation as more than mere entertainment; it becomes an active political practice embedded within an epicenter of cultural production in early modern Europe.Item Celebrity and the Interrupted Performance(2016) Cooper, Elizabeth;The casting of celebrities in major roles on Broadway is a common practice, incentivized by the large box office draw of film stars. This paper explores how fixed conceptions of good acting and markers of cultural prestige play into the criticism that celebrity-actors receive. Looking closely at Daniel Radcliffe’s 2008 performance in Equus, Sir Ian McKellen’s 2013 performance in Waiting for Godot and Marina Abramović’s 2010 performance The Artist is Present, this paper details how fan-celebrity encounters exist alongside or within performances, as well as how these celebrities are written about differently by critics. The celebrity’s attempt to represent a character within a play is complicated by their status as an easily recognizable sign for either themselves or another character. It is far easier for the celebrity-actor to become part of the world of the play than the celebrity-character. Ultimately, this paper asks how fancelebrity encounters can be harnessed as an artistic choice to enhance a performance instead of being negated and pushed to the periphery as a pre- or post-theatre experience.Item Crafting objects, selves, links: the embodied production of relational exchange in performances of craft in the United States(2011-06) Glover, Jessie"Crafting Objects, Selves, Links" formulates an ethnographic analysis of craft practice in the contemporary United States. Using performance as an analytic frame, the author examines the ways that crafters use the productive gestures of craft to generate opportunities for relational contact, achievement, learning, buying and selling, and other forms of exchange. The manuscript is divided into four sites: craft in recognizable sites of performance, the performance of leisure craft in craft circles, craft sellng spaces formed by crafter entrepreneurs, and sites on the World Wide Web where crafters take action together.Item Critical Literacy & Performance: Language in Action(2013-08-12) Redemann, Joseph;My Bachelor of Arts in Theatre Arts degree was originally undertaken as a performance emphasis degree, in which I hoped to acquire the training to become a professional theatre artist and actor. I have since realized that I hope to inspire students to feel the same way that I did about the stage: confident, empowered, engaged in my learning. This project and paper depict the beginnings of the process by which I will teach and empower students through storytelling, writing, and acting in order to help them develop critical literacy skills that will help them critically analyze and engage with their society. Through these non-traditional media of education, students will discover new and exciting ways to learn in the classroom, as well as to apply their classroom educations to their real-life experiences, connecting the theoretical with the practical. One will notice that this project, while containing a syllabus, a syllabus rationale, and three lesson plans, this course plan is far from finished; this is intentional. My advisor and I determined to set specific goals for the end of this semester, but that I would not submit a project that will be a ‘capstone’ project, ending my college career and simply providing a ‘time capsule’ of my efforts on campus. I intended to create a project that would both show the trajectory of my education at this school and propel me onward into the next phases of my life. This class outline will never be entirely completed because my education will be a lifelong endeavor, and I will constantly be revising my educational practice and adapting it to the needs of the students I am with. That is the goal of a truly liberatory education: to serve the needs of the students. My thesis project takes this form because it not only shows what I have done, it indicates what I will do, serving my need to help guide me onward from this University as I seek to become an educator and activist for social justice.Item Double returns: marking loss, memory, and absence in the Korean adoptee diaspora(2012-12) Brown, Maija E.This dissertation explores the notion of "double returns" within the transnational movement of Korean adoptees returning to and from Korea. Its focus on performance examines the ephemeral presencing of Korean adoptee identity by examining different sites of cultural production which mark memory, loss, and absence within the context of moving between national and racial formations in Korea and the US. As an interdisciplinary endeavor, this dissertation is multi-sited and draws from film and dance productions, the author's creative non-fiction, as well as social modes of performance.Item Performing spaces in Scotland: the theatre of circulating acts and localizing politics.(2009-05) Zerdy, JoanneIn 1997 Scottish citizens voted to re-establish a Scottish Parliament after a nearly 300-year hiatus, which resulted from the 1707 Act of Union. As the new Parliament developed, so did the concept of a building-less National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) whose foundations relied on collaborations with artists and performance spaces in Scotland. As academics and journalists heralded a "Second Enlightenment," the nation attempted to capitalize on the philosophical and industrial lineages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. In this dissertation I scrutinize the ways in which Scotland is performed: the modes of performance undertaken by individuals and institutions to construct and circulate particular framings of Scotland and Scottishness. My project situates moments of "national" performance in the early nineteenth century--namely, productions of a "National Drama," Rob Roy Macgregor, and the 1822 pageant held in Edinburgh for King George IV--beside political performances produced by "national" institutions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries--specifically, the mobile NTS and the Scottish Parliament's architectural design and Festival of Politics. Through archival and ethnographic research, I analyze the spatial materiality of these events and sites to consider how public spaces, architectures, geographies, texts, and institutional bodies complicate the exchange between mobility and rootedness in Scotland. As I map these complex performance practices, I ask: What are the frameworks in which articulations of Scotland become visible and material in these historical moments? How does a mobilization and circulation of Scottish bodies, texts and subnational imaginaries forward an agenda of an itinerant Scotland in larger political economies?Item The prosthetic life: theatrical performance, survivor testimony and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1963.(2009-10) Peschel, Lisa A.During all periods in postwar Czechoslovakia when the World War II Jewish ghetto at Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) could be discussed in the public sphere, Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivors created and circulated narratives about the cultural life of the ghetto and their own experience of agency and pleasure while engaged in theatrical performances. Focusing on two periods, the immediate postwar years (1945-47) and an early point in the political thaw leading to the Prague Spring (1963), I examine testimony that survivors addressed to their fellow Czechs in the public sphere as a rhetorical performance in its own right. The constative and the performative aspects of testimony have shifted over time; in each period, survivors needed or wanted their testimony to achieve different effects, and they provided different information about theatrical performance in the ghetto. The survivors clearly adjusted their narratives in response to period-specific pressures as they tried to reinforce both their subjectivity and their subject position in postwar Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the testimony of both periods shares a consistent core of themes, suggesting that theatrical performance in the ghetto functioned as a social practice that increased the prisoners' resilience and ability to cope with the traumatic events occurring in the ghetto on a day-to-day basis. Their postwar testimony reveals a related function: they resisted objectification within the sometimes hostile environment of postwar Czechoslovakia by establishing and conveying the meaning they ascribed to their own experience, thus remaining speaking subjects.Item Scenic shifts upon the Scottish rite stage: designing for Masonic Theatre, 1859-1929.(2009-05) Waszut-Barrett, Wendy RaeNineteenth-century secret societies often shared a similar ceremonial format, yet offered distinct themes and subject matter - frequently revising their ritual to attract potential candidates. This dissertation proposes that the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry captivated members and offered a unique fraternal experience when they completely and successfully staged their fraternal ceremonies, moving portions of their ritual from the lodge room floor to the elevated stage. Exploring Scottish Rite degree productions as fraternal imitations of mass-produced optical entertainments, this study argues that American Victorian theatre and nineteenth-century spectacle provided the vehicle that catapulted the Scottish Rite to the forefront of the American fraternal movement. The extant scenery collections currently housed in many Scottish Rite theatres depict and aesthetic shift in the field of scenic art from an itinerant to a study style, providing a primary source for both theatre scholars and practitioners to explore historical painting techniques and color palettes otherwise unavailable. The commercial theatre typically discarded or repainted scenic backdrops at a production's close, leaving only secondary source material in the form of playbills and theatre reviews to illustrate theatre aesthetics. Through the analysis of extant fraternal backdrop collections, historical scene designs, Scottish Rite ritual, Masonic legislative proceedings, fraternal supply catalogs, personal manuscripts, and archival documents, this dissertation examines the multifaceted fraternal, theatrical, social and economic ideologies facilitating the theatrical interpretation of Scottish Rite degrees between 1859 and 1929. The significance of this study lies in the present availability of complete backdrops collections and their perilous condition. Furthermore, it recognizes the imperative need to preserve our theatrical and fraternal heritage through documenting the origin and importance of Scottish Rite scenery, understanding the availability of historical scenic art, and preventing the further deterioration of this primary resource.Item 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.Item Struck stupid : 21st Century theatrical performance and the limits of a discourse.(2011-12) McConnell, George DavidThis dissertation is a critically creative response to contemporary U.S. devised theatrical performance and the relationships it instantiates between artists and spectators, and artists and critics. In order to tease out the complexities of these relationships, I theorize stupidity as an integral element in the creation of devised performances, their reception by spectators, and the critical methods best used to engage with them. I develop the concept of stupidity seriously and paradoxically as thought that cannot be thought. Stupid thinking is thought that interrupts discursive structures such as conscious thought that is shaped like language and is grounded in our storehouses of knowledge. Stupidity sustains the affective possibilities of non-knowledge that would otherwise be foreclosed by the drive for knowledge production. I attempt to answer the questions: how do I write of devised performances rather than about them? How do I attend to the embodied complexity of devised performances as I transmogrify them into scholarly discourse? To answer these questions I performatively write alongside devised theatrical performances and deploy methods that take their cue from ethnographic practices. My writing also takes cues from the work of the artists I engage: Ann Liv Young (New York), Every House Has A Door (Chicago), and SuperGroup (Minneapolis). Together my chapters argue that by relying on stupid tactics--such as chance, incompetence, and obscenity--in their own creative processes these artists all instigate a reconfiguration of the relationship between artwork and viewer, and thereby a simultaneous reconfiguration of the relationship between spectators and their own presumed-to-be-stable subject positions.Item Tout Bouge [Everything Moves]: the (Re)construction of the body in Lecoq‐based pedagogy.(2011-09) Gates, Laura PurcellThis dissertation explores how the body has been historically constructed as a performing agent in Lecoq-based performance pedagogy through investigating the ways in which the body has been and continues to be a site of contestation--revealing underlying ideas about the "natural", the mechanical and authenticity--within the French mime tradition. I analyze specific classroom practices in Neutral Mask and Clown workshops at the École Philippe Gaulier, and trace themes that emerged back through the French mime tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the performed mime figure of Pierrot shifted between a grotesque, scatological clown figure and a sinister, automaton-like stage presence marked by a mask-like white face, alongside a concurrent shift in the gestural style of mime towards a minimalist, subtle gestural style that prefigured the "mime renaissance" in early twentieth-century Paris. I interrogate the complex relationship of the Neutral Mask form to both mechanization (the body as machine) and the natural (the body as free of socialized habits of movement), and the Clown form's relationship to the idea of "authenticity" or the "true self" and this self's connection to the body, analyzing the ways in which "contamination anxieties" manifest in classroom practices of the present. This research addresses the question of how the body is both constructed and mobilized, in dialogue and in tension with normative constructions of the body, within a specific pedagogical context.Item Transgressing and Resisting Gender Normativity: Transgender Bodies and Narratives On Stage(2018) Sansone, Hal;In this essay, I am focusing specifically on transgender bodies and narratives on stage, what they mean, and what they bring to theatre. I specifically use the term “on stage” rather than “in theatre” because I am most interested in the audience/narrative/actor relationship in this work. If I said “in theatre”, there would be several layers of backstage-working relationships to discuss such as actor/director, actor/actor, actor/designer, etc., which could be an entire additional paper in and of itself. In the tradition of transgender studies, rather than being made an object of study as a trans person, I am seeking to make the world my object of study. That is to say, I am a seeking to identify the theory of trans scholars within and create knowledge out of lived, personal experiences of my work as a trans actor and theatre maker. The framework with which I am approaching transgender bodies and narratives on stage are languages of intelligibility, representational practices, gender performativity, gender self-determination, shifting, trans embodiment, and trans affect. I specifically address the way in which trans bodies and narratives are largely invisible in theatre - even though they are there - because the language they speak is not legible to mainstream audiences. This clash of mainstream representational practices and trans self-representational practices brings up several questions addressed in this paper such as: Where do these meet? Can they ever meet? On whose terms do they meet? Do we create bridges for them to meet? Who are we performing for? How is gender and transness constructed (or not) in theatre? Who are we trying to be recognized by? How could trans be embodied and affected on stage beyond a fixed identity? Finally, this paper proposes the ways in which trans artists can counter gender normativity from their own positionality on stage, and in the process, expose the cracks in gender and claim agency while simultaneously opening up the space of theatre. Ultimately, I want to pose the question: beyond the fact that we should just have more trans people on stage to begin with (which is often tokenizing), what functions do a trans body and narrative on stage serve?Item TRUTHQUEST: Exploring/Exploding the FTM Narrative(2013-08-09) Osswald, Milo;As my undergraduate courses culminated and I worked on my capstone project, I knew that I must continue to work with passions that had been uncovered in the most recent year. I had discovered and then cultivated deep interest in the craft of Directing (Theatre and Film), and wished also to work with subjects that were at the forefront of my personal and academic life. I have always wished to use my artistic and creative talents to work for greater social justice, and felt that my senior project must address these aims whilst stretching and expanding my Directing and Theatre crafting skills.Item zAmya Theater Project: toward an intimacy of social change.(2010-06) Chaves, RachelThis dissertation addresses efficacy in activist, community-based theater (CBT). It relies primarily on my ethnographic research with zAmya Theater Project, a community-based theater in Minneapolis, MN that makes plays with and about people who have experienced homelessness. My time with zAmya has led me to develop a theory of and language for efficacy in community-based theater based not on the desire for large-scale or systemic social change, but upon the possibility of intensely local instances of transformation in interpersonal encounters, or what I call an intimacy of social change. I draw my definition of intimacy from Buddhist philosophy, where it denotes a radical presencing, or a closeness to the present moment of lived experience without grasping or becoming averse to that experience. This theory of efficacy is not intended to replace the call for systemic change other CBT practitioner-scholars (such as Augusto Boal) articulate, but rather to enrich that mode of praxis. I look at three sites within zAmya's rehearsal and performance process where this kind of efficacy exists (or has the possibility to exist in other CBTs). These sites are: 1) the movement of bodies through theatrical space and the way that movement produces freedom or oppression, 2) the way affect and emotion are produced in rehearsals and performances, and the way they move in circuits through the room or are prevented from doing so, and 3) the narrative act, which includes an analysis of the narrators and the way they negotiate the power contained within the act of storytelling. I contend that when intimacy, or radical presencing, occurs in any of these three sites, a moment of efficacy has occurred, and I propose that this model of efficacy be included in discussions about the impact of activist theater.