Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: A Lighting Artist's Approach, Jonathan D. Hicks

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

A reflection of the lighting artist’s approach for the lighting design of The Twenty-fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Department of Theater’s Fall 2010 production used as a research ground for the experimentation of lighting design through the cueing process.

Decolonizing Texts: A Performance Autoethnography, Hari Stephen Kumar

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural …

A Process Of Design: The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Dennis R. Berfield Mr.

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

A collaborative process, when implemented for a theatrical production, not only reinforces a design team's ability to tell a story, it supports a artistically unified design that can be communicated easily to all members of a production team regardless of their production role. The information within this thesis is documentation of a collaborative process between the Scenic Designer and the production team for the University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Theater's production of The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee by Rachel Sheinkin with music and lyrics by William Finn. Preliminary design images, model photographs, Autodesk AutoCAD design plates, …

“What Country Friends Is This?”: Creating Shakespeare’S Twelfth Night Onstage, A Director's Journey, Dawn Monique Williams

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This written portion of my thesis is aimed at documenting how I, the director, as both interpretive and generative artist, took William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from the page to the stage through ongoing collaboration with a team of artists including designers, a composer, and actors. My documentation includes the generation of my theatrical production concept and staging of Shakespeare’s play. In order to place my production of Twelfth Night in cultural, historical, and artistic contexts, I open my discussion to theoretical considerations and artistic practices, address my specific artistic decisions in the creation of this production, examine the particular problems …

A Design Concept For The Lighting Design Of Federico Garcia Lorca's The House Of Bernarda Alba, Thaddeus L. Kramer

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

A discussion of the abstract approach for the lighting design of the Theater Department’s Fall 2010 production of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba through the use of time of day and “clean and dirty” light.

Freedom In Structure: Life Inside The House Of Bernarda Alba, Toby V. Bercovici

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

In this thesis, I take the reader through the process and particular challenges of directing The House of Bernarda Alba, from choosing a translation, to casting from a pool of mostly undergraduate actors, to staging a show in-the-round. More particularly, I compare my previous work with adaptation to this process of treating the script as a fixed entity.

I also offer a detailed explanation of the exploratory work I did with the actors in building the physicality of the play-world and exploring the relationships of the characters. For this, I drew heavily on Anne Bogart’s composition exercises, found in …