Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Fun Home (September 30-October 2, 2021), Alison Bechdel, Lisa Kron, Jeanine Tesori

Student Theatre Programs

Program for Fun Home (September 30-October 2, 2021).

To view the photos from this production of Fun Home., please click here.

Countersexuality In Times Of Neomachismo: Representations Of Gender In Contemporary Spanish Performance (1988–2019), Mara I. Valderrama

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces innovative representations of gender in Spanish contemporary experimental theatre and performance art. Using Paul B. Preciado’s concept of countersexuality, I argue that an embodied practice like theatre can model new forms of being-in-the-world that supersede binaries of gender and sexuality. Specifically, I analyze how emblematic performances marshal countersexual acts to intervene in the context of Spain and neomachismo, an antifeminist trend that, in the last two decades, has sought to reassert masculine structural power. I attempt to write marginalized cases into the academic narrative that might otherwise have been overlooked or erased for being experimental in their …

Baccio Del Bianco At The Court Of Spain: Early Modern Scenic Design In Context, Pamela Thielman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the life and work of seventeenth-century artist and architect, Baccio del Bianco, to imagine alternative research strategies for histories of theatre. Traditional scholarship of theatre design is rooted in art historical practices, which has limited the consideration of influences beyond visual culture. It has also posited Italian theatre culture as the driver of innovations in Early Modern theatre design. In this project, I argue for and engage in a practice of scenic design historiography that replaces Italy as the dominant actor in the theatrical scene of this period with a more nuanced approach that places emphasis on …

Aloof: Black Divas Of Refusal, Kwame K. Ocran

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Aloof: Black Divas of Refusal” studies performers Lena Horne and Billie Holiday as the progenitors of a new tradition of authentic representation of Black female interiority in the entertainment arts. As interiority denotes the wide-ranging amalgamation of human expression, these divas equipped themselves with a sense of refusal and aloofness to strategically posture themselves in conditions that suited their personal predilections best and considered their status as representatives of the Black community. Lena Horne’s evolution as an aloof diva successfully saw the singer and actress escape classist thought of racial uplift to the full embracing of the totality of Black …

A Host Of People In Detroit: Forging A Twenty-First Century Ensemble In The Deindustrial City, Jacob Hooker

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the vitality and importance of ensemble-generated experimental theatre in the United States beyond traditional creative capitals. I investigate the transformations that are taking place in US independent contemporary theatre and show that these changes are connected to issues of place and the local. I frame this inquiry by detailing five community-based, experimental ensembles working in five deindustrializing cities: Team Sunshine Performance Corporation in Philadelphia, Goat in the Road Productions in New Orleans, Maelstrom Collaborative Arts in Cleveland, Hatch Arts Collective in Pittsburgh, and A Host of People in Detroit. Through these case studies I show how local …

Dramaturgies Of Intellectual Property Law In Read-Write Theatre, Andrew Kircher

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Digital and networked technologies have intensified our relationship to knowledge: all the world’s information and creativity are so immediately and personally accessible that they become embodied. Into this moment, a new theatrical practice has emerged, what I identify as Read-Write Theatre (after Lawrence Lessig). In Read-Write cultural production, artists sample and speak through the full spectrum of disembodied data that is the internet—text, video, audio, and images. The artists I include in this critical category are marked by their posthuman relationship to knowledge and, most importantly, the ways that their theatrical work confounds contemporary intellectual property law.

In this dissertation, …

Listen Like This: Audiovisual Argument In Rockumentary, Lindsey Eckenroth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Rockumentaries are commodities that construct authoritative interpretations of popular music history, shaping how we come to know, value, hear, consume, and identify with popular music and those who create it. The arguments rockumentaries make, and the ways they make them, are the subject of this dissertation. Rather than position rockumentary as a genre, I investigate it as a set of representational tendencies to be examined in relation to stardom, authenticity, fandom, the culture industry, and the music(ians) these films represent. My introduction argues that rockumentaries operate according to what I call the offstage pattern, a dialectical structure in which …

Desde El Fuego Que En Mí Arde: Performance, Literatura Y Cine Afro-Latinoamericano Producidos Por Mujeres Afrodescendientes En Perú, Cuba Y Brasil (1960–2000), Elena Ekatherina Chavez Goycochea

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines different films, literary, and performance art pieces created by contemporary afro-descendant women from Peru, Cuba, and Brazil after the sixties with emphasis on the most relevant works of Conceição Evaristo, Sara Gómez, Victoria Santa Cruz, and Lucía Charún-Illescas. I focus my research on the crucial role these artists played in the cultural identity formation of Latin America when inserting ‘race’ as a category of socio-political analysis and cultural production. How did their films, performances, and texts challenge national narratives and imaginaries after 1960? Although in the sixties, women improved their civil rights in different countries, the ‘mujer …

The Musical Application Of Historical Literature, Yazmeen Mayes

Symposium of Student Scholars

This project combines history, literature, and newly composed music. The Yellow Wallpaper, a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, documents the age of “female hysteria,'' a catch-all “disease” for upper-class women acting outside of the social standard. The cure: solitary confinement. Any woman that showed signs of anxiety, creative passion, lack or abundance of sexual desire, or depression was sent to a remote, empty house for months at a time. Gilman describes these houses as exuberantly plain; thus, in confinement, the main character becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper. At the time, these women were considered insane, but the “treatment” …

How Theatre Produced By Autistic People Dismantles The Medical Model Of Disability, Ira Eidle

Symposium of Student Scholars

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disability that has a long history of being misunderstood. Said misunderstandings have led to falsehoods about autism and autistic people. The stigma surrounding autism encourages non-autistic people to see themselves as the best advocates for autism, leading to non-autistic people speaking over autistic people constantly. This has come to be known as the medical model of disability. Most autistic people do not consider autism to be a mental illness or disorder. (Kupferstein 2019) That is why when autistic people become informed on these aspects and band together, those misunderstandings can be mitigated. One such way is …

Cota Collaborations: Towards Interdisciplinary Projects In The College Of The Arts, Sarah Joseph

Symposium of Student Scholars

The College of the Arts at KSU is comprised of four departments that offer unparalleled education, artistry, and production. However, they are often function separately from each other. This paper outlines a vision of future collaborations for the college, recommending possible projects to collectively strengthen each of the departments. My research was conducted in a Senior Seminar course, including interviews and survey work within the college. It also stems from my own cross-disciplinary experience as Theatre major and Music minor. Ultimately, the paper will argue that both smaller level (student-lead) and larger level (COTA-lead) are desired and would benefit students …

Stepping Back In Time: Dance In 45 Plays For 45 Presidents, Antwanera Braxton

Symposium of Student Scholars

Stepping Back in Time: Dance in 45 Plays for 45 Presidents

Dances that are specific to their time period, like the minuet, which appears in the play 45 Plays for 45 Presidents, need to be supported with extensive research to ensure that their authenticity is preserved in performance. The play, as a whole, is constructed of forty-five mini plays, one for each of the presidents in America’s history. A few of the plays were musicals, ballets, or just plain dance breaks. Being that the production was done in 2019, and the dances were set in centuries prior, how does …

On The Anguish Of Going: An Actor’S Endgame, Jennifer Cavenaugh

Faculty Publications

Sometimes a theatrical production comes along that illuminates a familiar text, bringing parts of the story into a new focus or revealing other parts hitherto unseen. The Endgame Project, conceived by veteran New York actors Dan Moran and John Christopher Jones, is one of these productions. In this conception of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clov and Hamm, two characters with diminishing physical abilities, are played by Jones and Moran, two seasoned actors who are both living with Parkinson’s disease. The Endgame Project creates a powerful joining of Beckett’s script and the Parkinson’s disease that holds the principal actors in its …

A Midsummer Night’S Vr: An Exploration Of Virtual Reality Theater, Paige Hann, Nathan Roberts

The Yale Undergraduate Research Journal

Virtual reality (VR) is a medium predicated on immersivity. It therefore has implications for a similarly immersive field – live theater. The benefits of live theater are numerous. However, not everyone has the same access to theater for a variety of reasons, including cost and mental and physical health. Could VR serve as a legitimate alternative to live theater? Investigating this question, we utilized the resources of the Yale’s CCAM to create a virtual reality adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Research shows that our brains process VR differently from either real-world stimulus or two-dimensional monitors. VR …

From Stowaway To Emperor: Understanding Brutus Jones In Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Justin W. Davis

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The body of this thesis is a documentation of the process of creating the character of Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, including research, character analysis, rehearsal journal, list of actions and activities, and the play. The Emperor Jones was produced by the University of New Orleans Department of Film and Theatre in New Orleans, Louisiana in the fall of 2020. Due to the Coronavirus, all actors and crew were tested and masked during rehearsals and filming. The play was filmed in the Robert E. Nims theatre and presented online on the evenings of November 21^st, …

Sport, Space And Gender: Embodying Alternate Girlhoods With The Wolves, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to throw like a girl? If we empower girls to throw – and to kick, to jump, to fly through the air like never before – how does that space-making impact the humans into which they grow? Does staging girls at sport help us to understand sport as a space-making activity every girls needs, and to which every girl has a right? This article reflects on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Wolves as it explores the relationship between the practice of sport and the practice of gender.

Sport, Space And Gender: Embodying Alternate Girlhoods With The Wolves, Kim Solga

Department of English Publications

What does it mean to throw like a girl? If we empower girls to throw – and to kick, to jump, to fly through the air like never before – how does that space-making impact the humans into which they grow? Does staging girls at sport help us to understand sport as a space-making activity every girls needs, and to which every girl has a right? This article reflects on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Wolves as it explores the relationship between the practice of sport and the practice of gender.

Healing Attachment Wounds: Drama Therapy Within An Interpersonal Theoretical Frame As A Group Treatment Modality, Julia Dobner-Pereira

Dissertations, 2020-current

Drama Therapy is an active and experiential form of psychotherapy that is useful for group and individual therapy with a variety of populations (Dintino & Johnston, 1996; Emunah, 1999; Johnson, 2009; Landy, 1996, 2009; Sajnani, 2010). Often, there is ample work within the therapy process on understanding and shifting interpersonal patterns. Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy (Benjamin, 2006; 2018) offers a set of organizing principles emphasizing how early relationship patterns are copied in present relationships with self and other in order to conceptualize and guide treatment, focusing on in-session processes (Critchfield & Benjamin, 2006). The potential for integrating Drama Therapy and interpersonal …

“It’S War That's Cruel”: The Evolution Of Wartime Representation And ‘The Other’ In The American Musical, Leana Sottile

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

Musical theater has historically been a venue for Americans to come to terms with our past and present on both a national and an individual level as it stages and restages war mythology on the Broadway Stage. As the nation has won, lost, and abandoned foreign conflicts, the connotation, remembrance, and commemoration of war in American memory has shifted from romanticizing former conflicts to renegotiating their memory. Thus, this project examines how twentieth-century war memory is represented in the American musical, starting in the 1940s and continuing up to the present day. To do so, the phenomenon will be examined …

American Indian Law Students Association (Ailsa) Sponsors A Drum Circle, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Relation Between Musical And Dance Sophistication And Musical Groove Perception, Samantha R. O'Connell

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Listening to groovy music is an enjoyable experience and a ubiquitous human behavior in some cultures. Specifically, many listeners agree that high-groove songs are enjoyable, familiar, and likable compared to low-groove songs. While the pleasurable and dance-inducing effects of musical groove listening seem omnipresent, what is less known is how subjective feelings towards music, individual musical or dance experiences, or more objective musical perception abilities are correlated with the way we hear music with groove. Therefore, the present online study aimed to evaluate how musical and dance sophistication relates to musical groove perception. One-hundred and twenty-four participants completed an online …

The Beat Of A Subculture: A Study Of The History And Impact Of Non-Pitched Percussion In Early Hip-Hop, Jeffrey Michael Taylor

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This document presents a study of the origins and role of non-pitched, percussion-based samples in the history and development of the hip-hop genre. The survey presents an historical synopsis of hip-hop’s origins including the infrastructure of the genre, the DJ forefathers, and the music and drummers responsible for the subcultural emergence. Emphasis is placed on the specific genres of music that influenced the creation of hip-hop and the drummers responsible for the sounds that were appropriated to create new musical works. Influential drummers are examined, and transcriptions are given to aid the development of relevant drum set performance techniques. A …

The Green World Is Calling And She Must Go: Rhetoric Of Adventure And Betrayal In Shakespeare's Othello, Madeleine Dax Wilson

Toyon: Multilingual Literary Magazine

None.

Jet Of Blood, Elizabeth S. Goins, Andy Head, Thomas Davis

Frameless

A virtual production of Antonin Artaud’s 1925 play, Jet of Blood.

"Somnium" Vr Demo, Andy Head, Omen Sade, Elizabeth Goins, Joe Geigel, Yancarlos Diaz

Frameless

Driven by a desire to overcome challenges from COVID-19 and to explore theatre in a new direction, the fall production of SOMNIUM at the Rochester Institute of Technology took on a completely new concept. Instead of a more traditional, physical theatre piece as it was originally envisioned, the SOMNIUM RIT Team decided to leap into the unknown, and explore a unique blend of devised theatre, film, and 3D game design. This demo allowed audiences to view a short trailer of the production and speak with members of the design team.

Establishing The Actor-Audience Connection During Performance On A Virtual Stage, Zhongyuan Fa, Joe Geigel, Sungyoung Kim, Marla Schweppe

Frameless

In distributed virtual theatre (presentation of live performance in shared virtual spaces), a major challenge lies in creating a social connection between audience and actors, who reside in physically distant spaces. The goal of this demo is to explore the extents by which this chemistry can be recreated in a virtual space even though participants are in different physical locales. We focus on non-verbal connection using body motion and actor-audience proximity to create the social bond.

Designing Blended Experiences: Laugh Traders Design Fiction, Brian J. Okeefe

Frameless

The increasing ubiquity of interactions that involve complementary digital content, physical objects, and spaces, brings about new challenges for designers. There is a need to embed designs in legacy systems, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design often do not take this new context into account. Many systems do not consider how designers produce new digital and physical experiences that work harmoniously, while supporting new interactions and relationships with people (Imaz and Benyon 2007; Jetter, Geyer, Schwarz & Reiterer 2012). To address this, we propose the …

Into The Unknown!: Digital Theatre And Boldly Going Forward With "Somnium", Andy Head, Omen Sade

Frameless

Driven by a desire to overcome challenges from COVID-19 and to explore theatre in a new direction, the fall production of SOMNIUM at the Rochester Institute of Technology took on a completely new concept. Instead of a more traditional, physical theatre piece as it was originally envisioned, the SOMNIUM RIT Team decided to leap into the unknown, and explore a unique blend of devised theatre, film, and 3D game design.

Love, Yourself: A Solo Play, Tiffany Gilly

LSU Master's Theses

This Thesis outlines the research, writing, and production process that lead up to the performance of an original Solo Play, presented by the author. The project, entitled Love, Yourself is a twenty-minute autobiographical journey about the author’s experiences as a child of a neglectful and abusive single mother, as a foster kid, then college student, and eventual aspiring performer. In the play, the author deals with writer's block from not having felt inspired to write a song in months and attempts to find inspiration by sifting through old memories and telling stories to the audience. By the end of the …

Complete Volume (44)

Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal

Complete digitized volume (volume 44) of Communication and Theater Association of Minnesota Journal.