Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

The Wild Dark Or, La Oscuridad Salvaje: Illuminating Identity Through Failure, Worley B. Gierhart

Undergraduate Theses

This thesis, "The Wild Dark or, La oscuridad salvaje: Illuminating Identity Through Failure," explores how the narrative power of darkness can serve as a catalyst for profound self-discovery, particularly in the aftermath of significant failure. Drawing upon literary analysis and the author's personal experience of shifting academic paths, the study examines how confronting metaphorical darkness allows for a critical rebuilding of identity and self-concept. The play referenced in the title, "The Wild Dark or, La oscuridad salvaje," serves as a central point of analysis, investigating the interplay of theme, setting, and scenario in depicting this transformative process. By engaging with …

Theatre Education At The University Of Montana: Providing Innovative Solutions To A Complex Problem, Natalie Renk

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This paper is part of a larger project that aims to provide solutions to assimilate the University of Montana’s theatre education program with those across the United States by providing budget conscious innovations. The focus of this paper will be the creation of two methods courses: THTR 438: Content for Secondary Theatre Education and THTR 439: Skills for Theatre Education, this paper discussing the former. The latter was designed by my research partner, Ren Shepherd. This course would offer comprehensive coverage of theatre practitioners, both historical and modern theatrical texts, hands on design and budgeting experience, as well as teaching …

The Quiet Gnosticism Of Samuel Beckett’S Endgame, Andrew Dean Chapman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis draws on and extends previous Gnostic readings of Samuel Beckett’s fiction which has located the figure of the demiurge mostly in the background and finds through close reading that in Endgame the demiurge takes the foreground.

This thesis proposes that Endgame’s gnosticism goes further than recreating gnostic themes and tropes. Rather, Endgame’s gnosticism fuses the gnostic laughter of the gnostic Christ, Schopenhauerian tragedy, and Quietist paradoxes to create a system of progressive enlightenment which culminates in a revelation evidenced by a laugh that, in Beckett’s Watt, is called the mirthless laugh. This laugh, I propose, is the laugher’s …

The Page And The Stage: How Comics Perform, Elizabeth Buccella

Theses and Dissertations

Comics and theatre share several, often overlooked similarities, like their unique concept of the gaze, interpretation and execution of a script, and the curation of a distinct visual language. This makes comics a viable candidate for analysis using the field of performance studies and other theatrical forms of analysis. The process of comics and how they are read is discussed before a brief literature review of performance and comics studies scholarship. Two comics, one nonfiction and one fiction, are analyzed using the key concepts from the literature review.

Reading With Aunt Bunty: Intergenerational Feminism And Eighteenth-Century Studies, Alison Conway

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

This essay asks: what might an intergenerational reading practice look like for feminist critics working in eighteenth-century studies? What could be learned from reading the political and institutional conditions that have shaped reading practices, past and present, in relation to each other? I consider, here, the case of Q.D. Leavis. Reading Leavis, as well as other women who studied at Cambridge in the early twentieth century, shows me how profoundly I have been shaped by Virginia Woolf’s characterization of the university and literary history’s marginalization of women writers. What would it mean to consider the eighteenth century through the lens …

A Review Of Kristin M. Girten's Sensitive Witnesses: Feminist Materialism In The British Enlightenment, Peter West

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Sensitive Witnesses by Kristin M. Girten by Peter West.

A Review Of Glenn Mcgillivray's Actors, Audiences, And Emotions In The Eighteenth Century: Communities Of Sentiment, Semane Parsons

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A Review of Glen McGillivray's book Actors, Audiences, and Emotions in the Eighteenth Century: Communities of Sentiment (2023).

A Review Of Jennifer Maclure’S The Feeling Of Letting Die: Necroeconomics And Victorian Fiction, Jolene Zigarovich

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Jennifer MacLure’s The Feeling of Letting Die: Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction by Jolene Zigarovich.

A Review Of Maeve E. Kane's Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, And Exchange Across Three Centuries, Melissa Adams-Campbell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries, by Maeve Kane

“Strange And Unusual Things”: Teaching The Speculative Fiction Of Margaret Cavendish, E Mariah Spencer

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Margaret Cavendish, a prolific author and natural philosopher, defies categorization with her multifaceted contributions to literature and philosophy. While she is recognized for her groundbreaking work in various academic fields, her literature also resonates within the realms of science fiction, weird fiction, and speculative genres. This essay explores innovative approaches to teaching Cavendish's work, particularly within the realm of speculative literature, using an interdisciplinary lens. Drawing on perspectives including monster theory and the concept of the abject, students are prompted to critically engage with Cavendish's texts. By examining themes such as the monstrous, the supernatural, and the occult, students uncover …

Teaching Margaret Cavendish Through The Lens Of Scientific Anti-Realism, Kevin Lower

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) only began receiving sustained attention by historians of philosophy in recent decades, but she is being rapidly integrated into the early modern philosophical canon. This essay explores one dimension of teaching Cavendish that presents difficulties for introductory philosophy students: her criticisms of experimental philosophy. Section one explains how I integrate Cavendish into the narrative of my course, identifying both historical and thematic strategies for including her in introductory philosophy courses. Section two describes methods for teaching Cavendish’s natural philosophy and identifies a pedagogical challenge to presenting her criticisms of experimental philosophy. In their first exposure to Cavendish, …

Jumping Pens And Historical Vertigo: Teaching Cavendish In The Twenty-First Century, Anne M. Thell

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

"Jumping Pens" considers "historical and epistemological vertigo" as a useful pedagogical rubric for teaching the works of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) in contemporary university classrooms. Specifically, it looks back across more than a decade of teaching Cavendish in diverse settings in order to show how exciting this author can be for students who are just starting out in the discipline of literary studies. As this essay argues, Cavendish can make us all better, more self-aware instructors, while also developing critical and historical acumen in our students.

Concise Collections: Teaching Margaret Cavendish, Part Ii, E Mariah Spencer, Tiffany Potter

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The Winter 2024 edition of ABO continues the Concise Collections on Teaching series, centering on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), an "also/and" author whose expansive work defies singular categorization. Cavendish’s prolific corpus engages with a wide array of subjects, from materialism and scientific anti-realism to gender, education, and cognition. Her writings bridge both literary and philosophical traditions, blending speculative fiction with critiques of mechanistic science, particularly through her explorations of weird fiction and proto-scientific thought.

Photo-Feminists: The Inter-Textual Discussion Of Eighteenth-Century Periodical Frontispieces, Karenza Sutton-Bennett

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The visual afterlife of the two frontispieces from the first volume of Eliza Haywood’s periodical, The Female Spectator (1744-46) promotes the argument that middling women should be allowed to learn the same proto-disciplinary topics that men studied by representing how women could include both amusements and informal learning in between their duties as wives and mothers. The Female Spectator’s frontispiece, the emblem to Frances Brooke’s The Old Maid (1755-56), the frontispiece to Charlotte Lennox’s The Lady’s Museum (1760-61) and the 1789 frontispiece to The Lady’s Magazine (1770-1847) have the common element of the image of Minerva to visually continue the …

Playing Proverbs With Madame De Genlis, Rebecca Cypess

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The theatrical genre known as the proverbe dramatique, which flourished as a pastime of French high society during the late eighteenth century, has often been understood through the written exemplars left by the author and artist Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle. Yet Carmontelle’s literary contributions to the genre have obscured the vast range of activities known as jouer des proverbes (playing proverbs)—activities associated especially with women—which included conversational games, pantomime, poetry, dance, and music making. Attending to the many descriptions of jouer des proverbes left by Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, the Com­tesse de Genlis, reveals that the literary …

The Sounds Of Madame Geoffrin’S Salon, Melanie Conroy

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

Salons were core institutions of the eighteenth-century European social calendar, especially in Paris. Literary performances and philosophical conversation were the core activities of many of these gatherings. What did conversation and literary readings actually sound like at these events? To what extent were voices audible to everyone in the room, or too muffled or far away to be heard? What was the impact of the ambiance or of ephemeral sound on the reading or reception of the hearing? Using textual descriptions, paintings, and architectural information, I reconstruct two legendary readings of eighteenth-century texts, Voltaire’s L’Orphélin de la Chine and Marmontel's …

Tactical Staging: Evolving Methods Of Feminist Activism In Susan Glaspell’S Work, Allison Mcpeak

English: Student Scholarship & Creative Works

In the marketplace of ideas, the Theatre Arts employ narrative stories and eye-catching visual art pieces draw listeners and viewers in a way that is unmatched by other methods. Art not only reflects the society from which it was created, it also acts as a projection of the creator’s ideal world. Theatre, being both a sonic and visual medium also has the unique advantage of speaking directly to a captive audience that are physically in the same room as the characters onstage, making those connections significantly more personal. A caveat, however, is that modern theatre tends to reflect the values …

Little Shop Of Patriarchy : Analyzing Constructed Vs. Essential Gender Roles, Taylor Gadsden-Deterville

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Frank Oz’s Little Shop of Horrors (1986) is more than a silly kooky musical. The comedic plot dramatically dances with themes of domestic violence, poverty, and sexism. For this project, my poster will explore the expectations and representations of femininity and masculinity set up at the film's beginning versus the end. The film’s context will connect to research involving gender essentialism (innate, biological sex) and gender constructionism (socially constructed gender roles). I will analyze the roles of Seymour, Audrey, and Orin to exhibit how they discover their constructed and essential gender identities. The film represents Audrey as a ditsy hyper-feminine …

Was It Good? A Look At The Golden-Ticket Question Of Societal Preferences In Theatre, Carina Leland

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

What makes theatre “good?” There are some common answers that critics and the public agree upon, but the guidelines of good theatre have changed greatly throughout history. Many playwrights and critics have created philosophies that attempted to define popular theatre in their time or according to their personal views. Today’s opinion on “good” has its own set of characteristics that the majority of society enjoys, which is unique from any historical manifesto. Furthermore, our modern consensus doesn’t take into account the wildly different nature of individual preferences; while I enjoy light-hearted coming-of-age stories, others find deeper satisfaction from a thought-provoking …

Fall Faculty Dance Concert

Dance Programs

No abstract provided.

Bad Girls: Agency, Revenge, And Redemption In Contemporary Drama, Courtney Watson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Cultural movements including #TimesUp and #MeToo have contributed momentum to the demand for and development of smart, justified female criminal characters in contemporary television drama. These women are representations of shifting power dynamics, and they possess agency as they channel their desires and fury into success, redemption, and revenge. Building on works including Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, dramas produced since 2016—including The Handmaid’s Tale, Ozark, and Killing Eve—have featured the rise of women who use rule-breaking, rebellion, and crime to enact positive change.

More Than Simple Plagiarism: Ligotti, Pizzolatto, And True Detective’S Terrestrial Horror, Jonathan Elmore

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Of course, True Detective is neither a philosopher’s bedtime story nor supernatural horror, and yet there remains a productive affinity between Ligotti’s work and the HBO series. Where Ligotti provides substantial portions of the hallmark character’s identity and dialogue, True Detective puts Ligotti’s thought experiment to far more practical uses than does Ligotti himself. By intertwining hurricanes and flooding alongside industry and pollution into the background and negative space of the setting, the series implicates the urgent material reality of climate change and environmental collapse into the setting: “all of this is going to be under water in thirty years” …

Reflection: The Twenty-Line Trap? Shakespeare Enacted By Young Women, Shannon Reed

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Professional actors assemble a toolkit of monologues with an obligatory “Shakespearean monologue” of around 20 lines. But female actors are at a disadvantage, with less than 150 women in a repertoire of over 1,100 characters in Shakespeare’s 37 or more plays. Young female actors (18-22 years old) are even more at a loss, if the powerful and complex older female roles are removed, leaving only a few dozen appropriate speeches. What effect does this limited canon have on such actors? Here, I reflect upon my own participant observer experience as a young woman actor, who received the bulk of my …

Hamlet In Narnia: The Prince And The Poem In Lewis’S Chronicles Of Narnia, Sarah R. A. Waters

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

C.S. Lewis is little-known for his Shakespeare scholarship except perhaps for his lecture “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem” for the British Academy (1942). This essay begins by discussing Lewis’s approach to the play and his desire to reenchant his audience with the play he had loved as a child, before character-criticism got in the way. It then explores how Lewis takes the Prince and the aspects he found most affective in Hamlet out of the play and explores them, imaginatively, in another world: recasting them “for children” in Narnia. The essay considers Hamlet in The Silver Chair in …

Tolkien The Playwright: Manuscript Revisions And Faërian Dramas In "The Homecoming Of Beorhtnoth", Anna Smol

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Tolkien is not usually considered a playwright, even though his verse drama, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son,” is a unique example of the genre. It is Tolkien’s only published play and historical fiction, as well as a unique poetic - dramatic genre, a modern alliterative verse play, which Tolkien developed over many years in numerous drafts, now held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Brotherton Library in Leeds. These manuscript drafts allow us to trace Tolkien’s stage directions, which reveal that he imagined this to be a play for presentation on stage. This essay examines Tolkien’s statements …

2024 Cave Run Storytelling Festival Poster, Cave Run Storytelling Festival Committee (Morehead, Ky.), Morehead Tourism Commission (Morehead, Ky.)

Cave Run Storytelling Festival Posters

Promotional development poster for the Cave Run Storytelling Festival held on September 27 and September 28, 2024. Those performing included: Charlotte Blake Alston, Rev. Robert B. Jones, Sr., Bil Lepp, Ed Stivender, Dolores Hydock, Kevin Kling, and Antonio Rocha.

Burn The Sympathy, Gabino Noriega Iii

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

Poem

Moving Pictures Of The Past: Nostalgia For Classical Hollywood In The Broadway Musical, 1960–1990, Curtis Russell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I examine how Broadway staged classical Hollywood between 1960 and 1990 amid social, artistic, and industrial upheaval. While upheaval and experimentation are constants even during epochs of apparent stability, the story my dissertation tells is of an industry facing the perils of obsolescence by looking backward and westward to understand how its larger and more powerful culture industry sibling navigated similar moments of disruption. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “nostalgia film,” I contend that between 1960 and 1990 the nine “nostalgia musicals” under consideration served the same function for the Broadway musical that the nostalgia …

I Did It My Way: Theatre Production And Design Project, Bryan Stanton

Open Educational Resources

As future designers and technicians, it is essential to understand how design and technical elements assist with expansive storytelling. We work with directors and actors to bring stories to life and must always keep the story in mind when creating. By demonstrating your understanding of how technical theatre areas work together to assist with storytelling, you are getting real-world experience that will serve you in a career in theatre, as well as any career that focuses on storytelling, including marketing, advertising, law, and writing.

A Review Of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance Of The Forest, Edited By Shelley King And John B. Pierce, Annette Hulbert

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The Romance of the Forest has long been one of the most teachable of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, given its relatively shorter length and popularity at the time of its publication. Now, Shelley King and John B. Pierce have prepared with great thoroughness an updated version of the text for Broadview that proves a worthy successor to Chloe Chard’s Oxford World Classics edition, published in 1986. The edition builds on Chard’s notes and includes extensive historical appendices that would benefit both teachers and scholars of Radcliffe’s work.