Digital Commons Network^™

A Meisner Warm-Up: Advancing The Technique, Andrew Bryce

Theses and Dissertations

Why is there no warm-up for the Meisner technique? Why do standard vocal warm-ups not actually prepare the actor for performance? This thesis seeks to remedy both of these issues in 21st century actor training. It does so by creating a warm-up for the Meisner technique that will also prepare actors’ voice, body, and presence. This warm-up was formed by combining Meisner repetition exercises and the Miller Voice Method. The final warm-up was presented as a workshop for actors at the 2020 Southeastern Theatre Conference.

Kavana: Photography, Jewish Storytelling, And Memory, Hannah Altman

Theses and Dissertations

Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a given for the Jewish diaspora, …

Ghost Signs Are More Than Paintings On Brick, Eric Anthony Berdis

Theses and Dissertations

My work embraces a maximalist aesthetic that incorporates, archival research, personal secrets, and pubescent gay boy glamour. I seek to create a stimulating yet jarring experience, while building a world that is both familiar and inherently strange to the viewer. Thrift store cast-offs, hobbyist craft supplies, and saturated drawings are reassembled into a cast of characters and costumes that balance on the line between ghosts, creatures, and friends. While we often think of costume and even art installations as meant to cover bodies and walls, my work tends to reveal more than conceal. I aspire through this work to shine …

Translingual Public Pedagogy, Precarity And Inquiry: Learned Limits And Limitlessness Through Memoir, Melisa Cahnmann Taylor, Sharon Nuruddin, Tairan Qiu

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

In this paper we document the precarity of translingual pedagogies (Canagarajah, 2013), those occurring when languages are in contact and mutually influencing each other with emergent meanings and grammars. Sharing translingual art and literature during a public Lunar New Year Celebration, we turn to memoir methodologies for understanding “trans” practices: those that transgress singular codes, modalities, human/nonhuman cultures, and personal-scientific boundaries. Our findings (and lost things) identify the challenges and possibilities of working in the liminal space of fractured social and linguistic identities.

A Girl Is A Girl Is A Girl, Paige Lizbeth Morris

Theses and Dissertations

It is well known that Western society uses men’s visual pleasure as a means to determine womxn’s value; her success is dependent on her compliance with culturally determined beauty standards. This process turns womxn into commodities and reinforces notions of gender complementarity, perpetuating a lifetime of servitude to patriarchal ideologies. It reminds the non-male that she is incomplete, insufficient, insignificant, and so easily dismissable. It forces her to be dependent, to shut up, to sit down, and to enjoy it.

In an effort to reject these presumed histories and narrow connotations of womxn, I have analyzed my gender performance in …

Robert Cowley: Living Free During Slavery In Eighteenth-Century Richmond, Virginia, Ana F. Edwards

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the life of Robert Cowley, a formerly enslaved man living free during slavery in eighteenth-century Richmond, Virginia. The first chapter examines Cowley’s enslaved life through the records of others. The data collectors and historians of early America did not intend to capture the truth of Black people’s American experiences, except as defined their enslavement--people in service to the wealth-building capacity of the nation. Yet the lives of Black people who lived in proximity to prominent whites can be glimpsed in a variety of records and writings from account books to deeds, from private letters to newspaper advertisements. …

Diversification As A Strategy: A Research-Based Plan To Cultivate New Audiences At The Richmond Symphony, James A. Perkins Jr, C Keith Claassen, Frank G. Weber, Verona D. Wilborn

Doctor of Education Capstones

Building a more inclusive audience is not a far-fetched idea; system diversification by its very nature is a performance strategy, not a performance goal. Changing audience demographics requires well laid out plans, achievable goals, effective processes, and a total organizational commitment to diversification. This report was created to provide perspectives that inform executive leaders in arts organizations who plan to attract diverse audiences. It highlights nine research-based recommendations for audience diversification. Our report is unique in that it layers four approaches that, if used simultaneously, have the potential to both increase the likelihood of success and decrease the amount of …

The Future In The Instant: Time As The Essence Of Dramatic Tension In Shakespeare's Plays And Their Contemporary Stage Appropriations, Amalia Oswald

Theses and Dissertations

This project looks at the similarities and differences between three Shakespeare plays and their companion contemporary stage appropriations: Othello and Toni Morrisons’s Desdemona, The Winter’s Tale and Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s 16 Winters or the Bear’s Tale, and Macbeth and Daivd Grieg’s Dunsinane. The specific lens used to examine these texts is the dramatic concept of time, taking the form of different variations throughout the work such as chronology, remembrance, fate, and futurity. This project argues that the multifaceted dramatic concept of time is the foundation for dramatic tension and the principal connecting motif between the three sets of early modern/contemporary …

Going Ashore In Thule, David Schlitz

Mighty Pen Project Anthology & Archive

A Coast Guard member aboard The Westwind recounts his team’s adventures during the summer of 1961 in Thule.

Articles, stories, and other compositions in this archive were written by participants in the Mighty Pen Project. The program, developed by author David L. Robbins, and in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University and the Virginia War Memorial in Richmond, Virginia, offers veterans and their family members a customized twelve-week writing class, free of charge. The program encourages, supports, and assists participants in sharing their stories and experiences of military experience so both writer and audience may benefit.

Commonwealth Times 2019-11-20

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-11-13

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

(Global) Hip Hop Studies Bibliography, Travis T. Harris, Travis Terrell Harris

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

This bibliography documents Hip Hop scholarship outside of America, including scholarly works that may be US centric, yet expands its analysis to other parts of the world. Hip Hop Studies outside the boundaries of the United States stretches as far and wide as Hip Hop itself. This scholarship started in 1984, and the amount of scholarship beyond American boundaries has continued to grow up through present day. The first wave, before Mitchell's Global Noise (2001), includes a wider range of scholarly works such as conference presentations and books written by journalists, in addition to traditional academic sources such as books …

Negotiating French Muslim Identities Through Hip Hop, Mich Yonah Nyawalo

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

In The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National Identity, Gérard Noiriel contends that in France, the modern idea of the nation emerged as a means to subvert the dominant influence of the nobility, whose rule was underwritten by the aristocratic idea that “the nation was founded on ‘blood lineage.’”1 Noiriel posits that “the revolutionary upheaval discredited not only the old order but everything that harked back to origins, so much so that the first decrees abolishing nobility were also directed against names that evoked people’s origins: an elegant name is still a form of privilege; its credit must be …

Commonwealth Times 2019-11-06

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Building Relationships: Art Making And Empty Bowls, Susan R. Whiteland

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

How can collaborative art making foster relationship building for those involved? A Problem Based Learning project that investigated food insecurity and the creation of clay soup bowls provided an answer for a number of students, and various community members. This article follows the story of a university professor’s involvement with her students in a partnership with a local intermediate school when they pursued an initiative to include art in their STEAM based curriculum dedicated to meeting a local need. Older adults, elementary students, and a variety of other interested individuals joined the effort and demonstrated how art can build relationships.

Commonwealth Times 2019-10-30

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Sub/Versing Mentoring Expectations: Duration, Discernment, Diffraction, Natalie Leblanc, Valerie Triggs, Rita Irwin

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

The three of us have shared co-mentoring relationships over the last decade. Rita was the PhD supervisor for both Natalie and Valerie and while working with them and other PhD students, came to believe that goals are reciprocal in many ways. In this article, we attend to the concept of co-mentoring, an exchange that includes three qualities guiding ongoing artistic, professional and scholarly work. These subversive qualities are described as: a) duration, b) discernment, and c) diffraction. From a practice-based, new materialist lens, we take turns describing how each quality is important to co-mentoring relationships and we provide theoretical …

Commonwealth Times 2019-10-16

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-10-09

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-10-02

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-09-25

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-09-18

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-09-11

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-09-04

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-08-28

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-03-27

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

What Is The Role Of The Prison Library? The Development Of A Theoretical Foundation., Jayne Finlay, Jessica Bates

Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (2014-2023)

There has been little examination of how criminological theory may help to inform library practice in correctional settings. This article takes steps to address this deficit by presenting a new and timely approach to prison library research. It suggests that situating prison library research within the disciplines of librarianship, education and criminology can lead to a deeper understanding of the contribution made by libraries to the lives of those in prison. The authors propose a theoretical model which draws on theories of desistance, informal learning theories and critical librarianship. This model can be used by both library and education researchers …

Commonwealth Times 2019-02-27

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Commonwealth Times 2019-01-23

Commonwealth Times, 1969-

No abstract provided.

Virginia Commonwealth University Undergraduate Bulletin [2019], Virginia Commonwealth University

VCU Bulletins

Undergraduate bulletin for Virginia Commonwealth University for the academic year 2019-2020. It includes information on academic regulations, degree requirements, course offerings, faculty, academic calendar, and tuition and expenses for undergraduate programs.