Browsing by Subject "Theatre arts"
Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Beyond the closet: LGBT and queer archiving in the United States(2014-12) Colleary, Eric JosephThis dissertation explores the ways sexual identity and culture are produced, imagined, performed, shaped, re-shaped, and deconstructed in LGBT archives in the United States. While a great deal of research has been conducted within the past two decades on LGBT historiography, there has been a dearth of studies examining the archival sites from which histories of LGBT identity are being written. This dissertation reveals that the construction of non-heterosexual sexual identities has been a conscious, careful process - borrowing from established historiographic, feminist, and colonial and postcolonial theories to establish archives of LGBT history and culture counter and in relation to dominant heteronormative narratives. There are times, however, when every archive fails to capture the complexity and diversity of LGBT experience. Rather than see these moments as failures, I "read" them as queer opportunities to rethink and reposition identities which may have become politically and socially stagnant. In each chapter, I focus on a particular archive and a specific individual (an archivist or a collector) who helped make it. The first chapter explores W. Dorr Legg's efforts in the 1950s to establish the discipline of homophile studies through the ONE Institute in Los Angeles as a way of creating a historical and archivable past for a collective homosexual minority that was just beginning to take shape. Chapter Two focuses on the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Joan Nestle's radical reimagining of what an archive could be through the lens of 1970s lesbian separatist feminism. Chapter Three looks at the acquisition and organization methods of Jean Tretter of the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota as a way of describing the queer possibilities of encountering the unexpected in an archive. The fourth and final chapter theorizes what a queer archive might look like, grounding this theorization in the collection of 1960s performance artist Jack Smith, which has recently been acquired by the Gladstone Gallery in New York.Item Common ground: performing gay shame, solidarity and social change(2015-02) Winn-Lenetsky, Jonah AriThis dissertation examines Gay Shame activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s through case studies of three distinct performance sites: Gay Shame San Francisco, Kvisa Shchora, a Tel Aviv based collective, and Euroshame (London). Analyzing the performance work and self-articulations of these three groups, I demonstrate how their performative and rhetorical use of shame attempts to both critique the "pride" of mainstream LGBT groups and to forge solidarity between queer communities and others marginalized by neoliberal economies and nationalist rhetoric through what I refer to as "hyperidentification". These performances can, at their best, be aesthetically challenging and creative interventions that reimagine and place queer identities in ideological and, at times, actionable alliance with marginalized others; while at their worst they imagine themselves in solidarity with other communities, but ignore or fail to account for the perspectives, agendas and values of those communities. My exploration of these sites examines the limits of solidarity and empathy and investigates the contributions of queer activist performance to debates regarding the ethics and efficacy of political performance within the disciplines of Theatre and Performance Studies.Item "The fingerprint of the living mind": tape, technology, and performance(2015-01) Haynes, Wade DanielThis dissertation maps a shared territory between theatre/performance studies and music/sound studies via a materialist historiography of the tape recorder. It examines key musical and theatrical works by Steve Reich, Samuel Beckett, Alvin Lucier, Brian Eno, and Enda Walsh that position tape recording and playback as the foundation of their creative processes. It locates these works within a critical examination of the history and philosophy of technology vis-a-vis late capitalist information production and reproduction.Item Here be dragons: performing virtual embodiment, social conduct, and racial imaginaries in World of Warcraft(2014-12) Johnson, Kimi DianaThis dissertation examines the performance of racial identity in the long-running, fantastical multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft (WoW) and its role in shaping digital embodiment, guiding player conduct, and maintaining white racial hegemony in the virtual play space. As a space where players devise, build, and perform digital characters to play fictional scenarios, WoW is the world's largest form of participatory theatre. While this space provides a form of immersive escapism, it also asks players to emotionally invest in a narrative that reactivates the problematic racial imaginary of 19th century imperial modernity. Through the methodologies of cultural criticism and autoethnography, this dissertation investigates three components of WoW's gaming environment: the narrative devices that shape a player's avatarial identity, the process of embodying a gendered and racialized virtual character, and the structural design of a gaming system that encourages players to perform white, heteronormative, hypermasculine, and neoliberal capitalist behaviors online or acquiesce to operating within a space that defines itself along such lines. The project focuses on the development of racially coded and narratively complex virtual bodies and analyzes how avatarial embodiment shapes player perceptions of self, race, and gender online. It relies on the concept of the interaction continuum, a term that describes the overlap between the social, virtual-active, and real worlds that form the game space, and stresses the importance of online sociality as the locus of the game's value. This study also utilizes the concept of governmentality to describe how the game designers structure knowledge of and about WoW's citizenry such that small player populations govern themselves, but within the strictures of the game's digital code and the context of its fantastical yet whitewashed narrative. My analysis demonstrates that ludic online culture not only shapes player behavior in the role-playing space of a game, but also alters how players interact with one another in less narrative virtual social spaces.Item Performance with others(2015-01) Palani, MalinIn this dissertation, I theorize the immersion and emergence of performance research and practice--entangled together--in ongoing and unfolding relationality within the world and with more-than-human bodies. In keeping with an aspiration to consider how a focus on the more-than-human in performance might renew thinking and understanding of performance ontology and relationality, I propose and think through how a theory of becoming--an embedded relationality--might be mobilized in performance practice and research. I examine six contemporary performance sites in four chapters focused on human encounter with others--machines and technology, objects, animals, and landscapes.Item Staging Race in a "Post-Racial" age: contemporary collaborations between mainstream and culturally specific theatres in the United States(2014-12) Lein Walseth, StephanieThis dissertation examines the ways in which artists and administrators from mainstream and culturally specific theater companies in the United States negotiate vexed racial histories, complex racial representations, and material inequalities in contemporary partnerships. Though these collaborations mark a progressive step towards increasing racial inclusion on prominent American stages and subsequently within the national imaginary, they simultaneously constrain the transformative, social justice oriented goals that culturally specific theaters aim to achieve. Thus, I contend that these partnerships do not herald the definitive achievement of racial equality in the field of theater. Instead, they involve constant negotiation between companies' competing aesthetic, philosophical, and political missions, and their differing economic realities. In these sites, companies enter into delicate and contested territory, navigating between inclusion and imperialism, neighborliness and benevolent patriarchy: race is both celebrated and ignored, hyper-visible and repressed, the underpinning motivator for the collaboration and the not-to-be-discussed specter haunting every decision. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that these sites of cross-cultural engagement are not simply victories in the long march of civil rights progress, as they are often framed for the public, but rather are dynamic and contentious "contact zones" - sites of conflict, tension, collision, and compromise - that reveal the persistence of racism in limiting equality in the field. When the celebratory multicultural and post-racial rhetorics of "good stories" and "visibility" frame these partnerships, the consequence is that culturally specific artists must conform to liberal humanist standards (as commonly human or distinctly other) and aesthetic norms (through Western, Aristotelian dramatic structures) in order to be recognized. As such, culturally specific theater companies are looking to other venues, relationships, and interracial coalitions to ensure their long-term sustainability.Item This is not my body: alienated corporeality and Brechtian critical theatre practices(2014-12) Majzels, AshleyMy dissertation advances a historical materialist understanding of alienated corporeality meant to inform Brechtian critical theatre practices. In the first half of my project, I draw on Marx's account of commodity fetishism and industrial labour to frame a discussion of Brecht's Mann ist Mann. In the second half, I revise my account of alienated corporeality in the light of Guy Debord's account of spectacular society. I then use this spectacular corporeality as a means to address Canadian inter-media artist Freya Olafson's recent works, AVATAR and HYPER_, as well as her critical engagement with social media as labour, consumption, and ontology.