Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Beyond The Veil: A Contemporary Reimagining Of Chinese Shadow Puppetry, Yuheng Jiang

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Chinese shadow puppetry is a traditional art-form of storytelling that requires highly-skilled craftsmanship. Though it enjoyed great prestige in the past, at present Chinese shadow puppetry struggles to survive as it is difficult to recruit apprentices and to appeal to contemporary audiences. This honors project explores how to adapt the art-form with alternative materials and performance techniques, so that it may welcome younger generations as practitioners and spectators. For example, a simpler crafting process makes the art-form more accessible for novice puppeteers while preserving key traditional elements; or a Chinese horror-themed story that tailors more towards the youth’s interest.

Theater As An Experiential Destination: Exploration Of Themed Entertainment Design Techniques For Theatrical Productions, Yunzhu Chen

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

The paper investigates the integration of methods used in theme parks into theater productions to create experiences that foster returning patrons. Through examining their existing presence and other possible applications in theatrical performances, the research demonstrates how themed pre- and post-show environments, dynamic audience mobility, and techniques such as detailing and focusing can enhance narrative immersion in ways that traditional theater may not, potentially increasing reoccurring attendance. Additionally, the creative component of the project illustrates the implementation of these methods in staging the classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman as an immersive theatrical production.

Now I See You, Now I Know You: How Constructions Of Space And The Self Navigate The Tension Between Reenchantment Of The World And Intimate Communion In Autobiographical Performance, Huong Nguyen

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

The transformative power of live performances lies in their reenchantment of the world: how they allow us to see special qualities of everyday objects and phenomena. Autobiographical theatre, rather than trying to find new ways of seeing, aims to transform the audience to “[make] the stranger less strange”. How do these qualities co-exist in autobiographical performance, and how does such a style of performance navigate them? By centralizing a comparative analysis of stagecraft in Aya Ogawa’s The Nosebleed and my honors project, Anti-Cartesian Variety Show, I demonstrate how constructions of space and the self help collapse the boundary between reenchantment …

Theater As National Memorial: How Angels In America Remembers, Alice Endo

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Applying a framework of audience experience and scenographic analysis, this paper explores the connections between public memorials and performance. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. uses scenography to present itself as a “linking object,” gaining its meaning through audience projection. Millennium Approaches—part one of Tony Kushner’s two-part epic Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes—produced at Macalester College in 2021, also functions as a public memorial. Its scenography situates the play in a heightened, and specifically American, space and time. It becomes a receptacle for audience memory, reconstructs that memory, and ultimately reconstructs ideas of …

Queering Pina Bausch: Tanztheater For Queer Bipoc Artists, Lu Chen

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater (“dance-theater” in English) revolutionized global dance theater performance. From a feminist perspective, Bausch mixed movement with theatrical design elements and film techniques to express emotions and sentiments of women-men relationships, and the boundary between performing and being displayed. Inspired by German Expressionist Dance and post-World-War-II avant-garde movements across Europe and the United States, her movement language and text were visceral in expressiveness through repetition, alienation, montage technique, and emotive gestures (Helden 134). In this essay I explore how Bausch’s approach to dance-theater can welcome dancers who stand outside of the German choreographer’s identity as a white European …

Let The People Speak: How Verbatim Theater Allows Historically Marginalized Groups Tell Their Stories, Kalala C. Kiwanuka-Woernle

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

motherhood: the good, bad, and ugly was born out of my research of Verbatim Theater, specifically the practices of Anna Deavere Smith, The Tectonic Theater Project, and Eve Ensler; and the lack of fully fleshed out mother characters represented in theatre. In my research, I focused on how these different playwrights crafted their plays, identified the topic or event they wanted to explore, and the selection of their subjects. During the pandemic, I had the idea to create a theater piece that would tell the good, the bad, and the ugly of motherhood because in the media especially in the …

Challenging Oppressive Expectations In American Theatre From Within: A Comparative Analysis Of Whitney White And Elizabeth Lecompte, Jessica Yates

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

What does it mean to be a theater director with identities and social positions that do not align with those of 19th century, Western European directors? Inspired by the incredible lack of qualitative information on most female directors and directors of color, the scholarly component of this Honors project consists of an analysis of the directing processes of Elizabeth LeCompte and Whitney White, in particular LeCompte’s Hamlet and White’s An Iliad.

For that, I draw from documentation on LeCompte’s and White’s filmed materials of their work, hours of recorded interviews about their processes, and articles about their productions. Both directors …

How Screendance Embraces What Cannot Be Done On Stage, Maya Reddy

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Due to the recentness of the field of dance filmmaking, little research exists on the difference between dance films designed to be watched as films (referred to as screendance) and dance videography (videos of performances created to be viewed by a live audience). This paper contends that what separates screendance from dance videography is the unique appeal screendance has for the viewer. Through the use of instantaneous location changes or inaccessible locations, unusual camera perspectives (such as a birds’ eye shot) that allow the viewer to feel as if they or the dancers are defying gravity, and technology-mediated changes to …

I'M Going To Go Back There Someday: Reading, Writing, And Directing Hauntings In Four American Plays, Asher A. G. De Forest

Theatre and Dance Honors Projects

Asher de Forest

I’m Going to Go Back There Someday: Reading, Writing, and Directing Hauntings in Four American Plays

In this personal and formal research essay, I discuss and compare the plays A Raisin in the Sun, Fefu and Her Friends, Angels in America, and I’m Going to Go Back There Someday (my own work, which I am also directing in partial fulfillment for Honors in Theater and Dance). These plays all bring forth hauntings, despite and in some cases because of their differences in content and style—ranging from realism to the avant-garde. I base my discussion …