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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Clowning With Identity: Embodied Selves And Others In Comedy's Gendered Character Performances, Allison Douglass
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Clowning with Identity examines the comedic performance of characters. The enjoyment of a character feels easy to accept uncritically, but these performances work because they deploy stereotypes and the cultural meanings surrounding them, often through acts of appropriation, as the performer makes the choice to embody an identity separate from their own. This project connects theory on drag and gender performance and its ideas about identity-remixing to rhetorical theory on comedy and clowning practices, sketching the ways American practices of drag, clown, and comedic character work are all deeply linked through their historical development. I theorize the productive ways that …
Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran
Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” studies performers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday as the progenitors of a new tradition of authentic representation of Black female interiority in the entertainment arts. As interiority denotes the wide-ranging amalgamation of human expression, these divas equipped themselves with a sense of refusal and aloofness to strategically posture themselves in conditions that suited their personal predilections best and considered their status as representatives of the Black community. Lena Horne’s evolution as an aloof diva successfully saw the singer and actress escape classist thought of racial uplift to the full embracing of the totality of Black …
Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder
Art After Dark: Economies Of Performance, New York City 1978–1988, Meredith Mowder
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Art After Dark: Economies of Performance, New York City 1978-1988 examines the interwoven social and economic histories of New York City and performance in the late 1970s and 1980s. The dissertation traces the growth and visibility of performance art, moving from the recession of the 1970s and early years of public funding for the arts, to the downtown nightclub scene of the 1980s, the history of the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, and artistic experiments with television in the 1980s.Looking closely at the economic conditions under which performance occurred during the late 1970s and early 1980s, this dissertation …
Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo
Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …