Digital Commons Network^™

Call And Response : Experiments In Storytelling, Deanne Fernandes

Masters Theses

Being part of RISD's inaugural Masters of Illustration cohort has been an immense honor. This journey has been nothing short of transformative and healing, as it has allowed me to unearth layers of self-discovery through my creative practice.

In my thesis, I introduce a fresh research methodology rooted in the principles of call and response, with adaptability, creativity, and storytelling as its foundational pillars. Through the lenses of visual storytelling, experimental animation, graphic journalism, and fictional world-building, I demonstrate how these techniques can effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice. This dynamic approach fosters meaningful connections among diverse perspectives …

Justice And The Limitations Of Revenge In Othello, Laurie King

Theatre Thesis - Written Thesis

William Shakespeare's Othello is a tragedy that delves into the intertwined themes of justice and revenge. The play's characters ultimately serve as a cautionary tale about the dangers of pursuing vigilante justice and the importance of impartial, evidence-based decision-making in administering justice. In this essay, I will explore the limitations and consequences of the pursuit of wild justice and why justice can only be achieved publically.

Ride The Cyclone, The Musical: A Modern Morality Play, Bryelle Burgus

Theatre Thesis - Written Thesis

Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries morality plays were used by Christianity to teach their moral values to the community. Focused on the life of an individual human being, an “everyman” that represented all of mankind, morality plays followed the everyman’s innocence, fall, and penitential redemption. Using spectacle, dramatization, comedy, and satire, morality plays preached of the mortal inevitability of sin and the spiritual importance of repentance.

Utilizing the most well known morality play, Everyman, as a lens, I will be examining and analyzing the 2008 Ride The Cyclone as a modern day morality play that is reflective of our …

Emergent Trends Of Contemporary Dramatic Recontextualization: An Exploration Utilizing Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, Cameron M. Nickel

Theses and Dissertations

The art of adaptation in the realm of drama has undergone an easily recognizable evolution in the past couple of decades, from the work of Sarah Ruhl to Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. This evolution has opened doors to an altogether new form of adaptation in the theatre: dramatic recontextualization. While the two forms are built upon a foundation of shared aspects, there are certain observable and quantifiable delineations between the two artistic forms. As this trend continues to grow exponentially in the world of theatre, it is important to further research the origins and methodologies of contemporary dramatic recontextualization, both to provide …

Methods In Costume And Projection Design For Theatre, Jessica Wallace

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A report detailing multiple practices for theatre design in costumes and projection. It is focused on playscript analysis, the design process, and the final build of the design for production.

Selected Projects In Scenic Design, Sera Shearer

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A selection of scenic design projects completed in fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree in scenic design at Utah State University.

Theoretical Lighting Design: Little Shop Of Horrors, Lou Hillman

Student Research Submissions

This senior project includes design concepts, storyboard images, a light plot, a magic sheet, three cue lists, and three videos of songs from the show cued in the EOS augmented 3D software.

“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 …

Musicals, Murders, And Motivation: A View On The Audience And Their Support Towards Musical Murderers Through Maslow, Lesly Nuñez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

Audiences relay morbid support towards the enjoyment of horrific entertainment. Such examples are the success and long-standing allure spectators hold towards musicals such as Phantom of the Opera, Spring Awakening, Heathers, and more. These are shows that include themes of death, darkness, and tragedy which are presented. Using Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Motivation, The Jungian Archetype of Shadow, and Catharsis I will show how audiences are supportive of protagonists who portray actions resulting in death, darkness, and murder despite the societal pressure to find such subject matter as offensive, vile, repugnant, or obscene. By referencing the characters found …

Literature, Pandemic, And The Insufficiency Of Survival: Boccaccio’S Decameron And Emily St. John Mandel’S Station Eleven, Anthony P. Russell

Interdisciplinary Journal of Leadership Studies

The question of literature’s utility in relation to the “real world” has been asked since at least the time of Plato. This essay examines an extreme instance of this problem by investigating two works, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349-1353) and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2016), that argue for the value of art in the midst of catastrophe. Boccaccio’s collection of 100 tales, written in the context of the Black Plague, and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel about a world devastated by a killer flu, overlap and diverge in instructive ways in making their cases for the important role of literature in …

Theme Park Queues As Diegetic Worlds: Using Star Wars: Rise Of The Resistance As A Case Study For Core Design Elements, Jordan Zauha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-

This thesis seeks to establish core design elements for use by theme park designers to complement the guidelines established by Ledbetter and his colleagues for theme parks. Building upon Rose Biggin's "strands of enquiry" for examining immersive theatre, the suggested core design elements for immersive theme park queues serve as guidance to craft queues where audiences can actively engage with the queue's storyworld and narrative. Implementation of the core design elements alongside the already established queue design guidelines should assist designers in crafting queues that minimize discomfort and maximize narrative immersion. Theme parks offer location-based narrative landscapes, often contributing to …

Celebrating And Practicing Aspects From Eastern- And Western-Centric Animation Styles, Alissa Annette Standerwick

All Theses

Animation styles in a modern world end up influencing the animation of other regions. This project, through animation, celebrates Eastern and Western differences in their animations. Rather than analyzing story differences, aspects of the habits formed by the region’s animators are analyzed and practiced. The formation of animation in respective cultures represents the local history of these regions. So to understand the aspects & technicalities of how animators animate per region, it is useful to understand how film, TV, & comic styles of an entire community impacted that area’s animation

Dramaturgies Of Intellectual Property Law In Read-Write Theatre, Andrew Kircher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Digital and networked technologies have intensified our relationship to knowledge: all the world’s information and creativity are so immediately and personally accessible that they become embodied. Into this moment, a new theatrical practice has emerged, what I identify as Read-Write Theatre (after Lawrence Lessig). In Read-Write cultural production, artists sample and speak through the full spectrum of disembodied data that is the internet—text, video, audio, and images. The artists I include in this critical category are marked by their posthuman relationship to knowledge and, most importantly, the ways that their theatrical work confounds contemporary intellectual property law.

In this dissertation, …

Saga Beyond The Gate: Chapter One, The Coming Of The Gate Ghost, Tristan B. Miller

MSU Graduate Theses

“Saga Beyond the Gate: Chapter One, the Coming of the Gate Ghost” explores performance sculpture used as religious ritual. My work emphasizes ritual, creation myths, relics, physical manifestations of lived religion, and the power of narrative belief. One often turns to religion, science, or spirituality, to seek answers to questions about being a conscious entity, and one’s journey to the end. This saga uses scripts from all three of these schools of thought, placing the world of the Gate Ghost into tangible reality, as a play on a stage. Artefacts represent objects of power and mystery. Characters embody morality tales, …

Socialist-Realist Art From The Perspective Of Gaze Theory: An Inquiry From Filmology To Iconology, Ying Lu

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

"Socialist-realist gaze," linking gaze and socialist realist literary thoughts, refers to the visual communication of heroic figures on the external points off the screen in shooting Chinese revolutionary films. Such gaze, being invisible and with shared sight, returns to Jacques Lacan's gaze theory because of its intersubjective functioning. During its generation and function, socialist-realist gaze breaks the limitation of pictorial space, extends the boundary of screen as a "quilting point," and connects characters and audiences with ideological truth. As a performative image behavior, it arouses and strengthens the empathy between the viewers and the hero.

A Fat Imposter: The Embodied Intersection Between Race, Body Type And Fatness In Margaret Cho’S Comedy, Julia Cox

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Margaret Cho is a comedic goddess who, in her mockery, serves flaming hot social commentary about race, body image, and fatness. Within this thesis, I used critical discourse analysis to understand how Margaret Cho embodies Asianness, whiteness, and the body types and images prescribed respectively. While working on data analysis, I came across a common media trope of fat women: the use of indexically Southern (United States), Appalachian, and Working class indexicals in speech and lexical items. I connected the ideologies surrounding Southern and Appalachian language to the inequalities that fat women face. This voicing had not previously been written …

Making A Musical: The Art Of Adapting A Film Or A Book For The Stage, David Wohl

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

Over the past 100 years, stage musicals have been made from original works as varied as straight plays, novels, magazine articles, movies, short stories, poems, and biographies. This article explores two original works (a film and a novel) created separately by two faculty members at a historically black university in West Virginia and which were turned into staged musicals produced by professional theatre companies in 2019. The article includes information and advice on the adaptation process from composers, playwrights, and other collaborators.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Dramaturgical Concerns): Re-Centering Dramaturgy And Comedy As Feminist Tools For Social Change, Shaila Schmidt

Masters Theses

Titled as a play on Mindy Kaling’s 2011 book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), this thesis highlights the obstacles women, the genre of comedy, and dramaturgs face in order to be taken seriously in the arts. Using the work of Mindy Kaling, I explore how she uses comedy as a means of defying the expectations put upon her as an Indian American woman in order to provide context for the ways in which the marginal statuses of women of color and comedy overlap.

In an effort to demonstrate the ways in which comedy can be …

Desegregation Through Entertainment: Rodgers And Hammerstein’S South Pacific As An Instrument Of Military Policy, Leana Sottile

Voces Novae

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the 1949 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific became a staple of mainstream popular culture. However, the musical also served a specific function within the American military where its usage by the United Service Organizations and Department of Defense was widespread. This case study examines how South Pacific arguably served a way to ease the blow of desegregation on the military by other means, in this case, entertainment. This was achieved by combining the show’s progressive views on racial tolerance with the prevalent wartime nostalgia and romanticism in the piece. All of …

Transfer Of Vehicles Si Juki's Intellectual Property Rightsfrom Comics To Animation, Ehwan Kurniawan

International Review of Humanities Studies

Transfer of vehicles is removal and alteration. In a broader meaning, this term can even include the conversion of various types of science into works of art. Intellectual Property Rights are rights granted to the creators of Intellectual Property and include trademarks, copyrights, patents, industrial rights, and in some jurisdictional trade secrets. Art works including music and literature, as well as inventions, words, expressions, symbols, and designs can all be protected as intellectual property. Comics (noun) plural form, used with a single verb. Pictures and other symbols that are overlap (close together, next to each other) in sequentially thing, to …

Flaws In My Father | Better Engaging With Trauma, Grief, Loss, And Pain Through Storytelling., Neil Fontano

Theatre & Dance ETDs

In this essay, I will review my playwriting methodology and growth as an artist during my time as a Dramatic Writing Candidate at the University of New Mexico. I will begin by examining my personal narrative and the initial impulse to apply for and accept a position in the Dramatic Writing Program. I will continue by dissecting my own writing methodology and its numerous influences: a sense of place, character, and time. Further, I will give an explanation of and demonstrate my own methods developed during my second year work on “Thelonius | My Brother’s Keeper.” In addition to academic …

Hero: The Musical, Owen Mefford

Gatton Academy Student Research Outcomes

Over the past year and a half, I, aided by my research mentor, have undertaken the process of writing the libretto for an original stage musical. The concept is an idea I have somewhat developed for years, that of a musical based on a spoof of the superhero genre and its many tropes. The musical follows Danny, a young college kid who has just moved to the big city and gains the power to freeze time. As he becomes a blossoming super hero, he must balance his romantic interest in his friend Sam, a reporter, with his new duties. Along …

The Many Authors Of The Several Houses Of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, And Alex: Authorship, Agency, And Appropriation, Zach Whalen

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

The Several Houses of Brian, Spencer, Liam, Victoria, Brayden, Vincent, and Alex is a computer-generated children’s book of 53,651 words and 350 unique illustrations arranged over 800 pages. The text is a cumulative poem in the style of the nursery rhyme “This is the House that Jack Built,” but with a house for each of the eponymous seven individuals, and with each of their houses containing many more types of things. These houses, these things, and these words were chosen by a Python script that I wrote, and the resulting novel--which can be viewed on my Github repository--is …

Creative Writing Across Mediums And Modes: A Pedagogical Model, Saul B. Lemerond Phd

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This is a creative practice (pedagogy) paper outlining the current formulation of my multimodal introduction to creative writing course. In this paper, I describe the course in detail, address the tensions, tradeoffs, and workarounds inherent in abandoning the traditional workshop model, describe instances of student engagement and success to illuminate this process, and endeavor to explain why high amounts of engagement and enthusiasm I get from my students concerning the content of my course is justified. My multimodal course is a generative course where my students are required to produce work in different creative modes on a near weekly basis. …

Introduction: What Is “Creative Making As Creative Writing”?, Kathi Berens

Journal of Creative Writing Studies

This special issue of the Journal of Creative Writing Studies centers on how creative writing changes when writers actively engage computers as nonhuman collaborators in “creative making.” Using examples from McGurl’s The Program Era, Emily Dickinson, and the crowdsourced “translation” of Melville’s classic into Emoji Dick, Berens suggests that creative writing methods have long been procedural and technologic.

There are many forms of creative making. This special issue features creative writers that

• Write code to output novels
• Redefine how we think of writing’s “container”
• Demonstrate aspects of the digital-first, multimodal writing classroom
• Modify or remix existing artworks

Berens supplies three …

Comic Characters: Campbellian* Or Not?, Samantha Matos

Classical Conversations

There exists a peculiar pattern throughout numerous stories worldwide, which Joseph Campbell christened the ‘monomyth’ in his 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell researched stories from across cultures and used their similarities to determine a pattern that great tales seemed to follow. In this hero’s journey, the protagonist enters a new kind of realm, conquers his enemies, and ventures home with power, knowledge, and probably treasure of some kind. This monomythic pattern consists of seventeen steps, though not all of these steps are necessary, and many of them serve as alternatives to each other.

I propose that …

Modes Of Cartoon Corporeal Performance, Gregory Langner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation project works to introduce and interrogate a phenomenon I am calling cartoon corporeality. The phenomenon refers to the varied ways in which cartoons “escape” their usual two-dimensionality through performance, appearing to manifest in physical environments in ways that should be understood as culturally impactful. Cartoon corporeality encompasses different modes of performance wherein the explicit visual presence of a cartoon subject informs an immediately observable physical impact through the body of the performer. I interrogate the phenomenon by focusing on four select modes of cartoon corporeal performance: videogame play, cosplay, theatrical adaptation, and the active weaving of cartoons …

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction, Kathleen Spring

Faculty & Staff Publications

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction stems from work conducted during a sabbatical in fall 2017. The audio piece, Shush Me Awake, is a composition that explores the shush as a performative act. The accompanying framing essay uses an autoethnographic approach to provide a contextualized look at the composition process for this piece, while simultaneously situating it within existing scholarship in library and information studies on the image of the librarian and stereotypes. The composer notes provide additional technical details about the audio piece itself.

Claimed By The Stage: Popular Dramatization And The Legacy Of The Lady Of The Lake, Mary Nestor

Studies in Scottish Literature

Discusses three stage adaptations of Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake, by Thomas Dibdin for the Surrey Theatre, London, John Edmund Eyre, for the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh, and Thomas Morton for Covent Garden, arguing that these popular melodramas shaped popular perception of how Scott's poem engaged the Highland landscape.

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More Migrants With Nowhere To Go?, Mary E. Theis

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "More Migrants with Nowhere to Go?” Mary Theis reframes the stories of the Tai Dam and discusses this group of people, who migrated from Vietnam and Laos to Thailand and then to Iowa in 1975 after the wars in Southeast Asia when they virtually had nowhere to go. It is based on interviews with some of the 1,200 Tai Dam who were invited by Governor Robert Ray to resettle in Des Moines, Iowa, and nearby cities. The stories are contextualized by research on U.S. policies on immigration and the current precarious fates of other migrants in the United States …