Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Dancing In Circles: Bon Dance As Performance Of The Past, Travis Robb Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project traces the contours of the Japanese folk dance tradition of Bon Dance in Hawaiʻi through the nuances of public scholarship, diaspora, and racial capitalism by producing an original play which aims to perform the knowledge and praxis which the performance ritual puts forward. Treating Bon Dance as muse, the original play examines the necessity of turning to the past in order to disrupt a future made inevitable by oppressive systems; a fiction that comments on and critiques the predictive and generative technologies that have embedded themselves into society at large. Through intertwining conversations that explore prophecy and …

Going The Distance: How The Disney Renaissance Illustrated The Social And Cultural Changes In America During The 1990s, Deborah A. Bates

Graduate Masters Theses

The cultural and social history of America in the 90s is examined in this thesis by looking at the Disney Renaissance, a period of ten films made by the Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). This thesis illustrates how the animators were able to seamlessly incorporate important societal trends of the 90s into their films, portraying a changing world within their films. As they were creating a new style of the animated movie musical, they were creating works that connected to the audiences watching in new ways, by putting up a reflection of society within their films. The way that the …

“Retalhos De Mim Costurados Por Nós” (A Patchwork Of Me, Stitched Together By Us), Marjorye Graves

MFA in Dance Theses

This document represents the culmination of my thesis project "Retalhos de Mim Costurados por Nós" (A Patchwork of Me, Stitched Together by Us), a choreographic project integrating scholarly perspectives from Dance and Social Justice, Phenomenology, and Somatics courses. Employing both dance film and solo live performance, the research interrogates the complexities of identity within the overlapping contexts of immigration, domestic violence, and motherhood. Through an embodied praxis, the project addresses the intersection of adversity and resilience, highlighting the transformative potential of community, cultural inheritance, and spirituality in my healing process.

Spirals Of Light: A Healing Journey Through Somatics, Dance, And Pedagogy, Jessica Batha

MFA in Dance Theses

This thesis investigates dance as an embodied practice of healing, attunement, and belonging through phenomenology, somatics, and environmental engagement. Grounded in Sondra Fraleigh’s eco-phenomenological framework, the research weaves personal narrative, artistic inquiry, and interdisciplinary scholarship to examine how thresholds of birth, injury, and recovery shape sensory orientation across the lifespan. Drawing from lived experiences as a dancer, mother, educator, and researcher, the study explores tone, breath, light, and movement as formative forces in identity and resilience. Central to the inquiry is a knee injury and subsequent surgical recovery, which catalyzed a somatic practice aligned with circadian rhythms, sunrise ritual, and …

Machine (Un/Re) Learning, Jordan Shadley

MFA in Dance Theses

This thesis document is an exploration of the interaction between live performance art and digital content creation such as Generative A.I. In this work, I draw from several courses I completed during my time in Saint Mary’s College of California MFA in Dance and Creative Practice program, including Dance and Social Justice, Phenomenology, Somatic Movement Seminar and Dance and Performance Studies. Each offers a throughline of my scholarly explorations and embodied research into the spheres of adapting and challenging how concert dance spaces respond to digital information and creation. I utilized live movement collaboration and distorted videography through Generative A.I. …

D-Entangled, Macy Yu

MFA in Dance Theses

This thesis investigates the choreographic, somatic, and cultural significance hair holds in dance through identity and belonging. Hair is more than merely a visual or aesthetic marker, it is a lived, identity-bearing, and sensory archive of the body. To say that hair is merely just for aesthetics in lifestyles and in dance is not acknowledging its full impact. Hair functions as both a cultural and sensory archive as well as embodied resistance and a site of identity. I identify as a multi-ethnic woman, dancer, educator, and choreographer. This paper analyzes hair through the examination of four different methodologies including a …

Kinesthesis: A Choreographic Study Of The Somatic Effect Of Fascial Intervention, Mira Larsen

MFA in Dance Theses

This master’s thesis was a choreographic study that experimented with the somatic effects of fascial intervention practices, culminating in a final performance in June of 2026 at the LeFevre Theatre at Saint Mary’s College of California. Each chapter of this document investigates the topic of fascial awareness supported through somatic practice and its effect on creating impactful emotional and physical connections in ballet choreography and pedagogy. This document offers the conceptual framework for the choreographic process of the thesis project, titled Kinesthesis. Through the lenses of phenomenology, somatics, social justice, and performance studies, the research goal involved the utilization of …

Colonization To Commodification To Codification: The Salimpour Method, Suhaila Salimpour

MFA in Dance Theses

This thesis examines how colonization and commodification have shaped the codification of belly dance though the Salimpour Method. Codification here refers to the process of naming, categorizing, and organizing of movement into a teachable system. While codification inevitably transforms tradition, it also serves as a method of preservation. As the inheritor of the Salimpour lineage, I trace how my mother, Jamila Salimpour, first codified belly dance and how I built on her work to create a comprehensive pedagogical system that situates belly dance within artistic and academic contexts. This study argues that the Salimpour Method is a strategy of preserving, …

“A Beautiful Mess: Rebirthing Through Earth, Dance, And The Divine”, Mikayla Douglas

MFA in Dance Theses

A Beautiful Mess: Rebirthing Through Earth, Dance, and the Divine by Mikayla Douglas is a culmination of research, creative practice, and lived experience that was developed during her time at Saint Mary’s College of California in the MFA Dance Program. This thesis investigates the shared dialogue between eco-somatics, eco-phenomenology, motherhood, nature, and the BIPOC birthing body. Through the use of outdoor somatic practices, personal reflection and stories, Mikayla Douglas explores how nature can serve as a site of healing, embodiment, and reclamation for Black and Brown birthing bodies. The research of this thesis work is grounded heavily in both scholarly …

Under Open Skies: Black, Queer, And Ascending, Skyler Zakaar

MFA in Dance Theses

This thesis explores personal healing and community building through dance, rooted in my lived experience as a Black Queer man in America. Stemming from research in Phenomenology, Critical Dance Pedagogy, and Dance & Social Justice, I interrogate the impact of white supremacy and systemic racism both within and beyond the queer community. My choreographic process centers intersectionality and collective agency, seeking to resist the fragmentation of identity and to affirm the wholeness of self. Through performance and comprehensive study, my intentions are to foster empathy, connection, and belonging, while advocating for equity and transformation within dance and broader cultural discourse. …

(Re)Claiming Homeplace: Dance As Embodied Resistance & Healing For Health & Spatial Justice, Preeya G. Kannan

University Honors Theses

This thesis argues that dance functions as both an upstream public health intervention and a form of radical spatial resistance; creating healing, agency, and belonging among historically marginalized communities. Drawing on bell hooks' concept of homeplace, Jasbir Puar's assemblage theory, Nancy Krieger's eco-social theory, and Katherine McKittrick's Black geographies, I position the body as both an ecological and political landscape shaped by histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, displacement, and resilience.

Through this community-based participatory research study, Homeplace, I explore dance as a form of social prescription that centers liberation rather than pathology. Movement is often reduced in public health discourse …

From Story To Stage: A Journey In Pursuit Of Virtuous Leadership And Artistic Intentionality Through Student Directing A Full Play Production At University Level Theatre, Josephine L. Partridge

Honors Projects

A passionate storyteller and artist, earning her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Honors Liberal Arts and Theatre-Performance, explores her personal potential as the play Director of Little Women, a stage play adaptation based on the 1868 novel by Louisa May Alcott, adapted from the 1912 play by Marian de Forest and Jessie Bonstelle written by Josephine Partridge. Throughout the course of four months, Partridge adapted the script and works as Director and Marketing Director for this production with SPU Theatre Company club. She uses this experience to deepen her understanding and practice of intentionality with artistic vision and virtuous leadership. …

Vestigial Choreographies: Climate Consciousness In The Long Nineteenth Century, Alexandra A. Rego

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aims of this project are twofold: (a) to develop a method of theoretical analysis and (b) to put this method into pointed use. In service of (a), I propose a method of choreographic analysis. This method operates relationally, highlighting the production of movement and stillness among and between bodies, objects, and encounters. Choreographic analysis draws from methods typically sequestered to dance studies. Towards aim (b), this project demonstrates the relevance and breadth of choreographic analysis by connecting it to ecocriticism. Throughout this project, I apply choreographic analysis to a diverse set of case studies. I use choreographic analysis to …

School Just Wasn't For Me: Investigating The Intersections Of Education, Incarceration, And Improvisation, Kelly L. Brady

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New York City is the largest city in the United States and home to the nation's largest school system.  NYC public schools are also the country's most segregated, according to a 2021 report from the UCLA Civil Rights Project.  This qualitative, Arts-Based Research study follows the development and performance of an applied theater piece created by formerly incarcerated and court-involved youth exploring their early educational experiences before encountering the juvenile justice system. Using Disability/Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and Critical Performance Ethnography this project investigates how structural systems of education and incarceration intersect to construct youth as "others," including special education, …

Theatrical Agency In The Constitution Of Logical Space, Esther Marveta Neff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes advantage of our current moment of collapse and shifting episteme to move from resistance and critique into modes of position, prefiguration, and praxiocentricism, giving not only a critique of the colonial-modern logical space of Theatrum Mundi, but also aiming to configure the thetic consciousness that grounds “theatrical agency” in the logic of cognitive and social epistemological modelling.  In what ways do we “build our own worlds”? What does “theatricality” tell us about human agency, especially in the domain of “theoretical attitudes,” and “consciousness”? In what ways, and to what extent, are we responsible for constituting …

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

The Role Of Avram, In Indecent By Paula Vogel, Bryce Hargrove

Student Theses

In the Fall of 2026, the Brooklyn College Department of Theatre produced the play, Indecent by Paula Vogel. This play was directed by then MFA Directing candidate, Sam Plattus. In this production, I played the role of Avram, who serves to represent a handful of characters, including Sholem Asch, the author of the 1906 play God of Vengeance, the content and surrounding events of which Indecent is based on. This show ran from December 5-9 as a part of the 2025-2026 season. In this thesis, I will delve into the life of playwright Paula Vogel and discuss her prior works, …

The Role Of Halina In Indecent, Grace Olinksi

Student Theses

In December of 2025, I had the privilege of playing Halina in Paula Vogel’s theatrical love letter Indecent. It ran December 5th-9th in the New Workshop Theater at Brooklyn College, and was directed by MFA Directing candidate Sam Plattus. Indecent sprawls across time and place to tell the story of Sholem Asch’s controversial and groundbreaking play God of Vengeance. Halina, the female “Middle,” of Vogel’s archetypal acting troupe, takes on the roles of many mature and worldly women, including Manke, the prostitute and doomed lover of God of Vengeance, the actresses who portray Manke throughout the play’s history, hopeful immigrants, …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Every Night We Tell This Story: Remembering, Remaking, And Re-Remembering Paula Vogel's Indecent, Sam Plattus

Student Theses

Vogel’s subtitle calls Indecent “the true story of a little Jewish play,” Sholem 4 Asch’s The God of Vengeance. A Jewish man is arranging a marriage for his daughter; that man is a brothel owner who raised his daughter in a home just upstairs from his place of business; his daughter falls in love with a girl working downstairs, and they dance naked, together, in the rain. Indecent follows the journey of Asch’s play from its first reading in his bedroom in 1906, through its European tour in the 1910s, to its debut on Broadway in 1923 when the cast …

The Community Era: Developing Artistic Resource Sharing And Local Collaboration In California's Central Valley, Sine Chan-Golston

Student Theses

This work explores possibilities for artistic resource sharing and collaboration to address the needs of local arts communities. With the artistic programming researched and outlined (Arts Database, Space Sharing, Community Collaborations), the goal is to create an arts environment in California's Central Valley where local opportunities are abundant, accessible, and sustainable.

Enhanced And Confused: The High Price Of Partnership In American Theater, Brandan Walsh

Student Theses

Broadway’s contemporary development ecosystem relies on a complex and increasingly fragile relationship between nonprofit regional theaters, Equity workshop models in New York City, and a small number of fully commercial out-of-town tryouts. In recent decades, nonprofit regional theaters have become central to the commercial development process, hosting fully staged productions of Broadway-bound work under a banner of artistic partnership. These institutions provide infrastructure, audiences, labor, and institutional credibility, absorbing reputational risk in hopes of high rewards and financial gain from donors. In return, they receive limited financial participation in downstream commercial success and operate under strict ethical and legal constraints …

The Vocal Songs Of Ángela Peralta: A Performer's Guide, Ana Rangel Ortiz

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This document is a performer’s guide to the five vocal works of Ángela Peralta from her 1875 Álbum Musical. While she is known as an operatic soprano in Mexico, her work as a composer is slowly receiving more recognition. This project builds on that growing interest by bringing her songs back into conversation by bringing her songs into a performance-centered framework and demonstrating that they extend beyond the expectations of salon music. This document combines historical context, score editing, and performance analysis to support modern singers. The original published scores contain many inconsistencies, including issues with text underlay, spelling, and …

A Weeping Willow, An Original Script Enriching The Canon Of Deaf Plays, Tyler Furzland

Undergraduate University Honors Capstones

This creative writing capstone project presents A Weeping Willow, an original play script that explores themes of resilience, mental health, human connections, and acceptance. A teenager wakes up with no memory of the past year. Through fragmented glimpses of the past and the future, he struggles to piece together what happened on the most important day of his life. The play does not revolve around a Deaf-thematic storyline, a story that highlights the auditory aspects of the Deaf experience. This play is influenced by a study of scripts written by Deaf playwrights or plays featuring Deaf characters. This research examines …

A Puff's Exploration Of Wayne Hopkins, Ethan G. Mullen, Leon Wiebers

Honors Thesis

This thesis is a synthesis of modalities I have studied during the course of my Theatre Arts degree, applied to the realization of the principal character, Wayne Hopkins in the award-winning play Puffs (Or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic) a LMU Theatre Arts Department production. This work is divided into three major sections. First, I reflect on how I applied acting tools I have studied at LMU to the development of my character and performance. These include script analysis, story structure analysis, breath work, and Viewpoints training. Second, I share media displaying my …

House Managing Hand To God And Henry V, Ashley E. Cravaritis

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Documents used to complete a senior project house managing Hand to God and Henry V at UMW Theatre during the Spring semester, February and April of 2026.

Too Much Light? A Design Journey, Caitlin G. Shanahan

Theater Honors Papers

This project is the culmination of my work as a stage manager, technician, and assistant designer, both for Ursinus College and other unique opportunities outside of Ursinus with InterAct Theater Co. overseen by faculty advisor Shannon Zura. These experiences informed my process and resulted in my work in the lighting design for Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind. In this essay I discuss the journey I took in becoming the first student in the history of Ursinus College to take on a lead designer role, as well as the challenges and lessons I encountered along the way.

Harness The Darkness! Blackout Poetry And Drama Therapy For Systemic Existential Dread: A Proposed Methodology, Kerry Sullivan

Expressive Therapies Theses

This thesis explores the intersection of drama therapy and blackout poetry as a therapeutic intervention to address systemic existential dread (SED) among emerging adults. The proposed methodology is titled "Bringing Blackout Poetry to Life" and consists of five sessions designed to explore the participants’ SED and generate poetry, culminating in a public performance. By integrating elements from psychodrama and drama therapy with the therapeutic process of blackout poetry, the intervention intends to aid processing on all levels of the expressive therapies continuum (ETC), strengthen tolerance for uncertainty, and facilitate sustainable community action. This theoretical framework is supported by a wide-ranging …

Soma: Exploring Touch As Performance And Performance As Therapy, Erica Pamson

Expressive Therapies Theses

This project investigated the role of touch within a performative context and its potential as a creative intervention within Expressive Arts Therapy. Grounded in phenomenology and intersubjectivity, the study draws on Expressive Arts Therapy (EXAT) and Performance Art frameworks that position meaning as emerging through embodied, co-created experience. Existing literature identifies touch as a primary mode of perception and communication, essential to both physical and emotional well-being, while also noting its increasing absence and regulation within contemporary Western culture. Performance art literature further highlights the body as both medium and site of relational exchange, often dissolving boundaries between performer and …