Theatre and Performance Studies Commons^™

Ua12/2/54 Class Of 1930, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Class of 1930.

Ua12/2/40 Class Of 1932, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Class of 1932.

Ua12/2/52 Class Of 1925, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Class of 1925.

Ua12/2/56 Class Of 1933, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Class of 1933.

Ua12/2/49 Class Of 1922, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Records created by and about the Class of 1922.

Editor's Note, Richard E. Paine, Emily M. Cramer

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

Is It Prose Or Is It Drama? Distinguishing Events Based On Judging Criteria, Justin J. Rudnick, Anthony Peavy, Balencia Crosby, Alyssa Harter, Cristy Dougherty

National Forensic Journal

Genre distinctions have been a source of confusion and contention in the collegiate forensics community, particularly in terms of distinguishing between appropriate source material for prose and drama. As the most powerful indicators of current forensic performance evaluations, ballots help illustrate the judging paradigms shaping the community. To that end, we conducted a content analysis of preliminary-round prose and drama ballots from the 2014 NFA championship tournament to determine how judges distinguish between prose and drama. Results illustrate substantial similarities in how each event is evaluated by judges. We discuss implications for this distinction in the conclusion of this essay.

How Can Sotl Help Forensic Educators Assess Their Performance?, Leah White

National Forensic Journal

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a movement among educators which seeks to acknowledge the work we do teaching as its own form of unique scholarship. SoTL argues the work we do as teachers can be peer-reviewed, critiqued and shared with others in our academic communities. The goal of this paper is to outline how forensic educators can use SoTL approaches to help build an argument about their scholarly activity as illustrated in coaching practice. SoTL provides a frame through which we can articulate the significance of this aspect of our scholarly performance.

Kinship And Twinship In Jacob And Esau, Kent R. Lehnhof

English Faculty Articles and Research

"The implications of these early stage directions are upheld and amplified elsewhere in the play. In what follows, I demonstrate this to be the case by reviewing some of the ways the interlude seeks to justify Jacob’s usurpation, most interestingly in its systematic and strategic deployment of kinship ties and familial terms. After explaining how the play leverages family relations to elevate Jacob and overthrow Esau, I concentrate on one family relation in particular: namely, the complicated bond between twin brothers. As I will make clear, the interlude’s treatment of twinship raises pressing questions about the way wealth, affection, and …

Stagecraft Basics, Jeff Mclaughlin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Ua100/1/1 Rural Training School Administration, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

No abstract provided.

The Passion Of Love Or The Love Of Passion In A-Minor, Brendan Whitt

ETD Archive

A-Minor is an one-act play that examines the relationship between a Black artist and the predominantly white society and industry he must assimilate into in order to be considered a success. The main character Jacque Bonnet is used as a vessel to interpret the life and career of Joseph Bologne Chevalier de St. George. Despite Bonnet and Bologne being from different eras (Bologne mid to late 1700’s, Bonnet Mid 1800’s) I used Bonnet as a device to investigate the lesser explored life of Bologne. By creating a meta-gothic world for Jacque Bonnet to exist in, the crowd can watch his …

How Can We Know The Dance From The Dance?: Exploring The Complexity Of Staging Dance Legacy Works, Elizabeth Mcpherson

Department of Theatre and Dance Scholarship and Creative Works

Staging works from our rich concert dance heritage relies on determining what the “real” dance is, particularly when the work is no longer currently performed. Because choreographers frequently alter their choreography, creating multiple versions of a dance, identification of a definitive version can be a complex process. Adding to the complexity, there is the involvement of the stager, performers, and the audience who are each active or passive participants in the ultimate performance of a work. Through conversations with prominent stagers, scholarly discourse, and personal experience, the author investigates some of the key concerns and questions regarding staging dance legacy …

Maternal Instinct: Exploring The Dynamic Between Mother And Non-Mother Characters In Contemporary Plays, Julia Moriarty

Wayne State University Dissertations

What happens when radical intentions meet ingrained narrative patterns? Focusing on Birth and After Birth by Tina Howe, Crumble (Lay Me Down, Justin Timberlake) by Sheila Callaghan, and The How and the Why by Sarah Treem, this paper will unpack the way these texts address cultural attitudes surrounding motherhood and childlessness. A feminist lens will be applied to a dramaturgical study of these plays and the inherited legacies of mothers and non-mothers on stage with which these playwrights grapple. Despite their attempts to expose and dismantle the oppressive cycle of essentialized maternity, these plays all utilize a protagonist/antagonist structure to …

Dance-Off Or A Battle For The Future: Dance Reality Shows In India, Pallabi Chakravorty

Dance Faculty Works

The chapter examines the myriad meanings of dance competitions through the lens of Indian dance reality shows. It discusses reality shows such as Boogie Woogie, Dance India Dance, Naach Dhum Machale, and the production of new hybrid dances and remixes. The symbiotic relationship between Bollywood dance, reality shows, and the television industry creates the new aspirational aesthetics of “remix.” By combining ethnographic research and textual analysis of song-and-dance sequences of Bollywood films and reality shows, the chapter explores the transformation of the mythopoetic bhakti rasa of classical dances into the remix of Bollywood dances. It argues that “item numbers” and …

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction, Kathleen Spring

Faculty & Staff Publications

Shush: A Creative (Re)Construction stems from work conducted during a sabbatical in fall 2017. The audio piece, Shush Me Awake, is a composition that explores the shush as a performative act. The accompanying framing essay uses an autoethnographic approach to provide a contextualized look at the composition process for this piece, while simultaneously situating it within existing scholarship in library and information studies on the image of the librarian and stereotypes. The composer notes provide additional technical details about the audio piece itself.

In Defense Of Grass Grows: A Play About Mental Illness, Amanda Grace Hughes

Honors Program Theses

My mission as a mentally ill theatre artist is to challenge the commonly-perpetuated fictions that restrict public perception of mentally ill persons [MIPs]. A meta-analysis of plays from the Greek, Medieval, Victorian, Melodramatic, Naturalist, and Post- Naturalist eras reflected just how little progress has been made at exposing and eliminating popular myths about mental illness. While the theatrical canon offers evidence for the inadequacy of current representations of MIPs, the psychological literature offers steps forward for the artists telling these stories. Efforts to improve artist sensitivity to the complex realities of mental illness fail to educate with fact alone (Dale, …

Direction Of The Imaginary Invalid By Molière Translated By Charles Heron Wall Adapted By Kimberly Dorman, Kimberly S. Dorman

All Graduate Projects

This project comprises of the selection, research, casting, adaptation, production and post-production process of The Imaginary Invalid. Documentation and research include adaptation, analysis of the play as a production vehicle for our program, research, script analysis, outcome goals, a record of the production period, and a postproduction evaluation.

Scenic Painting, Jeff Mclaughlin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Power Puppets In Portable Pulpits: A Personal Account Of Puppet Ministry In The African American Community, Yolanda Sampson

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Yolanda Sampson relates the history of her path into puppet ministry and her PuppeTainment Productions company, which presents Christian stories in a “hip, entertaining way,” bringing “biblical principles to life for twenty-first century children.” She recounts her initiation in puppet ministry at the age of twelve, and her development of stories about the dangers of drug culture in the Washington, D.C. area, as well as her use of puppetry in beauty pageant competitions, and her ventures into puppet video productions such as What Time is It? and Tell It Like It Is. Sampson took a three-year hiatus to earn her …

Schroeder Cherry And His Puppets: Playing With Puppets, From Childhood To Adulthood, Schroeder Cherry

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Schroeder Cherry relates his path into puppetry, from childhood television shows to his exposure to European puppetry in Switzerland; and later an apprenticeship with Chicago puppeteer Gary Jones. After earning a master’s degree in museum education at George Washington University, Cherry began developing puppet performances for the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. Travels in Africa furthered his appreciation of that continent’s puppetry, and influenced his creation of such shows as How the Sun Came to the Sky. Cherry has developed an array of rod-puppet characters (including DiAndre, Ms. Lily, and Tevin) which he incorporates into museum performances and such …

Egg Whites: A Short Puppet Film Script, Alva Rogers

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Alva Rogers’ script for a short puppet film is a magical realist treatment of a mother’s efforts to help her young daughter, an unnamed African American girl, fall asleep in their New York apartment. The mother explains straightforwardly how she will make muffins for the girl’s breakfast, but the film then shifts into a surreal territory where the girl travels on a moonbeam to the sun, and then appears in a rowboat in a vast ocean, where she wants to plant a flower—all while the mother is baking in the kitchen. The sea explains that the girl’s flower will not …

Living Objects: Introduction, Paulette Richards

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

In her introduction to this collection of Living Objects: African American Puppetry online texts, co-curator Paulette Richards gives an overview of “the power of performing objects to disrupt dehumanizing views of blackness,” and the continuing history of African American object performance in relation to other aspects of popular culture and writing, despite the suppression of African figurative sculpture and object performance, and the persistence of racist stereotypes born of blackface minstrelsy. Relating W. E. B. DuBois’s sense of African American “double consciousness” to the inherent “double vision” of puppet and object performance, Richards proposes a “distinct lineage of African American …

Pura Belpré’S Puppetry At The Nypl Children’S Rooms: 1921-1982, Lisa Sánchez González

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

An extraordinary public intellectual of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Pura Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico in 1899 and died in New York City in 1982 after a prolific career as a children’s author, librarian, advocate, and puppeteer. Among other firsts, Belpré wrote the first mainstream Latino storybook in U.S. publishing history: Perez and Martina (House of Warne, 1932). The American Library Association has named a major children’s literature (now including Young Adult fiction) medal in her honor. In many ways, Belpré is the Zora Neale Hurston of Afro-Caribbean American literary history—with a flamboyant, polyglot twist.

This essay discusses …

Itsy, Dirk Joseph

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The famed Itsy Bitsy Spider realizes that climbing up the spout only leads to a rain gutter, and so goes off on a sidewalk journey to find a better life. After encountering two men arguing about money, a fraudulent salesman, and a girl afraid of spiders, Itsy finds a tree in a meadow where it can build a web and catch flies.

Alma W. Thomas: “The Marionette Show As A Correlating Activity In The Public Schools”, Jonathan Frederick Walz

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

The wider world primarily knows Alma W. Thomas as an African American visual artist who, despite the challenges of race, gender, and age, produced a coherent body of brightly colored nature-based abstractions that made her world famous in the late 1970s. What remains virtually unknown, however, is the artist’s involvement with puppet theater and related professional activities. During the summers of 1925, 1930, and 1934, Thomas studied at Columbia University’s Teachers College, where she earned an M.A. in arts education; post-graduate coursework with acknowledged marionette expert Tony Sarg followed. The pedagogical theories of John Dewey, who taught at Columbia 1905–1930, …

Teeth, Tau Bennett

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Brooklyn-based puppeteer Tau Bennett’s shooting script for a television puppet comedy employs dark humor and surreal slapstick to tell the story of a man whose offhand wish to lose his “pesky teeth” becomes unfortunately true, thanks to larger-than-life forces, two bumbling hoodlums, and a boss looking for teeth.

Puppetry And Inside Change, Al Tony Simon, Tychist Baker

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Al Tony Simon and Tychist Baker describe their experiences as formerly incarcerated individuals, and their work with puppetry through the group Inside Change. Simon became involved in theater in prison, and then with prison activism through RAPP (Release Aging People from Prison), and Milk Not Jails’ efforts to reform New York State parole boards. Great Small Works theater company introduced Simon to puppetry, which he has used in his work with young people in youth detention centers, schools, and at-risk communities through the One Foot In and One Foot Out program, and later the creation of Inside Change. During his …

Shape-Shifter, Tarish Pipkins

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Tarish Pipkins’s early experiences with the “shape-shifting beast” of racism as he grew up near Pittsburgh, and later his growing awareness of African American history, have influenced his poetry, visual art, and puppetry: a “weapon of mass destruction to fight the beast.” His work with puppets and special-needs children led him to create larger puppet productions such as Just Another Lynching and 5P1N0K10: The Android Who Wants to be Real b boy, which allow him to “[fight] back using puppets as my swords.”

Five-Star Review And Other Responses, Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, Akbar Imhotep

Living Objects: African American Puppetry Essays

Living Objects Festival and Symposium attendees Sheila Gaskins, Tau Bennett, Nate Puppets, and Akbar Imhotep offer their appreciation of the events, illustrated with photographs by Gaskins.