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Full-Text Articles in History

Go Off: The Geography And Labor Of Off- And Off-Off-Broadway, Sean C. Mellott Feb 2022

Go Off: The Geography And Labor Of Off- And Off-Off-Broadway, Sean C. Mellott

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Off- and Off-Off-Broadway remain ill-defined and misunderstood sectors of New York City’s theatre industry, at least when compared with Broadway. This capstone project examines these dual sociocultural spaces and defines some of their contours through a primary analytical lens of geography (the physical locations where Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced) and a secondary lens of labor (the professional contexts in which Off- and Off-Off-Broadway are produced). Both elements speak to the material conditions of theatrical production in New York City, offering clues as to Off- and Off-Off-Broadway’s position within the entertainment industry and their relationship to the larger social structure …


'Once Famous In An Odd Way': Curiosity And Queerness In Late 19th-Century American Male Impersonation, S.C. Lucier Jun 2020

'Once Famous In An Odd Way': Curiosity And Queerness In Late 19th-Century American Male Impersonation, S.C. Lucier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis depicts the emergence of one particular iteration of the popular female actor within 19th century performance, the male impersonator, and identifies the ways in which this theatrical expression was related to and affected by similar amusements of the period. Public amusements of this period include a diversity of experiential entertainment that was primarily geared toward working and lower-middle class males. Included in these types of illegitimate theater is the variety hall. Male impersonators were the height of theatrical fashion not only in New York City, which is the focused landscape of this paper, but this type of …


Performing Nyc Latinidades: Building A Diasporic Home At Pregones And The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Oriana E. Gonzales Feb 2020

Performing Nyc Latinidades: Building A Diasporic Home At Pregones And The Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Oriana E. Gonzales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In December 1966, Miriam Colón, a Puerto Rican actress, starred in The Oxcart at the Greenwich Mews Theatre in New York City. The play, written by Puerto Rican playwright René Marques in 1951, told the story of a Puerto Rican family’s migration from the countryside to San Juan, and finally, to New York City. One-year post-production Colón founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater (PRTT) as a response to the lack of diversity she saw in the audiences at the Greenwich Mews and everywhere else she performed during her prolific acting career in the 1950s and 1960s. Thirteen years later, Rosalba …


International Influence On The Development And Reception Of Cello Playing In England, 1870–1930: Robert Hausmann, Auguste Van Biene, And Guilhermina Suggia, Hannah E. Collins Feb 2020

International Influence On The Development And Reception Of Cello Playing In England, 1870–1930: Robert Hausmann, Auguste Van Biene, And Guilhermina Suggia, Hannah E. Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The development of cello playing in England in the late nineteenth century was driven largely by the efforts of expatriate and visiting performers trained elsewhere. Performers from abroad, with the support and admiration of British institutions and audiences, elevated the technical level of cello playing and helped to increase the quality and quantity of solo repertoire being written and performed. They also expanded the degree of acceptance that British audiences held for the cello, both as a solo instrument and as an instrument that could be played in public by women. This study explores the impact that three such cellists, …


Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux May 2019

Just A Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy And Racialized Performance In Black Vaudeville, The Chop Suey Circuit, And Las Carpas, Michael Shane Breaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by …


Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey May 2019

Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …


Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo May 2019

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …


Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez Sep 2018

Ansiedades Épico-Criollas Y El Mecenazgo De Indias En El Arauco Domado De Pedro De Oña, Andrea L. Fernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Among the characteristics of epic poetry are the topic of war, love encounters, heroism of exemplary individuals, and the narration of events contemporary to the audience to reinforce a collective historical identity. Arauco domado by Pedro de Oña, born in Angol (modern Chile), reiterates these traditional expectations with its protagonist, characters, setting, and latter theatrical representations within the viceregal context. The poem was made possible by the sponsorship of García Hurtado de Mendoza y Manrique, IV Marquis of Cañete and Viceroy of Peru. If the title of “espíritu cesarino novelo” [Caesar’s new spirit] (V.76.3) corresponds to the patron, Pedro de …


Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo Jun 2017

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 …


"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen Jun 2017

"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …


Theatres Of Reality, Fiction, And Temporality: Vegard Vinge And Ida Müller’S Ibsen-Saga (2006 - 2015), Andrew L. Friedman Jun 2016

Theatres Of Reality, Fiction, And Temporality: Vegard Vinge And Ida Müller’S Ibsen-Saga (2006 - 2015), Andrew L. Friedman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the influence of modernist aesthetics and ideologies on contemporary, European and U.S. experimental theatre. I argue that modernist and contemporary experimental theatres offer competing notions of reality, fiction, and temporality, which I interrogate through Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen-Saga. I illuminate this tension by reading current modes of performance against the Saga’s productions and work practices, as well as their aesthetic and ideological foundation in three modernist sources: the artificiality of Ibsen’s realism, the utopianism and totality of Richard Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, and the temporal provocations of the historical avant-gardes. I contend that the …


Economies Of Touring In American Theatre Culture, 1835-1861, Nicole Berkin Feb 2015

Economies Of Touring In American Theatre Culture, 1835-1861, Nicole Berkin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Employing methods from print and material culture studies, this dissertation explores the economic, social, and cultural dynamics of theatrical touring during a period, 1835-1861, when the ultimate symbols of anxiety over rising industrialization, migration, and urbanization--con artists and prostitutes or "confidence men and painted women"- were associated with both theatre and transportation. I argue that touring was central to the spread of theatre culture and is therefore critical to understanding U.S. popular culture. This project examines how geographic movements, as well as the circulation of extra-theatrical materials like newspapers and photographs, were instrumental not only for performers who attempted to …