Mass Communication Commons^™

Improvisational Music Performance: On-Stage Communication Of Power Relationships, David A. Steinweg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project explores how musical improvisational processes come into being through interacting discursive power relationships that are embodied and enacted through performance. By utilizing the concepts of framing and performativity I am able to show how discursive power constitutes the performance of improvisational music. To exemplify this theory, the project presents a case study examining a Grateful Dead cover band named Uncle John's Band that performs at Skipper's Smokehouse in Tampa, FL. Using an ethnographic methodology, the project articulates the dominant discursive power relationships that constitute Uncle John's Band's improvisational performances. The dominant discursive power relationships revolve around the lived …

An Ethnography Of The Bay Area Renaissance Festival: Performing Community And Reconfiguring Gender, Matthew Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This performance ethnography analyzes the means by which performers at Tampa, Florida‘s Bay Area Renaissance Festival constitute community and gender through performance. Renaissance Festivals are themed weekend events that ostensibly seek to allow visitors to experience life in an English Renaissance village. Beginning with the theoretical assumption that performance is constitutive of culture, community, and identity, and undergirded by David Boje‘s festivalism, Richard Schechner‘s restored behavior, Victor Turner‘s liminoid communitas and Judith Butler‘s performative agency, The Festival is explored as a celebratory community that engages in social change through personal transformation.

Employing reflexive ethnography and narrative as inquiry, Chapter Two …

An Ecology Of Performance: Gregory Bateson's Cybernetic Performance, Daniel Matthew Blaeuer

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a case study of the public performances of Gregory Bateson at The Esalen Institute. The case study is a reconsideration of the work of Gregory Bateson from the perspective of performance studies. The author brings together performativity, cybernetics, and the sacred to argue that Gregory Bateson, in his public performances, was striving for grace in encounters with others. The author has conducted archival research into Bateson’s presentations and has spoken with several close to Bateson to get a sense of how his process of public presentation paralleled his ideas—a process of continually working through ideas in conversation …