Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

From Classroom To Gallery Floor: A Processual Exploration Of Rene Saheb’S (Meta)Physical Engagements With Clay, Kasper Tromp

Regards

This article presents a case study detailing the creative process of Iranian artist Rene Saheb. It analyzes the various stages, developments, and challenges Saheb went through while she explored the medium of clay, which was new to her artistic repertoire. Rather than focusing on outward properties of ceramics such as style or technique, the artist’s inward experiences of her medium and creative process are foregrounded by means of interviews.
As Saheb frequently turns to Islamic mysticism and poetry as conceptual anchorage throughout her creative process, her engagements with the ceramic medium will be discussed in light of relevant Islamic discourses …

Liberating “Khatt” From Calligraphy: Samir Sayegh On Art, Religion And Spiritualit, Kristen Scheid, Hala Shoucair, Saleh Barakat

Regards

The eminent Samir Sayegh has contributed substantially to Arab modernism as a critic, historian, and artist himself.¹ His writings in Arabic are well known, through numerous journal articles, interviews, and most notably his 1988 book, Islamic Art: A Speculative Reading of Its Philosophy and Aesthetic Particularities.²
Further, his thinking impacted scores of students and colleagues in architecture or graphic design from the American University of Beirut, where he lectured from 2003 to 2007.
However, his voice has not been heard loudly in English. This transcript amalgamates multiple sittings with Sayegh, between 2009 and 2022. He kindly allowed us to …

History Or Project? The Double Life Of Islamic Art Since The 1970s, Hamed Yousefi

Regards

This article argues that since the 1970s a duality divides the concept of Islamic Art. On the one hand, we have Islamic Art as the subject matter of a modern mode of historical inquiry, invented and developed in the colonial period in Europe but then taken up by scholars from around the world, including Muslim academics. This is the Islamic Art of Islamic Art History as a field of secular scholarship.
But then, in the decolonization period, and more pronouncedly since the 1970s, we witness the birth of another concept of Islamic Art that is not focused on the past. …

The Nonidentical Identical; Or, Notes On Violence And Escape In Basel Abbas And Ruanne Abou-Rahme’S "Oh Shining Star Testify", Ruslana Lichtzier

Regards

A review of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s installation Oh shining star testify at the 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), where the artists present Palestinian lives and deaths by disrupting the progressive chronologies of Palestine’s ongoing obliteration.
The essay considers the representation of racist epistemologies through recourse to the work of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, while also situating the installation within a lineage of cultural productions that respond to the histories of genocide.

"All Is Not Glitter" Review Of “Beirut And The Golden Sixties: A Manifesto Of Fragility” Berlin, Gropius-Bau, 25 March – 12 June 2022 Lyon, 14 September – 31 December 2022, Nadia Von Maltzahn

Regards

The exhibition Beirut and the Golden Sixties: A Manifesto of Fragility highlights what the curators argue is the fragility of the narrative surrounding Beirut’s “Golden Age” – the period leading up to Lebanon’s civil war.
This review traces the genesis of the exhibition and presents its displays at Berlin’s Gropius Bau and the MAC Lyon. Several works are showcased to demonstrate how the curators constructed the exhibition’s five sections, which focus on place, body, form, politics, and the Civil War.
The review offers contextualization for an exhibition rich in diverse artworks and archival materials that contain a multitude of narratives.

Postcolonialism And The Missionary Experience In The Book Of Mormon, Diana Witt

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

In their irreverent 2011 musical, The Book of Mormon, writer-composers Matt Stone, Trey Parker, and Robert Lopez satirize the work of Mormon missionaries. This paper analyzes the musical's book and lyrics, its cultural context and reception, and postcolonial scholarship. The paper argues that while The Book of Mormon operates as a postcolonialist text by critiquing cultural hegemony, it also reinforces stereotypes and practices present in colonization like othering and cultural colonialism.

Vedantic Basis And Praxis Of The Integral Advaita Of Sri Aurobindo, Debashish Banerji

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The integral nondualism of Sri Aurobindo can be traced to the great pronouncements (mahāvākya) of the Upanishads and later commentaries. This study examines teachings on the Supermind (vijñāna) and the other four kinds of consciousness that define human reality: Matter (annaṃ), Life (prāṇaḥ), Mind (manaḥ), and Bliss (ānanda). Through Yoga and Tantra, one learns and embodies the pathway to the divine.

Digital And Spatial Humanities Mapping: Eurasia-Pacific Early Trade And Belief Linkages, Igor Sitnikov, David Blundell

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The Eurasia-Pacific is a dynamic region of rapid economic growth, cultural awareness, natural resource exploration, and military buildup. The concept of the region is relatively new, featuring contested vast areas of geo-resource space of numerous cultures and languages. The current findings in anthropology and archaeology and even its more specific subfields such as folklore are important contribution to the understanding of periodic environmental changes and technical innovations were the main forces of transformations in social structures that have determined the mechanisms and levels of cross-cultural trade activity across the region. We have traced early trade and belief linkages across Eurasia-Pacific …

Tusha Hiti: The Origin And Significance Of The Name, Deepak Shimkhada

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

In this article, the author examines the royal bath called Tushā Hiti located in Sūndari Chowk (Beautiful Courtyard) of Pātan Durbar Square, using six different methods of investigation. The question: What is in a name? started the ball of investigation rolling and along the way were added more supporting blocks such as history, iconography, function and purpose, notion of purity and impurity, and finally the hiti in popular culture to get a complete picture of the subject in question.

A Festival Of Form: Score, Anthony Elia

Bridwell Library Research

"A Festival of Form" was both an event at Bridwell and Perkins School of Theology and a conceptual piece of music that lasted several days. In this rendering, the "piece of music" was articulated in a fluid combination of activities that included works by other composers, including John Cage. The activities involved--from lectures, conversations, and meals to actual performances of both short works and especially the world-record breaking rendition of "Organ2/ASLSP" played by Christopher Anderson--comprise the entirety of "A Festival of Form" as performance piece. The challenge of this work is that unlike nearly any other music, it is purposely …

Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion: Perspectives From Contemporary India And 6th Century Jain Yoga, Christopher Key Chapple

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

Times New Roman

Ganges In Indian Sculpture And Literature: Mythology And Personification, Nalini Rao

Monsoon: South Asian Studies Association Journal

The river Ganges is a symbol of wealth, purity and eternity, and its sacred waters have inspired sages, philosophers, and artists in India who have immortalized its divine imagery. However, it has rarely been understood from a historical point of view, as to how it became so sacred and to view it from a multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary perspective with an accumulation of layers of historical thought and practices, provides a rationale for the living practices around the river. The paper explores the evolution of the concept of sacredness and eternity of River Ganges through art- historical and archaeological evidence. It …

Curious Inceident Of The Dog In The Nightime, Department Of Theatre And Dance

Spring 2022

When a neighbor’s dog turns up murdered, 15-year-old Christopher (a suspect himself) sets out to solve the mystery and embarks on a terrifying journey that takes him far beyond his familiar street in Swindon, UK. As Christopher navigates the world through a unique neurological lens with a brilliance for math, his journey reveals more than the murderer, as family secrets unravel, bonds of trust are broken, and his once predictable world spins out of control. Based on the award-winning novel by Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time received 7 Olivier Awards, including Best New Play …

Movement, Office Of Arts + Cultural Programming, Peak Performances At Montclair State University

2021-2022 Join Us in Engaging with the Imaginations of Unparalleled Visionaries

MOVEMENT follows Yerushalmy’s most recent major work, Paramodernities, a six-part series generated through reverently and violently dissecting iconic modern choreographies. The project explored tenets of modern discourse–sovereignty, race, sexuality, disability–with contributions by scholars from different fields, and was created explicitly in order to provoke dynamic conversations with the past and its legacies. In MOVEMENT, existing dances are again quoted (this time from a vast array of sources) and pieced together into an intricate and elaborate quilt with radical and surprising results. By plucking (stealing) short movements and placing them outside of their original contexts, Yerushalmy repurposes them, re-orients them, and …

A Documentation Of A Year As An Artistic Director For Unl, Philip Crawford

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The goal of this project was to document a year of being an Artistic Director for UNL’s student run theatre company Theatrix. Through this documentation, I will be able to reflect upon and learn from my experiences as a leader, director, and theatre maker.

This thesis will be broken up into eight different parts to outline the eight different stages I experienced as Artistic Director this year: season selection, the 24-hour Play Festival, The Revolutionists, The Thanksgiving Play, Clown Bar, season changes, Based on a Totally True Story, and Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons. Through these eight stages, I will …

Ethical-Reparative Reconfigurations Of The Literary Today, André Cechinel

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay aims to debate the evidence of an ethical-reparative function for literature and literary studies today. Therefore, it is divided into two fundamental moments, two argumentative channels that, without a totalizing intention, point out the general perspective of the current, changing, stuation. On the one hand, the literature of the 20th century is presented through the image of a supposed negativity or radical intransitivity, capable of “undoing the work” in its “aesthetics of suppression.” On the other hand, from an introductory debate around some of the places of transitivity envisioned for literature at the beginning of the 21th century, …

“It Is Not All That Bad”—Hitler And Identity-Building In Er Ist Wieder Da (Look Who’S Back), Yuan Xue

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In Germany, multiculturalism and “leading culture” (Leitkultur) are a pair of closely connected but opposite concepts. Multiculturalism has been accused of being the main reason why culture loses its core cohesion. Despite the persistence of calls for a leading culture in Germany in recent years, many scholars argue that the concept is also problematic. A monopolistic leading culture may be hard to realize in an already pluralistic Europe. I argue that the choice between the two reflects the dilemma of the establishment of German cultural identity. Focusing on the German bestseller Er ist wieder da (Look Who’s Back, 2012), this …

The Brazilian System Of Television, Or How To Get A President, Tauan F. Tinti

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The purpose of this essay is to draw attention to some perhaps unexpected affinities between a considerably expressive segment of the Brazilian culture industry that for several reasons seems to usually fly under most interpretive radars and a certain regressive frame of mind that is becoming increasingly manifest and now holds both considerable political power and a surprisingly firm grip over a portion of the population whose size is still unclear. The following remarks and associations gesture tentatively at what could be preliminarily defined as a constellation of cultural junk being outlined, its shape against the night sky sometimes resembling …

Introduction: A Return To The Bad Old Times, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Fernando Urueta

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Winter Dance Concert (March 3-5, 2022), Lindenwood University

Student Dance Programs & Brochures

Program for the Winter Dance Concert (March 3-5, 2022).

Head Over Heels, Department Of Theatre And Dance

Spring 2022

Head Over Heels is the bold new musical comedy from the visionaries who rocked Broadway with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q, and Spring Awakening. This laugh-out-loud love story is set to the music of the iconic 1980s all-female rock band The Go-Go’s, including the hit songs “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Vacation,” and Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” and “Mad about You.” A hilarious, exuberant celebration of love, Head Over Heels follows the escapades of a royal family on an outrageous journey to save their beloved kingdom from extinction—only to discover the …

My Favorite Murder As Discursive Performance, Taylor Dawson

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

My Favorite Murder as Discursive Performance uses performance-centered discourse analysis to explore the major narratives informing the popular true crime comedy podcast, My Favorite Murder (MFM). Hosts, Karen and Georgia draw from podcast, comedy, true crime, feminist, and mental health discourse to create a unique discursive space where “murderinos” (fans of the podcast) express and explore aspects of their own life experiences. I explore the performative strategies MFM uses and the effects of those choices, drawing on some of my own experiences as a murderino. Ultimately I argue that a performance lens reveals some of the imperfect but powerful ways …

To Kill A Mockingbird

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University's performance of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee, dramatized by Christopher Sergel.

Performed February 18-20 & 25-27, 2022 at the Mitchell Theatre.

To Kill A Mockingbird is a dramatization by Christopher Sergel of Harper Lee's classic novel. Set in the racially segregated South during the 1930s, the play follows young Scout Finch and her brother Jem as they witness their father, Atticus Finch, defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Through Scout's eyes, the story explores themes of racial injustice, moral integrity, and the loss of innocence. The …

Dancescape Poster 2022, Winona State University

Dancescape Posters

A poster for the Winona State University Theatre and Dance Department's annual Dancescape. This is a poster for the Dancscape 2022.

Interview With Jenny Cavenaugh, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh, Wenxian Zhang

Oral Histories

Growing up in New York City, Jennifer Jones Cavenaugh earned her BA in Policy Studies from Dartmouth College in 1982, and her MFA in Dramaturgy from Brooklyn College in 1992. After receiving her PhD in Theater History and Dramatic Criticism from the University of Washington in 1995, she served as Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Denver for three years before joining the faculty of the Louisiana State University, where she earned her tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor of Theater in 2003.

In 2005, Dr. Cavenaugh was named the Winifred Warden Endowed Chair of Theater at …

Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor In King Lear And Levinas, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"In recent years, scholars have increasingly put the works of William Shakespeare (1564-1623) in dialogue with the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (1905-1995)... The majority of these Shakespearean references are to Hamlet and Macbeth, but contemporary critics working in the vein of Levinas have tended to favor King Lear. No Shakespearean play has been subjected to Levinasian analysis more fully or more frequently.⁵ This critical proclivity is not unwarranted, for Shakespeare's tragic play and Levinas's ethical writings tell the same basic story: that of the egoist who heedlessly pursues his own interests until he is until he …

Poetic Explorations In Bill F. Ndi’S Worth Their Weight In Thorns: (De)Constructing Hegemonic National Integration And Debating Francophonecentric National Governance., Hassan Mbiydzenyuy Yosimbom

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This paper explores “hegemonic national integration” and “Francophonecentric national governance” in The Cameroons (TC) poetic scape. The former refers to La République du Cameroun (LRC)-British Southern Cameroons (BSC) or Southern Cameroons (SC) interconnectedness dominated by Francophones. The latter is governance that promotes a Francophone cultural superiority that refuses to see the Cameroonian world through Southern Cameroonians’ eyes. Cameroonians live in a time of enormous fragmenting “Francophonizing” and “Anglophonizing” processes. To flesh this argument out, this paper borrows critical perspectives from Benhabib’s “democratic iterations” and “deliberative democracy” and Rosenau’s “six-governance typology’ as requisites for good governance. It contends that …

Socrates The Degenerate: Irony As Trope Of Decadence, Daniel R. Adler

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Decadence is typically associated with a fall from, or an opposition to, ideals of civilization. Western Civilization traditionally traces its roots to the culture of Ancient Greece. While theorists of periodicity from Vico to Nietzsche and Deleuze, to Hayden White and other contemporary scholars, associate decadence with excess, artificiality and over-indulgence, they also recognize that decadence often incorporates pre-civilized, base or “Other” tendencies. Paradoxically, decadence as a degeneration of an original culture’s values can also rejuvenate that culture’s core values through mutation so that a new version of the original culture arises. In literature, degeneration has also been associated with …

Exploring The Margins Of Kotha Culture : Reconstructing A Courtesan’S Life In Neelum Saran Gour’S Requiem In Raga Janki, Chhandita Das, Priyanka Tripathi

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article, “Exploring the Margins of Kotha Culture: Reconstructing a Courtesan’s life in Neelum Saran Gour’s Requiem in Raga Janki,” Chhandita Das and Priyanka Tripathi discuss the invisible challenges in life of a famous courtesan Janki Bai Ilahabadi through close analysis of Neelum Saran Gour’s 2018 novel, Requiem in Raga Janki. In this novel, Janki belongs to the infamous kotha but she never fails to seek her subjectivity. This marginal place of Janaki’s belonging will be discussed by appropriating and the theoretical framework of Indian feminist Lata Singh’s (2007) for whom courtesans have been represented as “‘other’ …

Identity Reconfigurations, Memory And Personal History In Norman Manea And Saul Bellow’S ‘Spoken Book’, Simona Antofi, Nicoleta D. Ifrim

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their paper, “Identity Reconfigurations, Memory and Personal History in Norman Manea and Saul Bellow’s Spoken Book, ”Simona Antofi and Nicoleta Ifrim analyze the book of interviews Settling My Accounts Before I Go Away: A Words & Images Interview, a two-authored mirror-like writing in which two biographical courses and two scriptural identities engage in dialogue. Their aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into the self-oriented narrative: a collective history of the Jewish exile from the communist totalitarian space (Soviet and Romanian) towards the “promised land,” with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an …