Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Movement, Office Of Arts + Cultural Programming, Peak Performances At Montclair State University

2021-2022 Join Us in Engaging with the Imaginations of Unparalleled Visionaries

MOVEMENT follows Yerushalmy’s most recent major work, Paramodernities, a six-part series generated through reverently and violently dissecting iconic modern choreographies. The project explored tenets of modern discourse–sovereignty, race, sexuality, disability–with contributions by scholars from different fields, and was created explicitly in order to provoke dynamic conversations with the past and its legacies. In MOVEMENT, existing dances are again quoted (this time from a vast array of sources) and pieced together into an intricate and elaborate quilt with radical and surprising results. By plucking (stealing) short movements and placing them outside of their original contexts, Yerushalmy repurposes them, re-orients them, and …

A Documentation Of A Year As An Artistic Director For Unl, Philip Crawford

Honors Theses

The goal of this project was to document a year of being an Artistic Director for UNL’s student run theatre company Theatrix. Through this documentation, I will be able to reflect upon and learn from my experiences as a leader, director, and theatre maker.

This thesis will be broken up into eight different parts to outline the eight different stages I experienced as Artistic Director this year: season selection, the 24-hour Play Festival, The Revolutionists, The Thanksgiving Play, Clown Bar, season changes, Based on a Totally True Story, and Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons. Through these eight stages, I will …

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, …

“It Is Not All That Bad”—Hitler And Identity-Building In Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’S Back), Yuan Xue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Germany, multiculturalism and “leading culture” (Leitkultur) are a pair of closely connected but opposite concepts. Multiculturalism has been accused of being the main reason why culture loses its core cohesion. Despite the persistence of calls for a leading culture in Germany in recent years, many scholars argue that the concept is also problematic. A monopolistic leading culture may be hard to realize in an already pluralistic Europe. I argue that the choice between the two reflects the dilemma of the establishment of German cultural identity. Focusing on the German bestseller Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back, 2012), this …

The Brazilian System Of Television, Or How To Get A President, Tauan F. Tinti

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to some perhaps unexpected affinities between a considerably expressive segment of the Brazilian culture industry that for several reasons seems to usually fly under most interpretive radars and a certain regressive frame of mind that is becoming increasingly manifest and now holds both considerable political power and a surprisingly firm grip over a portion of the population whose size is still unclear. The following remarks and associations gesture tentatively at what could be preliminarily defined as a constellation of cultural junk being outlined, its shape against the night sky sometimes resembling …

Introduction: A Return To The Bad Old Times, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Fernando Urueta

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Winter Dance Concert (March 3-5, 2022), Lindenwood University

Student Dance Programs

Program for the Winter Dance Concert (March 3-5, 2022).

Head Over Heels, Department Of Theatre And Dance

Spring 2022

Head Over Heels is the bold new musical comedy from the visionaries who rocked Broadway with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q, and Spring Awakening. This laugh-out-loud love story is set to the music of the iconic 1980s all-female rock band The Go-Go’s, including the hit songs “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Vacation,” and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and “Mad about You.” A hilarious, exuberant celebration of love, Head Over Heels follows the escapades of a royal family on an outrageous journey to save their beloved kingdom from extinction—only to discover the …

My Favorite Murder As Discursive Performance, Taylor Dawson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My Favorite Murder as Discursive Performance uses performance-centered discourse analysis to explore the major narratives informing the popular true crime comedy podcast, My Favorite Murder (MFM). Hosts, Karen and Georgia draw from podcast, comedy, true crime, feminist, and mental health discourse to create a unique discursive space where “murderinos” (fans of the podcast) express and explore aspects of their own life experiences. I explore the performative strategies MFM uses and the effects of those choices, drawing on some of my own experiences as a murderino. Ultimately I argue that a performance lens reveals some of the imperfect but powerful ways …

Interview With Jenny Cavenaugh, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh, Wenxian Zhang

Oral Histories

Growing up in New York City, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh earned her BA in Policy Studies from Dartmouth College in 1982, and her MFA in Dramaturgy from Brooklyn College in 1992. After receiving her PhD in Theater History and Dramatic Criticism from the University of Washington in 1995, she served as Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Denver for three years before joining the faculty of the Louisiana State University, where she earned her tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor of Theater in 2003.

In 2005, Dr. Cavenaugh was named the Winifred Warden Endowed Chair of Theater at …

Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor In King Lear And Levinas, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"In recent years, scholars have increasingly put the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1623) in dialogue with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)... The majority of these Shakespearean references are to Hamlet and Macbeth, but contemporary critics working in the vein of Levinas have tended to favor King Lear. No Shakespearean play has been subjected to Levinasian analysis more fully or more frequently.⁵ This critical proclivity is not unwarranted, for Shakespeare's tragic play and Levinas's ethical writings tell the same basic story: that of the egoist who heedlessly pursues his own interests until he is until he …

Poetic Explorations In Bill F. Ndi’S Worth Their Weight In Thorns: (De)Constructing Hegemonic National Integration And Debating Francophonecentric National Governance., Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores “hegemonic national integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance” in The Cameroons (TC) poetic scape. The former refers to La République du Cameroun (LRC)-British Southern Cameroons (BSC) or Southern Cameroons (SC) interconnectedness dominated by Francophones. The latter is governance that promotes a Francophone cultural superiority that refuses to see the Cameroonian world through Southern Cameroonians’ eyes. Cameroonians live in a time of enormous fragmenting “Francophonizing” and “Anglophonizing” processes. To flesh this argument out, this paper borrows critical perspectives from Benhabib’s “democratic iterations” and “deliberative democracy” and Rosenau’s “six-governance typology’ as requisites for good governance. It contends that …

Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Decadence is typically associated with a fall from, or an opposition to, ideals of civilization. Western Civilization traditionally traces its roots to the culture of Ancient Greece. While theorists of periodicity from Vico to Nietzsche and Deleuze, to Hayden White and other contemporary scholars, associate decadence with excess, artificiality and over-indulgence, they also recognize that decadence often incorporates pre-civilized, base or “Other” tendencies. Paradoxically, decadence as a degeneration of an original culture’s values can also rejuvenate that culture’s core values through mutation so that a new version of the original culture arises. In literature, degeneration has also been associated with …

Exploring The Margins Of Kotha Culture : Reconstructing A Courtesan’S Life In Neelum Saran Gour’S Requiem In Raga Janki, Chhandita Das, Priyanka Tripathi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Exploring the Margins of Kotha Culture: Reconstructing a Courtesan’s life in Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki,” Chhandita Das and Priyanka Tripathi discuss the invisible challenges in life of a famous courtesan Janki Bai Ilahabadi through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s 2018 novel, Requiem in Raga Janki. In this novel, Janki belongs to the infamous kotha but she never fails to seek her subjectivity. This marginal place of Janaki’s belonging will be discussed by appropriating and the theoretical framework of Indian feminist Lata Singh’s (2007) for whom courtesans have been represented as “‘other’ …

Identity Reconfigurations, Memory And Personal History In Norman Manea And Saul Bellow’S ‘Spoken Book’, Simona Antofi, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, “Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s Spoken Book, ”Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim analyze the book of interviews Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away: A Words & Images Interview, a two-authored mirror-like writing in which two biographical courses and two scriptural identities engage in dialogue. Their aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into the self-oriented narrative: a collective history of the Jewish exile from the communist totalitarian space (Soviet and Romanian) towards the “promised land,” with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an …

Strange Fruit, Office Of Arts + Cultural Programming, Peak Performances At Montclair State University

2021-2022 Join Us in Engaging with the Imaginations of Unparalleled Visionaries

Strange Fruit draws its title from the 1937 poem and song of the same name by Abel Meeropol and made famous by the great jazz singer Billie Holiday—which metaphorically addresses lynching as a tool of racial terrorism during the Jim Crow Era. For this dance/theater work, the facts of lynching act as springboards into a highly personal interior space and state of mind. Abstract yet grounded in a brutal reality, Strange Fruit tracks choreographer Donald Byrd’s feelings as a response to lynching and plays out as a series of dance/theater vignettes.

Multiracial Students Do Not Belong In The Margins., Aubrey Felty

Research on Capitol Hill

USU senior Aubrey is an Honors student, Caine Summer Arts Fellow, and an undergraduate research grant recipient. She studies Theatre Arts and is currently student teaching. Aubrey’s research produced a docudrama, where students who identify as multiple races were able to dissect the ways that they interact within predominantly white universities. She hopes that the film will help students to reflect on race and racism and lead to a more welcoming educational environment for all students. Aubrey has been involved in research for nearly all of her time at USU. “I participate in undergraduate research because it lets me use …

Lerner And Loewe's Gigi, Lynn University

Drama Programs

Elaine's Annual Musical Treat

Music by Frederick Loewe

Lyrics & Book by Alan Jay Lerner

Place: Paris, France. The 20th-Century

Based on the 1944 novella by Colette and the 1958 musical film of the same name. Gigi follows the story of a young girl as she navigates her social debut and her families traditions and expectations. Will Gigi find the life she is dreaming of or will she follow in the path that society and her family is laying out for her?

Diary Of Anne Frank: Analysis And Design, Leeann Carol Wheaton Mueller

Master of Theater Production Graduate Projects

The script "The Diary of Anne Frank," by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and its historical background were studied and researched. After analyzing the play and its given circumstances, a design concept was developed, goals were set, and then the play was directed and produced in a high school setting. The project notebook contains the documented dramaturgy, a written concept statement, the visual plans and materials, the production notes and journal, and production evaluations. The project goal was to implement the aspects of theatre production learned during the course of study, and to educate high school theatre students. The results …

Dance Pieces, February 22nd - 28th, Theatre Sheridan

Theatre Sheridan Productions

Working Title
The process: it's a moment, but the end is worth it. When twelve talented humans come together...magic is made.

Choreographer: Shakeil Rollock

The Chorines
Inspired by the chorus girls of the 1940's, this new dance work will feature hyper-synchronized choreography, while honing the individual expressions of the performers as they pay homage to some of the most memorable female stage performers of the chorus girl era.

Choreographer: Natasha Powell
Composer : Waleed Abdulhamid