Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Direction Of The Play: Dead Man Walking, Michelle Willden

Graduate Student Projects

This project entailed the selection, background research and documentation, casting, direction, and post-production analysis of Bingham High School's Production of Tim Robbin's Dead Man Walking. Documentation included research and analysis of the play and an evaluation of the play as a production vehicle for the Department at Bingham High School.

Direction Of The Play: Dead Man Walking, Patrick Williams

Graduate Student Projects

This project entailed the selection, background research and documentation, producing, set and house design, casting, direction, collaboration, and post-production analysis of Mater Dei High School's Production of Tim Robbin's Dead Man Walking, and The Dead Man Walking School Theatre Project. Documentation included research and analysis of the play as a production vehicle for the Project: Discourse event for the Performing Arts Department of Mater Dei High School. The analysis also includes a discussion as to the candidate's directorial vision and execution of this production.

Performing Religiously Between Passion And Resistance, William Robert

Religion - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dancing The Numinous: Sacred And Spiritual Techniques Of Contemporary American Belly Dancers, Jeana Jorgensen

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

In this paper, I explore how contemporary American practitioners of belly dance (as Middle Eastern dance and its many varieties are often called in the English-speaking world) conceptualize not only the spiritual dimensions of their dance, but also how the very notion of performance affects sacred and spiritual dance practices. Drawing on interviews with this community, I describe the techniques of sacred and spiritual belly dancers, how these dancers theorize performance, and how the conflicts inherent to patriarchal mind-body dualism are resolved in these practices. My purpose here is twofold: to document an emergent dance tradition and to analyze its …

If Clothes Could Speak: Sartorial Analysis Of Japanese Cultural Identity, Ivy Han

Whittier Scholars Program

This project is a deep sartorial analysis of Rei Kawakubo’s and Yohji Yamamoto’s designs and how they reveal the global influences that shaped the cultural identity of contemporary Japan. However, such analysis of high fashion would only be half of the identity; to fully understand Japanese cultural identity, it is equally important to delve into the sartorial phenomenon of Harajuku street fashion. While Japanese avant-garde fashion and Harajuku youth culture seem to be at opposite ends of the sartorial spectrum, the two have a closely entwined complementary relationship. Japanese high fashion and street fashion demonstrate how such cultural commodification impacts …

"Spectacular Opacities": The Hyers Sisters' Performances Of Respectability And Resistance, Jocelyn Buckner

Theatre Faculty Articles and Research

This essay analyzes the Hyers Sisters, a Reconstruction-era African American sister act, and their radical efforts to transcend social limits of gender, class, and race in their early concert careers and three major productions, Out of Bondage and Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad, two slavery-to-freedom epics, and Urlina, the African Princess, the first known African American play set in Africa. At a time when serious, realistic roles and romantic plotlines featuring black actors were nearly nonexistent due to the country’s appetite for stereotypical caricatures, the Hyers Sisters used gender passing to perform opposite one another as heterosexual lovers in …

American Art Theatre In The Digital Archive, Patrick Michael Finelli

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

Based on a critical examination, evaluation, and selection of primary and secondary sources related to American art theater that have moved from the private into the public digital realm, Finelli reflects and comments on key issues related to the digital archive and theater historiography. His objective was to analyze the notion of digital archives and consider how accessing materials in electronic form affects the practice of writing history. He hypothesizes that the process of digitizing library and archival materials has a significant affect upon archival elements through their transformation into the digital realm, bringing about change in both an ontological …

Perception, Power, Plays, And Print: Charles Ii And The Restoration Theatre Of Consensus, Christopher William Nelson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation aims to establish the importance of Charles II in the shaping and evolution of Restoration theatre. Even more so than the playwrights themselves, Charles II determined the future of the theatre, both by his conscious efforts to do so, as well as unintentionally through his own behavior and image. The tradition of Restoration theatre began in 1660 with Charles’s efforts at establishing a consensus theatre, in which it would appear that he enjoyed unanimous support for his return to England from exile. Consensus theatre was determined by the perception of Charles’s rule and character, his power to manipulate …

Mediums Change, Fears Stay The Same, Lucy Wilhelms

Honors Theses

Although generally dismissed by scholars as being overly sentimental or superstitious, the gothic genre has survived for over four centuries and maintained significant cultural appeal, outlasting the sentimental novel and the travelogue as popular literature. What, then, makes this genre different? What is so special about the gothic?

In my thesis, I examine the evolving cultural appeal of the gothic genre that keeps it attractive and relevant for readers by tracing the gothic text, The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, through its initial inception and its subsequent adaptations. As a novel, The Woman in Black both repeats and revises …

Capturing Dance: The Art Of Documentation (An Exploration Of Distilling The Body In Motion), Kasey J. Lack

Theses : Honours

This research paper is an exploration of documenting and capturing live dance performance in regards to three artistic mediums, Notation, Photography and Film. This piece of writing discusses practitioners who have contributed to the development of these processes such as: Ann Hutchinson Guest, Rudolf von Laban, Eadweard Muybridge, Lois Greenfield, Ted Shawn, Norman McLaren and Sue Healey. In conjunction with historical and current day research the secondary document provided alongside this thesis describes the practical investigation undertaken. The reflections included define first-hand discoveries of how these three mediums of documenting interconnect to describe a contemporary dance solo. Thoughts, findings and …

Thesis On The Eiffel Tower A Stage Manager’S Account Of Working On An Avant-Garde Show, Ellen Johnson

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Rabbit Who Loved Peas, Rebecca Saunders

English Faculty Publication Series

Ned loves growing peas in his garden, and Rudy the Rabbit loves peas too. Rudy manages to hide from Ned and gobble all the peas he wants, until one day . . .

Readers’ Theater for children is a delightful way to involve children in performance while improving their reading skills. Because no memorization is required, children are free to focus on bringing the text to life through their voices

Effects Of Visual, Auditory, And Kinesthetic Imagery Interventions On Dancers’ Plié Arabesques, Teresa Heiland, Robert Rovetti

Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science Faculty Works

The goal of this study was to examine the influence of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic delivery modes of Franklin Method images (anatomical bone rhythms, metaphorical image, and tactile aid, respectively) on the performance of college dancers’ Plié Arabesques by assessing its influence on three measures: plié depth; maintenance of rotation; and simultaneous use of hip, knee, and ankle (Tri-fold). Eighteen participants performed a series of Plié Arabesques during three visits over a period of two months; at each visit, pliés were performed before and after an image intervention, and the change in mean Likert scale rating was calculated for each …

The One-Acts, Molly Manhart

Undergraduate Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

The Masks Of Commedia Del’Arte, Noh Theater And Classical Greece: The Cultural Meanings, Influences And Similarities, Makena Bennett

A with Honors Projects

This essay examines the use and meanings of masks in Noh, commedia dell'art, and classical Greek theatre.

Unpacking EugèNe Giraudet’S Library: Dance, Books, And International Relations In Fin-De-SièCle Paris, Dominique Bourassa

Library Staff Publications

Eugène Giraudet (1861-19?) was an exceptionally prolific and influential Parisian dance teacher, choreographer, author, and bibliophile. His library catalog, published in his 1900 Traité de la danse, Tome II, Grammaire de la danse et du bon ton, is more than a simple record of the books he owned. It also serves as a wish list and a directory of prominent dance personalities. As a whole, it presents an unparalleled conspectus of dance teaching, book collecting, business, and international networks radiating from a major metropolis—the historical urban center of the dance world—in the late-nineteenth century.

Projected Performances: The Phenomenology Of Hybrid Theater, David Edward Coley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the 20th century, mediatized forms gained prominence and eclipsed the theater as a site of cultural power and popularity. Because of this tension, performance theorists like Peggy Phelan framed the definition of theater through its inherent differences from film and television. Other theorists like Philip Auslander problematized this distinction, particularly due to television’s similarities to live performance. The cinema, however, has remained an opponent to performance, ignored in favor of technologies that more readily promote a sense of “liveness.” In Projected Performances, I argue that film projection is more closely related to performance than previously thought, particularly when viewed …

Taboo And Tragedy In Frank Wedekind’S Frühlings Erwachen, Thyra E. Knapp

Languages & Global Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Cocuzza Teaches Students How To Be Actors, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

She Wears The Masks: Bluefacing In Nilaja Sun's Black And Blue And La Nubia Latina, Patricia Herrera

Theatre and Dance Faculty Publications

This article examines how Nilaja Sun explicitly employs the minstrelsy traditions of blackface to push the conceptual limits of racial identity, and expand the nodes of intersection within diasporic identities. The act of bluing up, as opposed to blacking up, is Sun's way of provoking her audience to think more expansively about the performance of racialized identity outside of black and Latino paradigms, and toward a more complicated and not-clearly discernible Afro-Latino hybrid subjectivity. Sun uses what I call bluefacing, a performance tactic that magnifies the constrictive and monolithic perceptions of blackness and Latinidad as a means of generating …