Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

The Musicality Of Salsa Dancers: An Ethnographic Study, Janice Mahinka

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work analyzes the musical knowledge and aesthetics acquired by improvisatory social salsa dancers who hone close listening skills through corporeal means. The connections that these dancers construct between music, self, and partner make evident an engagement with musicality that can be seen through their demonstration of kinesthetic entrainment, structural feeling of hypermetric conventions, and enactment of expressive microtiming within beat and metric structures. I introduce the concept of timespace to explain how dancers manipulate this physiological experience to create different feelings in a dance, addressing issues that dancers raised in our feedback interviews such as feel, flow, and play. …

The Lines Between The Lines: Stage Directions As Fluid, Affective Collaborations Between Theatre Texts And Theatre Makers, Sarah Bess Rowen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project contends that certain kinds of stage directions can affectively engage the bodies of actors, and the imaginations of directors and designers, resulting in a collaboratively created performance of a given theatre text. As opposed to more literary treatments of stage directions, this project contends that theories of embodiment, especially affect theory, is a useful lens through which to explore the range of potential performances present in various stage directions. By analyzing the ways in which stage directions allow for more agency than has traditionally been considered in theatre scholarship, I seek to encourage theatre makers and scholars alike …

A Conversation Rewound: Queer And Racialized Temporalities In Hamilton, Shereen Inayatulla, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

The authors of this article, two educators and immigrants situated in the United States, consider the exigencies of listening to Hamilton: An American Musical. Shaped as dialogue, this article follows a previous piece where the authors processed their experience seeing Hamilton performed live. The current conversation shifts to the act of listening; it examines the ways in which the soundtrack embeds the audience into Lin-Manuel Miranda’s narrative, reinscribing the racialized immigrant body onto both Alexander Hamilton’s story, and Hamilton, the musical. Additionally, this article asks how the fictional Hamilton’s message to rise up and take a shot grants audience members …

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Broad City Scrambles The Formula, Robert Leston

Publications and Research

Robert Leston explores how Broad City breaks the sitcom mold, eschewing the conservative and cyclical narrative structure of the traditional sitcom and thereby offering a "willingness to explore controversy and to cross identity, class, race, and gender boundaries."

Whispering Together In The Dark: Rereading Samuel Beckett's Homosociality Through Harold Pinter, Aaron Botwick

Publications and Research

In a 1960 letter to a friend, Harold Pinter wrote of Samuel Beckett, “I’ll buy his goods hook, line, and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty; his work is beautiful.” What do we learn if we take the word “beautiful” seriously? Rereading Waiting for Godot backward through Betrayal, this article argues that Beckett’s landscape, typically read as a realization of postwar angst, is in fact one released of the pressures of contemporary living and for Pinter a homosocial Eden. Jerry’s joke upon discovering the adultery—“Maybe I should …

Starting Over On Stage, Keydra Manns

Capstones

RTA is a non profit organization based out of New York that uses the arts as a way to rehabilitate inmates. Research shows that this type of rehabilitation strongly impacts an inmates behavior, self esteem and possibly reduces their likelihood to return to prison. This is one man’s story on how practicing theater during his prison sentence changed his life.

https://medium.com/@keydra.manns/starting-over-on-stage-3614e7bc0dd9

When Grade Schools Stage Musicals, It’S Broadway Or Bust ..., Erin Degregorio

Capstones

St. Ephrem School, located in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, just introduced its drama program in Fall 2016. After much success with last year’s first-ever production of Disney’s “Aladdin JR.," the St. Ephrem students put on “Elf the Musical JR.” in time for the winter holiday season in December 2017. But it’s not your mediocre school drama club, putting on simple pageants. It’s more like Broadway Lite – and it’s part of a cross-country wave of professionalization hitting grade-school plays.

Project can be found at http://erindegregorio.com/grade-school-productions.html

Booming Laughter: The New Era Of Experimental Comedy Shows, Oscar F. Gonzalez

Capstones

This project looks at the rise of experimental comedy shows in New York City. The comedy industry is in a second boom that caused an increase in variety shows that test performers 'writing and performance skills. I interview the producers of the shows, the comedians that perform in them to understand how they're challenged and the audience members who watched the show. I talk with historians and comedy experts on the history of the comedy industry and the neighborhood in New York City where it originated in.

https://oscarfgonzalez.com/2018/12/21/booming-laughter-the-new-era-of-experimental-comedy-shows/

Global Issues In Plays - Essay [Theater], Stefanie Sertich, Garrett Neergaard

Open Educational Resources

This assignment was developed with the global learning core competency rubric and its dimensions in mind. The objective is for students to understand and articulate the intention of a play and the significance of choices the playwright makes. Students are also expected to articulate how the play fits into a social/political context on a global level and articulate how the student can relate or not relate to the point of view and why. This process provides the student an opportunity to open their minds to plays beyond entertainment purposes and have a deeper understanding of a writer’s intention.

LaGuardia’s Core …

Tenneriello Studies Theater In Many Forms, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“My background was in a working class/middle class family, and I had a passion for drawing when I was a kid, but we also put on a lot of theatricals. Lots of dramas, playing with things and staging thing. So, my exposure to theater was not professional, it was more interactive with my friends and family.” That is how Susan Tenneriello explains how she ended up becoming a theater scholar.

A native of Bayside Queens in New York City, she obtained her doctorate in theater from the CUNY Graduate Center, and today she is an associate professor in the Department …

Choteo Cubano: Humor As A Critical Tool In Twentieth-Century Cuban Theater, Rebecca L. Salois

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project analyzes the incorporation of choteo in specific Cuban theater texts written during three distinct periods in twentieth-century Cuban history, all of which coincide with specific moments of social, political, and/or economic unrest or transition. Choteo in the theater has served as a tool to demonstrate discontent and frustration with authority figures in various contexts. As that need has altered over time, so too has the approach that playwrights have taken to speak out about these issues. I suggest that by responding to changing circumstances with choteo, confronting a difficult situation is more palatable to audiences or readers than …

One Endless Dance: Tanaka Min's Experimental Practice, John (Zack) Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work is the first in-depth study of the work of avant-garde Japanese dancer/choreographer Tanaka Min, and focuses on his extensive innovations in the fields of improvised dance, training, and choreographic method. These interrelated aspects of his experimental practice are intimately concerned with the relation between space and the body, employ collaborative methods, and are strongly influenced by the life and work of Hijikata Tatsumi (widely to considered to be the founder of the butô movement). They are also deeply informed by his choice to live his daily life as an organic vegetable farmer, a choice that I argue constitutes …

Spectacular Politics And Everyday Performance: Tracing Music From Ceauşescu’S Romania To Multicultural America, Benjamin Dumbauld

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a …

Caplan Studies, Teaches The Richness Of Yiddish Theater., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

“I grew up in a family where Yiddish was spoken around me quite a bit. I grew up surrounded by Yiddish and Jewish culture, but I didn’t grow up speaking Yiddish, so it was something that was sort of mysterious that I didn’t know very much about.” That is the way Dr. Debra Caplan explains how she became an expert in Yiddish theater. A native of North Wales in Pennsylvania, she says she was always interested from a very young age in performing arts. “I studied theater in high school and in college and became very interested in theater history. …

From Humiliation To Epiphany: The Role Of Onstage Spaces In T. S. Eliot’S Middle Plays, Ria Banerjee

Publications and Research

This essay looks at T. S. Eliot's major dramatic productions from the 1930s-40s: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party as a series of investigations into spatial expressions of faith. By using onstage space in unique ways, Eliot encourages audiences to consider the connections between performance and belief, the knowable and unknowable.

Playing God: The Bible On The Broadway Stage By Henry Bial (Review), Christopher B. Swift

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Who Tells Our Story: Intersectional Temporalities In Hamilton, An American Musical, Andie Silva, Shereen Inayatulla

Publications and Research

This article examines the ways in which Hamilton: An American Musical can be read less as a historical account and more as a prediction of a future immigrant, who is called upon to (re)define US nationhood. Keeping with the tempo of the musical as well as the broader issues of time, space, and identity it attempts to address, this article is presented as a dialogical rap. The co-authors’ discussion frames Hamilton as an example of the power of unplottable, time-arresting immigrant bodies, to whom the colonial imposition of linear history does not apply. From this framework, the authors’ conversation shifts …

Performing Human Rights In Neoliberal Asia: Artistic And Activist Engagements In Hong Kong, Malaysia, And Singapore, Melissa Wansin Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines artistic and activist performances that address issues of rights abuses in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. I demonstrate how the centralized ruling parties encourage the neoliberalization of their economies while maintaining autocratic rule, thus intensifying structural inequalities while also clamping down on dissent. This condition then exacerbates the lack of labor, sexuality, and democratic rights. Concurrently, the states’ aspirations to be part of the global capitalist market have paradoxically provided conditional spaces of political and artistic expression. I contend that existing critiques of human rights from sociological and legalistic perspectives are inadequate for contemplating this state of …

Embodying Rhythm Nation: Multimodal Hip Hop Dance As A Site For Adolescent Social-Emotional And Political Development, Lauren M. Roygardner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This exploratory study employed qualitative methodology, specifically values analysis, to learn more about how being involved within Hip hop dance communities positively relates to adolescent development. Adolescence was defined herein as ages 13-23. The study investigated Hip hop dance communities in terms of cultural expertise (i.e. novice, intermediate and advanced/expert) to look specifically at dance narratives (i.e. peak experience narratives and “I dance because” essays) and hip hop dance performances. The primary purpose of this dissertation was to (1) explore how adolescents use multimodal Hip hop dance discourse for social-emotional development and critical consciousness, and to (2) understand how values …

Nervous Salomes: New York Salomania And The Neurological Condition Of Modernité, Margaret K. Araneo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In January 1907, New York City had its first major encounter with the figure of Salome. Appearing on three large stages in the city simultaneously, the archetype of the dancing girl quickly became an object of controversy. Her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in its staging of Strauss’s Salome resulted in public debate and the ultimate closure of the performance by the Met’s Board of Directors. The event brought attention to the Salome archetype’s already contested character. Salome arrived in the United States from Europe where she had been the subject of a quarter century of debates about how …

Theatre Translation As Historiography: Projections Of Greek Self-Identity Through English Translations During The European Crisis, Maria Mytilinaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project focuses on theatre translation from Modern Greek into English through the examination of three plays translated in the early years of the ongoing Greek crisis (2012-2014). Currently Greek culture is received internationally through two important frames of reference: Hellenism, the admiration for the ancient Greek spirit, and the more recent negative associations with modern Greece provoked by the Eurozone crisis. The three translations I examine challenge these dual external projections onto Greek culture by promoting a more nuanced image that recontextualizes the Greek past. In their capacity to travel between cultures, often in bilingual iterations, these theatrical translations …

Twenty-First-Century Transnational Theatre Development In The Cases Of Théâtre Du Soleil/Aftaab And Sundance Institute East Africa: Cultural Politics, Performance Aesthetics, And Global Circulation, Julia Goldstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines two case studies of twenty-first-century transnational theatre development programs in which arts organizations from wealthy countries in the Global North extend resources and support for the professional development of theatre artists in regions in the Global South. The first case study takes up the French theatre company Théâtre du Soleil’s work in Afghanistan, starting in 2005, leading to the formation of the Afghan theatre company Aftaab and the next ten years of Soleil’s support of and collaboration with Aftaab, transpiring both in Kabul and Paris. The second case study examines the Sundance Institute East Africa Theatre Lab …

"Propaganda For Democracy": The Vexed History Of The Federal Theatre Project, Karen E. Gellen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My thesis explores and analyzes the Federal Theater Project’s cultural and political impact during the Depression, as well as the contested legacy of this unique experiment in government-sponsored, broadly accessible cultural expression. Part of the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration, the FTP aimed to provide jobs for playwrights, actors, designers, stagehands, and other theater professionals on relief in the stark period from 1935 to 1939. But the project became a nationwide political and artistic flashpoint, spurring fierce debate over the leadership, politics and impact of this “people’s theater.” The FTP gave professional theater an unprecedented reach into working-class and black …

Acts Of Provocation: Popular Antiracisms On/Through The Twenty-First Century New York Commercial Stage, Stefanie A. Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is an abolitionist feminist study of the role of liberalism in the twenty-first century political economy. It takes as its object New York City bourgeois cultural productions (in particular Broadway theatre and the New York Times) from approximately 1984 to 2009. It offers insights into important yet widely-misunderstood features of turn-of-millennium US society: class, art, political practice, and war. In order to understand liberalism’s political and economic agenda, I look at how these objects are pitched in the struggle over racism. Sometimes when we say “liberal” we mean it in the philosophical sense, with particular attention to liberal …

Dark Stars Of The Evening: Performing African American Citizenship And Identity In Germany, 1890-1920, Kristin L. Moriah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dark Stars of the Evening: Performing African American Citizenship and Identity in Germany, 1890-1920 demonstrates that black performers in Germany developed wide networks in the performance world as they sought artistic opportunities beyond the racist circumscription of the American popular stage. Their performances became emblematic of modernity, globalization, and imperial might for German audiences at the turn of the century. African American-styled blackness contributed to the formation of the city of Berlin while allowing African American performers to assert themselves on the global stage. Groups like the Four Black Diamonds had a lengthy engagement with the popular stage in Berlin, …

The King’S Daughter, Reout Essiminy Feldman

Theses and Dissertations

The King’s Daughter is a spatial video installation that depicts an oversized projection of a woman’s head. Her eyes are closed, and there are necklaces with words coming out of them. The necklaces disappear into the black surface. The King’s Daughter happens in a black room, where the viewer can only view the installation through a window.

The Second Pen, Nicholas D. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

"The Second Pen" evaluates the historical relevancy of prevalent monikers for William Shakespeare-- namely, "The Bard," "Swan of Avon," and "Upstart Crow." While Brennan finds the general concept of the moniker to encapsulate Shakespeare's current historical legacy, he equally finds the aforementioned monikers to misrepresent this. Brennan offers "The Second Pen" as a moniker for Shakespeare that redresses the distortions of the others. He concentrates his defense of its relevancy around a defense of William Shakespeare as the "second pen" which Ben Jonson's 1605 Sejanus quarto names as a collaborator in the writing of a preceding stage version of the …

The Force Of Seduction: The Use Of Rape Narratives In The Plays Of Aphra Behn, Caitlyn Piccirillo

Theses and Dissertations

The English Restoration’s heightened interest in sexuality promoted the use of rape narratives on the stage. Aphra Behn, the first woman to earn her living as a playwright, used these narratives in her work (specifically in The Rover and The City Heiress) as a means of social critique.

"Hippie Acid Freak Drag Queens:" Situating The Cockettes Within An Art Historical Context, Scott Dow

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates the Cockettes – a performance group rarely referenced in art historical discourse - within Bay Area performance art, second-wave feminist art, and the Gay Liberation Movement. Contextualizing the Cockettes within their contemporary art movements provides a new understanding of the group and emphasizes their significance to art history.