Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Examining Audience Receptivity To Theatre Across Various Technological Mediums, Chingyi "Ac" Chan

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

This creative project and study was proposed to investigate the impacts of online theatre on audience members’ emotions, feelings, and comprehension of the show. The Research questions asked were: RQ1: How does the viewing medium, if at all, affect the audience's response to a theatrical performance? And RQ2: Which, if any, technological mediums do audiences members prefer to use to watch theatre? Three versions of the same play were made and adapted to their respective social media platforms: YouTube, Instagram Live, and TikTok. Participants were asked to watch one of the three shows and fill out a survey. Forty participants …

9/11 In Selected American Plays: Postmodern & Postcolonial Encounters, Shaimaa M. Saeed

English Language and Literature

History immortalised the date 9/11 as it witnessed the sudden attacks on one of the world’s superpowers, the United States of America. The repercussions of this date boomed in the world’s four corners leaving behind feelings of insecurity and fears of the unknown in all aspects of life to the extent that the literary contexts along with political, economic, and social ones were impacted. This book probes into postmodernism and postcolonialism, as two interrelated literary approaches having many intersecting points, to unravel the psychological, political, and social significance of the 9/11 events as depicted in selected American plays: The Mercy …

"With The Commodity In The Hand": A Practical Investigation Of The Intersection Of Material Culture With Performance Theory, Katharine M. Given

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the intersection of performance theory and material culture through the practices of garment reconstruction. In chapter 1, I examine key theorists in the fields of material culture and performance studies and articulate the connections between the two fields. In chapter 2, Using practice as research, I recount the experience of building reproduction garments from the eighteenth century using historically appropriate tools and methods, as well as the experience of wearing those garments. Finally, in Chapter 3, I walk through a possible historical examination of my encounter with these reconstructed garments, and consider the way in which feminine …

The Launch 2020: A Senior Cabaret, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

No abstract provided.

Print Culture, Digital Culture, Poetics And Hermeneutics: Discussion With J. Hillis Miller, Liyuan Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper is a response to Hillis Miller’s query on the author’s essay “Hillis Miller on the End of Literature.” The author basically agrees with Miller’s view on the shift from print culture to digital culture, explaining the special cultural context under which Chinese scholars emphasize the visual turn. Based on the rapid development of Chinese online literature, the author points out that print culture does not rival but coexists with digital culture. On the other hand, drawing on Aristotle’s Poetics and insights of several leading figures of contemporary hermeneutics, the author contends that Miller’s dichotomy of poetics (form) and …

China Question Of Us-American Imagism, Qingben Li

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper investigates first the influences of ancient Chinese culture on Ezra Pound, and then Pound’s influence on the New Culture Movement of modern China (1917). It is a kind of circular journey of literary texts and theories from ancient China to the West and then back to China. This journey, or “circle model,” involves textual appropriation, variation, transformation and misunderstanding in every stage.

Western Theory And Historical Studies Of Chinese Literary Criticism, Zhirong Zhu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper examines the formation of modern historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism in terms of its interaction with and transformation of western theory. The discipline emerged during the eastward movement of Western ideas in the early twentieth century, promoting the “scientific study” of classical Chinese learning, and instituting curriculum and textbooks in Chinese universities. The reception of Western concepts of “literature” and “literary criticism” in the early twentieth century, largely through Japan, laid the very foundation of historical studies of classical Chinese literary criticism as an independent subject of study. This paper argues that when adopting Western methods …

The Chuanyue (Traversing) Of Western Cultural Industry Theories In China, Hui Li, Naihai Zhai

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper discusses the reception and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry in China during the Reform Era (1978-present). It proposes the term 穿越 (chuanyue, traverse), rather than communication or traveling theory, in order to probe into the complexity of the interaction, modification and transformation of western theories of Culture Industry and creative industries in China. The paper focuses on 1) issues of time lag or disjunction, in that it took more than half a century for the critique of Culture Industry to enter China; 2) divergent interpretations of Culture Industry with a strong critical edge of …

Cinematic Representation Of Ethnic Minorities In Prc And Postcolonialism, Xinyu Lu

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores the notions of “Sinophone” and “Chinese-language cinema” under the rubrics of postcolonialism in Chinese film studies both in China and elsewhere around the world. The paper argues that these postcolonial-inspired notions misconstrue Chinese national identity building as imperialist/colonialist endeavours, and dichotomize Han and Chinese ethnic minorities. The paper offers its counterargument by examining cinematic practices of people’s cinema, minority nationality films and native-language films in the PRC.

“Western Marxism” In Mao’S China, Jun Zeng, Yichen Wang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

China’s reception of “Western Marxism” is a critical part of the global history of Marxism. This paper examines three aspects of the reception of Western Marxism in literary and art criticism during the early years of Mao’s China (1949-65): the Western Marxist critique of surrealism, debates over Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and Sartrean existentialism and Western Marxism. The impacts of Western Marxist literary thought upon Chinese literary studies during the early years of the PRC are discussed, along with the extensive influx of Western Marxism that began in the reform era of post-Mao China (1978- ) …

Late Postmodernism, Nicholas Brown

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Sedimented Forms: Coming Back To Autonomy, Marina Vishmidt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

The Minimal Politics Of Autonomy, Myka Tucker-Abramson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Immanuel Kant’S Manifesto For Dad Rock, Christian Thorne

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Genre’S Autonomy, Autonomy’S Genre, Tim Lanzendörfer

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Admiring Autonomy, Fabio Akcelrud Durão

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

When ‘Interplay Is The Content Of The Work’—A Response To Nicholas Brown’S Autonomy, Elise Archias

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Aesthetics Today, Fredric Jameson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Dance 2020: The Wild Within, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

The Dance Concert, inspired by Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are,” will include a collection of solos, duets and trios which will illuminate the immense power of imagination and prove without a doubt that there’s a wild thing within us all.

Demechanizing Whiteness: Lessons From Theatre Of The Oppressed, Elizabeth J. Simpson

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) provides small group techniques to strategize and “rehearse” for collaborative liberation using popular education forms of systems analysis, bolstered by practices that counter implicit biases and habituated behaviors. This essay draws on interviews with jokers at CTO-Rio to advocate the need for continual engagement of demechanizing practices both within TO and in the lives of practitioners in order to demechanize the tenets of white supremacy that we are born into, despite our essential loving nature, with particular focus on counteracting a the habit of exploiting Black suffering for creative capital.

Don't Poke The Bear - A Project Report, Nicole Kontolefa, Grace Cannon

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

In 2018, four applied theatre practioners created a forum theatre play and workshop for a small Wyoming community. They wanted to engage participants in a dialogue about inclusion, racism and homophobia, in particular how it manifests in a state known as the "Equality State."

Forum theatre focuses on a protagonist experiencing oppression and how they may break their own bonds. In this report, two of the facilitators and creators reflect on how using forum theatre to follow the actions (or inaction) of a potential ally in a play about the exclusion of a gay woman of color was useful in …

Highlander Center: Hotlines And Cultural Bazaars, Je Naé Taylor

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

Since the pandemic’s arrival,Highlander has created specially tailored on-line community-building spaces, programs, and re-granting opportunities for artists working at the intersection of cultural production and social change. This report documents two examples. The first is a “Cultural Workers Hotline” for BIPOC artists to share struggles, needs, and strategies for (a) coping with the impact of the pandemic on their livelihoods and (b) creating change-oriented artistic responses to the pandemic in their communities. Highlander staff have held multiple weekly virtual spaces for all of our programs, and each gathering has employed an artist to be a graphic note taker. Illustrations are …

Joker Exchange Online - Meeting The Risks And Opportunities Of The Covid-19 Crisis, Uri Yitzchak Noy Meir, Anne Larcher

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

In this article, we narrate and analyse patterns of engagement and harvest key learning from the Joker Exchange Online (JEO) events on 11th April and May 2nd. We map the impact of these online events to inform future events as an effective collective response/strategy to global challenges. At the same time, we are Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners who attended/presented in the JEO, and this informs our research and engaged interest in theatre and community work on the margins of theatre, activism, and social change. The article has three parts: the first part look at the “triggers” for the Joker …

Virtual Newspaper Theatre: Zoom As A Theatrical Playing Space, Nabra Nelson

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

This article presents findings from a virtual Newspaper Theatre workshop that took place via Zoom on May 5, 2020 through Seattle Rep. Nelson reflects on the way that the constraints of the Zoom format can add meaning to Theatre of the Oppressed performance techniques in the era of quarantine and social distancing due to COVID-19. The article describes elements of the one-minute performances created during the one-and-a-half-hour workshop, and how the virtual sphere interacted with them and even enhanced them in meaningful ways. Nelson also describes “production” elements unique to Zoom, and the nature of the virtual “spect-actor.”

Application Of Applied Theatre Online With Children And Its Effects In The Indian Perspective During Covid Age, Chetna Mehrotra, Sooraj Amin, Roshan Karkera, Viral Champaneri

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

Applied Theatre in general and Theatre of the Oppressed in particular have been put into practice for a long time now. Right since when Augusto Boal started Theatre of the Oppressed in the 1960's the tools have been utilized in many oppressive situations. Augusto focused on marginalized societies and their people. He believed that every individual who is not allowed to voice out their opinion, thoughts (political, social), views, and choices can be considered to be oppressed.

Today, in the year 2020 with the current crisis of the breakout of the communicable virus Covid 19 everyone is forced to stay …

Joker's Log 2020: An Odyssey, Julian Pimiento

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

Join our passengers as we embark on a voyage of Theatre of the Oppressed discovery during the destabilization of 2020. Experience one Joker’s facilitating choices and how those decisions led to unexpected pedagogical destinations.

The Year In Review, 2019-2020, Rachel Desoto-Jackson, Reg Flowers

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

The work of the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed organization and its members remains vital. As we reflect on the 2019-2020 organization cycle, we share with you the ways in which the PTO organization has continued to grow amidst these global shifts. We continue to embrace the challenges and opportunities of this moment and continue to support people whose work challenges oppressive systems by promoting critical thinking and social justice through liberatory theatre and popular education.

Theatre Of The Beat’S Restorative Justice Theatre Program: Highlights From The Baseline Evaluation, Karen Nelson, Keely Kavcic, Courtney Primeau, Kimberlee Walker

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

This report highlights the findings from the evaluation of Theatre of the Beat’s (TOTB) Restorative Justice Theatre Program, which works with incarcerated persons at the Grand Valley Institution for Women (GVIW), a federal prison in Kitchener, Ontario. The project was conducted by the Research Shop, part of the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) at the University of Guelph, in partnership with Theatre of the Beat (TOTB), a not-for-profit theatre company with a process rooted in restorative justice principles and a passion for promoting conversations around social justice.

Abbreviating Boal At The Louisiana Old State Capitol Museum: Using Image Theatre, Bonny Mcdonald, Joshua Hamzehee, Naomi P. Bennett, Montana Smith

Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed

This article describes the execution of and reflections of a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop offered in 2017 to middle and high school groups visiting the Louisiana Old State Capitol Museum on half-day field trips. The workshops accompanied The Power of Children: Making a Difference exhibit, which features the stories and struggles of Ruby Bridges, Ryan White, and Anne Frank. Despite initial plans for an hour-long session, the workshop designed to connect youth participant experiences to the stories of the children featured in the exhibit was cut to only fifteen minutes. Our group of four facilitators discusses ways we modified …