Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Redefining Irishness: Fragmentation Or Intercultural Exchange, Rania M Rafik Khalil

English Language and Literature

The traditional definition of Irishness has been overwritten by internationalization, cultural and political discourses. Globalisation today sets the ground for the redefinition of a “new Ireland” altering the ethnocultural base to the definitions of Irish national identity. Recent cultural criticism on modern Irish studies have described the Irish nation as undergoing moments of crisis and instability within a global context. This paper explores and analyzes the process by which literary dramatic works dealing with Irish national distinctiveness have been put subject to being written and re-written as the Irish nation passes through periods of instabilities and problematisations. Ireland has been …

The Story Of Us: College As A Modern Rite Of Passage For Emerging Adults, Tamara Ulana Bodnar

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

The movement from adolescence to adulthood has often been identified by certain rites of passage across cultures. These rites are ceremonious, ritualistic events such as a bar/bat mitzvah, marriage, and graduation, They indicate a transition from one stage of life to another and sometimes contain difficult obstacles and challenges that assist in the maturation process. College provides contemporary American students with a modern rite of passage; it is a time of transition between youth and the "real world" of adulthood. At its core, the purpose of going to college is to become educated, so that by the time one leaves, …

The Curse Of The V: Contemporary Feminist Movements And Performative Dichotomies In The Plays Of Caryl Churchill, Meredith A. Connelly

Honors Program Theses

Caryl Churchill mixes historical setting with shallowly defined characters and dissociative references to the contemporary within her vast body of work. She seeks to deny her audience the opportunity to blindly accept the entertainment of narrative theater, forcing them instead into a realm of discomfort where they must identify the unsavory elements of history with their own lived experience. This research began with the questioning of previous critical models which examine characters as autonomous beings rather than as personified themes, and asks how Churchill responds radically with theater as a medium to events pervading her own experience as a woman …

Hamlet #Princeofdenmark: Exploring Gender And Technology Through A Contemporary Feminist Re-Interpretation Of Hamlet, Allegra B. Breedlove

Scripps Senior Theses

Exploring the process of designing, producing, directing and starring in a multimedia feminist re-interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in a contemporary social media landscape.

Interdisciplinary Connections Between Science & Theatre, Jessica N. Dotson

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

INTERDISCIPLINARY CONNECTIONS BETWEEN SCIENCE & THEATRE

Jessica Nicole Dotson

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Virginia Commonwealth University, 2015.

Major Director: Dr. Noreen C. Barnes, Director of Graduate Studies, Associate Professor of Theatre

In the 1990s, astronomer Peter Usher was searching for new ways to teach his introductory astronomy class at Pennsylvania State University. He began to engage his students by searching for astronomical connections from other disciplines. His focus was turned to the arts, especially the works of William Shakespeare. Usher found, while …

Robot Saints, Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

In the Middle Ages, articulating religious figures like wooden Deposition crucifixes and ambulatory saints were tools for devotion, techno-mythological objects that distilled the wonders of engineering and holiness. Robots are gestures toward immortality, created in the face of the undeniable fact and experience of the ongoing decay of our fleshy bodies. Both like and unlike human beings, robots and androids occupy a nebulous perceptual realm between life and death, animation and inanimation. Masahiro Mori called this in-between space the “uncanny valley.” In this essay I argue that unlike a modern person apprehending an android (the uncanny human-like object that resides …

Anarchist Strategy And Visual Rhetoric In Brazil, 1970: The Living Theatre As “The People In The Street”, Chelsea R. Roberts

All Master's Theses

The dominant narrative of the Living Theatre, an anarchist-pacifist, activist performance group, situates the company within a historical framework of the "New Left". Implications of this strategy are identified and critiqued. Both due to the simplification of historical time periods between the fields of theatre and politics, or "periodization" (Postlewait), and because of the ways in which the "New Left" is identified as overtly American in much theatre scholarship, historicizing the Living Theatre as "in-line" with the New Left has resulted in the erasure of the Living Theatre's founding philosophies of anarchism and pacifism. The visual implications of these findings …

"Nayles Large And Lang": Masculine Identity And The Anachronic Object In The York Crucifixion Play, Daisy Black

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

No abstract provided.

“Frailty, Thy Name Is Woman”: Depictions Of Female Madness, Julianna Little

Theses and Dissertations

Concepts of mental health and normality cannot be understood apart from cultural norms and values. The most significant of cultural constructions that shape our view of madness is gender. Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be gendered into the twenty-first century. Works of art and literature and psychiatric medicine influence each other as well as our understanding and perception of mental illness. Throughout history, images of mental illness in women send the message that women are weak, dangerous, and require containment. What are the cultural links between femininity and insanity, …

The Absurd Reality Of Satire In Neil Labute's 'Fat Pig', Hermione Gehle

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This research project examines the misreading of satire in some productions of Neil LaBute’s play, Fat Pig. This practice led project aims to investigate why such misinterpretations occur and explore the theatrical styles that emphasise the satire in the text via rehearsal processes and production.

There will be three preliminary paths undertaken in this research heading toward a new production of Fat Pig; an exploration of the responses of audiences and critics to past productions; an analysis of the background to Neil LeBute and his work; and an examination of theatrical expressions of satire, experimental theatre, contemporary theatre, …

No One Is Alone: Responsibility, Consequences, And Family In Into The Woods, Jennifer White

Honors Program Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Choose Your Own Oz, Tommy R. Jamerson Ii

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Dancing On Checkers' Grave By Eric Lane, Allison Kump

Honors Projects

My proposed honors project consists of directing my own, fully-actualized production of Eric Lane’s play Dancing on Checkers’ Grave within the BGSU’s Department of Theatre & Film Elsewhere season. As the director, I must hone in on the play’s relevance to today’s society and shape my storytelling tools to clearly communicate the narrative, establishing a relationship between the performers and the audience.

Dancing on Checkers’ Grave is a play about two very different teenage girls who come to bond over homework, “munchkining,” relationships, and nail polish. Rooted within the text are topics of sexual identity, what it means to be …

The Rape Of Blanche: An Examination Of Critical Analysis & Sexist Overtones, Audrey Thayer

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The first people to ever listen to the words of A Streetcar Named Desire were two women, Margo Jones and Joanna Albus. Tennessee Williams read them an uncompleted first draft of the play. Margo Jones was “supportive of the play but urged him to rewrite it and to soften Blanche's hysteria. He listened, and ignored her” (Rader 199). The very first people who were privy to the violent, sensual, chaotic world of Blanche and Stanley were two women who found fault in Stella's character. They saw her hysteria, no doubt an unbecoming trait, as “far out,” or perhaps unbelievable. Much …

Review Of "The Norton Anthology Of Drama", Andrew Vorder Bruegge

College of Visual and Performing Arts Faculty Publications

Review of new edition of a drama anthology/textbook.

Seventeenth-Century Social Hierarchy And Character Interpretation In "The Country Wife", Andrew Vorder Bruegge

College of Visual and Performing Arts Faculty Publications

Analysis of characters in the drama within their cultural context. Four of the principal female characters succeed in attaining upward mobility in social class over the course of the action. The URL for the full-text document is: http://dx.doi.org/10.15640/ijmpa.v2n2a3

Webster's Geometry; Or, The Irreducible Duchess, Benjamin Bertram Phd

Faculty Publications

This study of geometry, gender, and skepticism in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi argues that the play leaves us in a hall of mirrors, a horror show of optical tricks, delusion, narcissism, and perspectivism from which there seems to be no escape, no masterpiece of God’s creation upholding reality beyond sensory images. In the absence of a transcendental referent, the Duchess’ willful and fearful journey «into the wilderness» – the life she leads as a result of her furtive marriage to her steward Antonio – becomes an alternative to both the public sphere mapped by divine patterns of order …

Review Of Marilyn Francus, Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture And The Ideology Of Domesticity, Phyllis Ann Thompson

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

Review of Marilyn Francus. Monstrous Motherhood: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Ideology of Domesticity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. Xi + 297pp. Index. ISBN 978-1-4214-0737-1.

2014 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 26 to September 27, 2014. Those performing included: Bil Lepp, Sheila Kay Adams, Victoria Burnnett, Bill Harley, Josh Goforth, Dan Keding, and Antonio Rocha.

“A Little History Here, A Little Hollywood There”: (Counter-) Identifying With The Spanish Fantasy In Carlos Morton’S Rancho Hollywood And Theresa Chavez’S L.A. Real, Courtney Mohler

Scholarship and Professional Work – Arts

Often considered the final conquest and ultimate summation of Manifest Destiny, California holds a unique place in the American imaginary. While the popular mythology of the Spanish fantasy has served to obscure the use of violence and racialized oppression throughout the colonization of the American Southwest, traces of such struggle remain in memories of the colonized as they continue to occupy this contested space. This paper examines Carlos Morton’s ensemble-based political satire, Rancho Hollywood, and Theresa Chavez’s one-woman show, L.A. Real, to navigate the dynamic experience of contemporary Southern Californian racialized identity. These two pieces diverge stylistically but …

"The Color Purple" Takes Us On Emotional Journey Of Self-Discovery (Performance Review), Daryl Cumber Dance

English Faculty Publications

Extraordinary. That's the only way to describe the Virginia Repertory Theatre's musical version of "The Color Purple." Based on Alice Walker's classic novel, this Broadway-class show takes the audience on a moving, soulful journey of self-discovery with the heroine, Celie.

Review Of Bonnie Latimer, Making Gender, Culture, And The Self In The Fiction Of Samuel Richardson: The Novel Individual, Karen Lipsedge

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

Latimer’s Making Gender, Culture, and the Self in the Fiction of Samuel Richardson answers a need in eighteenth-century Richardsonian studies. It is also a thoughtful and long overdue study, which deserves praise and attention. Latimer provides the reader with a greater understanding of the notion of female individuality in Richardson’s novels, and also of eighteenth-century culture and contemporary literature. Her research is gratifying in its level of detail, and she is deft in showing correspondences between eighteenth-century culture, fiction and Richardson’s novels. Although Sir Charles Grandison lies at the heart of this study, Latimer is equally skilful in devoting attention …

Novels, Philosophies, And Sex, Aleksondra Hultquist

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Enit Karafili Steiner, Jane Austen's Civilized Women: Morality, Gender, And The Civilizing Process, Sarah Raff

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Paula Backscheider, Elizabeth Singer Rowe And The Development Of The English Novel, Sarah H. Prescott

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

No abstract provided.

Review Of Carol Stewart (Ed.), The Rash Resolve And Life's Progress, Sarah R. Creel

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

This review gives an overview of Carol Stewart's edition of Eliza Haywood's The Rash Resolve and Life's Progress. Providing a modern edition of these texts in print for the first time, Stewart's edition brings the two novels to life with careful attention to historical and contextual details.

You’Re An Austen Heroine! Engaging Students With Past And Present, Caroline Breashears

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

In my senior seminar on Jane Austen, I seek to engage students in multiple ways. On one hand, I want them to connect with Austen’s world and to reflect on what it means to them; on the other hand, I want them to understand the very real differences of that world and how they inform her novels. One strategy for engaging students in these ways is through interactive games. Studies have shown that many modern games have features similar to those stressed by engaged learning, so game design can be adapted for pedagogical purposes. I discuss the purposes, design, and …

Teaching Willmore, James Evans

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

Teaching Aphra Behn’s The Rover for nearly four decades, I have witnessed a considerable shift in students’ attitudes toward the play, especially toward Willmore. More positive about his character in the 1970s and 1980s, they have had a much more negative assessment since then. The only available video version, the Women’s Theatre Trust production, compounds my pedagogical problem through filming techniques and choice of actor; emphasizing male violence against women, its interpretation parallels feminist criticism of the 1990s. Asking students to examine theater history may lead them to see that Behn does not completely match this ideological paradigm. The original …

The Secret Life Of Archives: Sally Siddons, Sir Thomas Lawrence, And The Material Of Memory, Laura Engel

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

This essay is in two parts, in the first I attempt to map out strategies for considering archival materials through the lens of performance, and in the second I enact or perform some of those strategies through a close reading of a letter from Sally Siddons, daughter of the famous actress Sarah Siddons, to the renown portrait painter and rakish bad boy, Sir Thomas Lawrence. I present a methodology that considers archival researchers as tourists who approach archival objects and images as material for curating a virtual exhibition. I argue that this strategy allows us to recognize and attempt to …

Adrianne Wadewitz, 1977-2014, Laura Runge

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

No abstract provided.