Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

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.

Studying Silence In Popular Culture, Kathy Merlock Jackson, Terry Lindvall

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This article explains the impetus for and execution of a team-taught, interdisciplinary class in silence using popular culture materials and practices, such as silent film, music, meditation, and mime. The course identifies individuals as possessing characteristics of introversion and extraversion and explores the role of silence in the modern world, incorporating the following: (1) Foundations for the Study of Silence, (2) The History of Silence, (3) The Role of Silence in Spirituality, Creativity and Reflection, (4) Silence in Communication Study, (5) Silent Film and Silence in Film, (6) The Role of Silence in a Highly Technological, Mediated World, and (7) …

Making The Case For Teaching Character Change In Complex Tv: The Closer And Major Crimes, Emily C. Hoffman

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Jason Mittel’s 2015 book Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling offers enough material to sustain a semester-long undergraduate course. Because of its approachability and students’ interest in discussing characters, his chapter devoted to viewers’ parasocial relationships and characters’ potential for change is among the most teachable. However, teaching complex television that relies on intensely serialized story elements can make choosing televisual texts for study and discussion challenging. Therefore, series that skew episodic yet still incorporate serial elements, like police procedurals, can prove to be a practical alternative for classroom study. This article describes how using the interrelated …

“Every Time I Write A Rhyme / These People Think It’S A Crime”: Persona Problems In Catullus And Eminem, Jesse Weiner

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This essay interprets Eminem’s song, “Criminal” (2000, The Marshall Mathers LP, Track 18), as a Catullan project in establishing distance between the poet and poetic persona, accomplished through Catullan invective. Drawing upon pedagogical experience, I argue that Catullus (a Roman poet of the 1st Century BCE) and Eminem use analogous rhetorical tactics and structures to challenge accusations (real or imagined) of poor character stemming from their poetry. Catullus and Eminem vociferously articulate a separation of art from artist, using common transgressive poetics. Each poet disavows his own self-constructed stance of authenticity with similar threats of violence and postures of …

The Many Faces Of Foley: A Journey Of Discovery And Influence On Professional Wrestling, Adam Michael Nicks

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Though the academic community often looks down on professional wrestling, there are examples in which the medium allows for elaborate and complex storytelling rivaling other forms of literature. During the 1990s, due to the constant blurring of the lines between reality and fiction within the world of wrestling and the increasingly intelligent audience that consumed the product, performers were forced to adapt to a more realistic style integrating their actual life events and personality into their on-screen personas. One sports entertainer of note was Mick Foley, who crafted three splintered characters he portrayed amongst numerous promotions. Each had their own …

“This Cabal Guy Could Be Right”: Numeric Correlations In Maury Yeston’S In The Beginning, Leonard Vandegrift

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The study of gematria and isopsephy, the numeric conversion of Hebrew and Greek words, yields an abundant harvest of biblical insight. Though applying this method to more secular literature is rare, we have a unique set of circumstances in Maury Yeston’s musical In the Beginning that renders its use appropriate. Derived from Hebrew and Greek, the names of the show’s principal characters can be converted to numeric values, all of which share at least one of three common factors. Moreover, the names are often connected thematically, and their factors reflect key elements in the first five books of the Bible. …

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” …

John Proctor Is A Villain (November 6-9, 2024), Kimberly Bellflower

Student Theatre Programs

Event program for John Proctor is a Villain (November 6-9, 2024), Lindenwood University.

To view the photos from this production of John Proctor is a Villain, please click here.

“If You Want To Be The Man, You’Ve Got To Beat The Man”: Masculinity And The Rise Of Professional Wrestling In The 1990s, Marc A. Ouellette

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

This paper traces the relationship between the shifting representations of masculinity in professional wrestling programs of the 1990s and the contemporaneous shifts in conceptions of masculinity, examining the ways each of these shifts impacted the other. Most important among these was a growing sense that the biggest enemy in wrestling and in day-to-day life is one’s boss. Moreover, the corporate corruption theme continues to underscore the WWE's on-screen and off-screen coverage, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Thus, the paper provides a template for considering a widely consumed popular cultural form in ways that challenge the determinism …

“High Culture As Entertainment”: Hybrid Reading Practices In A Live Book Club, Magnus Persson

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

The Bushwick Book Club (BBC) is a live book club in which invited pop musicians perform musical interpretations of a predetermined literary work in a nightclub environment. What can a typical BBC show, with its strong emphasis on popular music and performance, teach readers about the uses of literature? This case study will investigate which reading practices are at work and in what ways they challenge traditional ideas of the forms, functions, and values of reading. Another important aspect concerns how the borders between high and popular culture, and between the printed word and other media are renegotiated. Based on …

Music Review: “Indy Classical Innovation: Ymusic” At Usc’S Southern Exposure New Music Series, March 21, 2014, Peter B. Kay

Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy

Review of “Indy Classical Innovation: yMusic” at the University of South Carolina’s Southern Exposure New Music Series, March 21, 2014.

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 …

Solar Systems And Hind Legging: A Practitioner’S Perspective On Creative Research Practice, Nat Dianne Texler, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A presentation on Creative Practice Research from the perspective of the practitioner - demonstrating the different ways in which we both operate in order to show how broad research actually is under the framework.

We both work under the same framework but with entirely different ethoses - which we believe will help our colleagues understand that there's more to research than the write up.

Antigone Playbill, Providence College Department Of Theatre, Dance, & Film

Playbill and Promotion

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film

Angell Blackfriars Theatre

The Antigone of Sophocles by Bertolt Brecht

October 24 & 26-27, 2024

November 1-3, 2024

DIRECTOR, ERIN JOY SCHMIDT

SCENIC DESIGN, CARL GUDENIUS

LIGHTING DESIGN, JOHN MALINOWSKI

SOUND DESIGN, STUART HOLLAND

VOCAL COACH-SINGING, ELIZABETH HEATH

COSTUME DESIGN, DAVID COSTA-CABRAL

PROPERTIES DESIGN, GREY RUNG

VOCAL COACH-SPEECH, MEGAN CHANG

ACCORDION, ROGER BOTELHO

CAST: Antigone/First Sister - Maisie Cocker; Ismene/Second Sister - Olivia Black; Creon - Anthony Joseph; Haemon - Gabriel Joseph; Tiresias - Claire Dancause; Guard 1 - Andy Belotte; Guard 2 …

Antigone Poster, Providence College Department Of Theatre, Dance, & Film

Playbill and Promotion

Providence College Department of Theatre, Dance & Film

Angell Blackfriars Theatre

The Antigone of Sophocles by Bertolt Brecht

October 24, 2024, 7:30pm

October 26 & 27, 2024, 2pm

November 1 & 2, 2024, 7:30pm

November 3, 2024, 2pm

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 …

Coltrane’S A Love Supreme: Mediations Of Immediacy In Jazz Ritual And Recitation, James R. W. Crockford

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This paper explores the ritualized performance ethic of John Coltrane’s later career, which is charged with a determined exploration of freedom and spiritual ascendance through participative and gestural immediacy. Conceiving of this music as a spiritual and political tool for embodied transformation, this paper traces this ethic at play in Coltrane’s iconic 1965 album A Love Supreme, identifying ways the work effects a mediation of immediacy. Through focus on the album’s closing “Psalm” recitation, its parallels in Coltrane’s other works, and their analogue in traditions of ecstatic liturgical and political oratory, this paper demonstrates the consistent priority Coltrane gives …

Stemming The Flow: Strategies To Address The Production Arts Skills Shortage Within Australian Theatre And Performance Practice, Tessa Rixon, Anthony Brumpton

Behind the Scenes: Journal of Theatre Production Practice

The lockdown, cancellations, and uncertainties of COVID-19 triggered a large-scale exit of skilled professional technicians, managers, and designers from the Australian arts industry. A significant gap in the national workforce of production artists has since emerged, forcing arts organisations to work with smaller teams and employ younger people with little to no training or knowledge. These pressures are beginning to impact the industry’s ability to meet the post-COVID demand to stage live performances, yet little information has been collected to fully comprehend the issue or to suggest solutions.

Conducted throughout 2023, this research sought to understand the current situation of …

Water Stories: A River Harvest, Christine Hoang-Dung Vu

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Artist Statement Water Stories, a digital art piece, was one of the artworks shown in the 2024 River Reflection exhibition. This was created by gathering inspiration from the producers, cast, and the vision of preserving places and people through stories that are connected to nature and how it impacts its community. This is also part of the multidimensional performance project with the help of producers, Dr. Tru Leverette Hall and Dr. Maureen McCluskey. By being exposed in the River Reflection exhibition, people will be able to understand the artwork and spread the news of not only preserving the environment, but …

12 Angry Jurors, Parkland College Theatre

Parkland Theatre

Based on the Emmy Award-winning television movie by Reginald Rose

Adapted for the stage by Sherman L. Sergel

Director: BJ Gailey
Stage Manager: Yen Vi Green
Scenic Designer: Kristin Kelleher
Properties: Cindy Adamek
Lighting Designer: Max Prevatt
Costume Designer: Sheri Doyle
Sound Designer: Drew Bagby*
Hair and Makeup: Sophie Accardo+

Presented in the second stage theatre
October 3, 4, 5, 11, 12 at 7:30pm
October 6, 13 at 3pm
Parkland College Theatre
Fall 2024

To view images from this production, visit 12 Angry Jurors (2024).

Sondheim Tribute Revue (October 2-5, 2024), Lindenwood University

Student Theatre Programs

Event program for Sondheim Tribute Revue (October 2-5, 2024), Lindenwood University.

To view the photos from this production of Sondheim Tribute Revue, please click here.

Funny Girl, Lynn University

Drama Programs

Elaine’s Annual Musical Treat

Directed by Lynn University Associate Professor and Chair of Drama Adam Simpson, starring Lynn's B.F.A. in drama program students.

Conducted by Music Director Phil Hinton, featuring an orchestra of conservatory students.

Nominated for eight Tony Awards in 1964, including Best Musical, in the Ziegfeld Follies, in Hollywood films and on the radio, Fanny Brice was one of the most celebrated entertainers of her time. With humor, talent and chutzpah, young Fanny, an awkward Jewish girl who "isn't pretty," defies the odds and becomes one of the greatest stars of her generation. Fanny's rise to super-stardom and …

The Fight Master, Fall 2024, Vol. 43 Issue 2, The Society Of American Fight Directors

Fight Master Magazine

No abstract provided.

Natasha, Pierre, & The Great Comet Of 1812, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2024-2025 Season Productions

No abstract provided.

The Importance Of Being Earnest, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2024-2025 Season Productions

No abstract provided.

Green Utopias: A Possible Green Ground For Performing Arts Training, Renee Newman, Alexa Taylor, Luke Cowling, Jason Garbenis, Tom Heath, Fleur Kingsland, Vahri Mckenzie, Jeremy Neideck, Richard Reddrop, Simon Stewart

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

No abstract provided.

V.1 Fall 2024, Center For Arts & Language, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

v.1 is a publishing platform for the ongoing work, ideas, discussions, debates, and aspirations of students at the Rhode Island School of Design. The Fall 2024 issue contains articles on RISD Alumni Graciela Batista's Commencement speech on friendship and community, Britain's Royal Festival Hall, birds crashing into glass buildings, an Ojibwe student's reflecting on his native identity, RISD student interviews, an abandoned Bed Bath and Beyond store, Ai Weiwei's Kui Hua Zi, life in Banaras, a student's Yankee Swap experience, the 2024 RISD Grad Show, and indentations, along with student creative writing and a feature on images students saw out …

Retrospective Of My Experience At The University Of South Carolina, Karl Dickey

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre is, by its very nature, a collaborative process. No show lives in true isolation. Even in its smallest version, it takes at least one to perform and one to listen. The theatre that is produced in the 21^st century is deeper and more complex a process than the finished and polished shows that are presented to the audience. Behind, underneath, and all around a single performer on a stage are hours of thoughtful contemplation and execution on the part of the director, designers, and fabricators. There is something to be learned and gained from every human interaction in …

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.