Dance Commons^™

Introducing Genzai Nō: Categorization And Conventions, With A Focus On Ataka And Mochizuki, Diego Pellecchia

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

Mochizuki: History And Context, Michael Watson

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

From Ataka To Kanjinchō: Adaptation Of Text And Performance In A Nineteenth-Century Nō-Derived Kabuki Play, Katherine Saltzman-Li

Mime Journal

Nō techniques and play borrowings provided important infusions into kabuki throughout its history, but in the nineteenth century, a genre of kabuki plays in close imitation of nō or kyōgen wasadded to the kabuki repertoire. The genre came to be called matsubamemono, meaning “[nō/kyōgen-derived kabuki] plays [performed] on a stage with a pine painted on the back wall” or “pine-boardplays.”1 These plays are the focus of this article, in which I first introduce the genre and its place in kabuki history, and then discuss its most famous example, the play Kanjinchō (Hattori 17–40; Meisakukabuki zenshū 181–197; Brandon, The Subscription List …

On Ataka: Interview With Udaka Michishige And Sugi Ichikazu, Diego Pellecchia, Rebecca Teele Ogamo

Mime Journal

No abstract provided.

The Launch 2020: A Senior Cabaret, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

No abstract provided.

Touch As Bond: Exploring The Use Of Contact Improvisation In An Ensemble Process, J Travis Cooper

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

This document serves as a contextual and reflective essay detailing the work done on J Travis Cooper’s Honors Capstone Project, Touch as Bond: Exploring the use of Contact Improvisation in an ensemble process. It is a process focused creative project exploring the potential of Contact Improvisation [CI] as a tool for ensemble development and content creation in a theatrical production. Contact Improvisation is a dance practice created by Steve Paxton and other collaborators in the 1970s. The form demands dancers improvise movements while in contact with each other, creating spontaneous lifts and requiring the ability to adapt to a …

Putting It Together: Musical Theatre As An Academic Discipline, Madison Finney

Honors College Theses

Musical Theatre is an art form that integrates singing, acting, dancing, and production for the purposes of storytelling. It is an artistic field that is extremely interdisciplinary, and it draws upon many different areas of knowledge for performance and education. Additionally, Musical Theatre has evolved into a viable academic field of study. It incorporates artistry and academic analysis as a way to enhance performance and higher education. This paper will use Practice as Research theory, creativity theory, and disciplinary discourse theory to explore the ways Musical Theatre successfully functions as an art form and an academic discipline.

Decolonizing Playwriting Through Indigenous Ceremonial Performances, Jay B. Muskett

Theatre & Dance ETDs

This dissertation attempts to express the importance of storytelling within the Indigenous Theater framework. It does so by first analyzing the progression of the writer’s unique upbringing and analyzing the influences of story upon an indigenous identity. I will also attempt to describe the aesthetics of Native Theater along two lines of methodology which includes praxis described and developed by Hanay Geiogamah and Rolland Meinholtz. I will also explain how the script 1n2ian tries to follow those concepts of Native Theater to create a ceremonial performance that uses a blending of both methodologies.

Holding On/Letting Go: Situating Trauma And Memory In Theatrical Spaces, Caroline T. Graham

Theatre & Dance ETDs

In this essay, I review my development as a playwright in the MFA Dramatic Writing program and examine the shifting, overlapping goals of playwright-as-educator and playwright-as-entertainer. In Part One, I position my academic exploration of trauma in relation to ethics in journalism, embodied knowledge, and intersectional feminism and outline my creative experiments in staging trauma through the process of witnessing, retelling, and abstraction. In Part Two, I detail the artistic and personal roots of my dissertation play, The Great Maverick Adventure of 2007, and the structural and dramaturgical tools I employed to rebuild a sense of play and theatricality …

Contents - Edward Gordon Craig Special Issue 2017, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

Cover, front matter, and contents for Mime Journal Special Issue, "Action, Scene, and Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues with Edward Gordon Craig." Guest editors: Jennifer Buckley and Annie Holt.

Editors' Note - Action, Scene, And Voice: 21st-Century Dialogues With Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Anne Holt

Mime Journal

A roadmap to this Special Issue of Mime Journal. This issue emphasizes the tissue of influences that shaped Craig’s own work and continue to impact contemporary theater and performance. By focusing on the historical contexts in which his ideas were developed and those in which they have been received, the essays counter the widely held perception of Craig as the solitary genius of the “Art of the Theatre.” His claims of originality and singularity have too often obscured the connections between his work and that of other artists—especially the dancer Isadora Duncan, upon whom two of the pieces included here …

The Revolutionary: On Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Jennifer A. Buckley, Lori Belilove

Mime Journal

Jennifer Buckley interviews dancer, choreographer, and teacher Lori Belilove on Isadora Duncan’s practice and legacy. Belilove argues for Duncan’s modernism, and emphasizes her impact upon Edward Gordon Craig’s developing aesthetic and his career. This edited transcription of their conversation takes its point of departure from Craig’s portfolio of six drawings of Duncan in action, Isadora Duncan: Sechs Bewegungsstudien, Insel Verlag, 1906. Belilove sees both Craig and Duncan as poised between late Victorianism and modernism, and she contends they shared a modernist impulse toward abstraction. Belilove also comments on her own practice as a performer and as a teacher passing …

The Dancer And The Übermarionette: Isadora Duncan And Edward Gordon Craig, Olga Taxidou

Mime Journal

Olga Taxidou analyzes the ambiguous concept for which Edward Gordon Craig is best known—the “übermarionette”—alongside Isadora Duncan’s discussions of the liberated dancer. Highlighting the emphasis on futurity in Craig’s and Duncan’s manifestos and theories, she contends that this pairing works to undo the binaries between Hellenism and modernism, and between mechanistic and vitalistic aesthetics. Emphasizing the impact of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories upon Duncan’s theory and practice, Taxidou locates Duncan within an intellectual vanguard that includes Jane Harrison and her fellow Cambridge Ritualists as well as major modernist poets.

Speaking Looks: A Conversation About Costume With Edward Gordon Craig, Léon Bakst, And Pablo Picasso, Annie Holt

Mime Journal

Holt focuses on Craig’s influential stage designs in relation to the performing body. Through costume design, Holt rethinks Craig’s relationship with the designs of the Ballets Russes, placing him in context with the experimentations of his contemporaries Leon Bakst and Pablo Picasso. Holt frames these designers’ historic opposition as a difference of opinion around the way that costumes can carry meaning. She argues that while all three designers used similar visual language and agreed that costumes should communicate with audiences, each artist used a different model for this communication – speech (Craig), music (Bakst) and writing (Picasso).

Process Metamorphosis, My Choreographic Journey, Brianna J. Larson

Theses and Dissertations

Process Metamorphosis, My Choreographic Journey describes the journey from my initial interest in choreography to where I find myself as a choreographic artist today. Throughout the paper I look at different productions I have worked on, both professionally and within an educational setting, and different people I have collaborated with. Included will be thoughts from peers and mentors as well as my own observations from rehearsals and meetings. I will also be pulling information from my notes and journals while working on shows over the last twelve years.

Finding Voice, The Body Speaks: Original Work And Counter-Hegemonic Performance And Practice, Matthew Paul Thornton

Theses and Dissertations

Graduate study in theatre has allowed me to understand my work as an artist and educator from a critical academic perspective. I have researched Butoh as a model for original work that employs multiculturalism against hegemonic control of personal identity. From my own training experience, I am recognizing Capoeira, Contact Improvisation, and Devising processes (co-creation or collaborative creative process in dance) as counter-hegemonic forms and techniques that share a physical/philosophical emphasis on communal engagement, improvisation, circularity and repetition. Looking at them together provides points of intersection for me to examine them as an artist, while posing questions for cross-cultural investigations. …

Dance Of Light And Loss, Clark Lunberry

English Faculty Research and Scholarship

On a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon in the Ogikubo district of western Tokyo, in the dark basement of Saburo Teshigawara's dance studio and performance space known as Karas Apparatus, an audience gathered to see the dancer's newest solo performance, Fool. The uncurtained stage in the small theatre was empty and unlit, the stage itself far larger, perhaps three times larger than that tight space reserved for those attending the event. What lights there were faintly illuminated only the slightly raised rows of cushions upon which the forty of us in the audience took our seats, waiting for the performance …

Implementation Of Lighting And Projection Into Metamorphoses By Mary Zimmerman, Loren Haynes

Honors College Theses

On March 4, 2015, Metamorphoses opened its doors to the public. The cast, crew, and production staff had been working on this masterpiece for many months, but the night was finally here and the production was finished. The end product was a transformative work of art that took the audience through many of the old Greek myths through song and dance and words.

In order to help accomplish this, the lighting and projection elements were designed to accent each story and give the audience a clear sense of place, time of day, mood, and other aspects of the world. This …

The Art Of Adaptation, Katharine E. Jordan

Honors Theses and Capstones

My honors thesis The Art of Adaptation discusses the process of adapting old stories and theatrical pieces for modern audiences through the exploration of various adaptations (theatrical, operatic, dance and film) of Euripides' Medea. It also touches on my own short, modern, adaptation; FURY: A Rock Musical Inspired by Medea. All of this research was important in making the performance aspect of my capstone the best it could be.

Noises Off

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University’s Spring 2012 performance of Noises Off by Michael Frayn.

Noises Off is a farce involving the small cast of a play and how their offstage drama impacts their onstage drama.

Artmaking On The Edge Of A Cliff: Directing Iphigenia 2.0, Shannon E. Cameron

Johnny Carson School of Theatre and Film: Theses, Student Research, and Creative Work

This thesis contains written documentation regarding the process of directing a theatrical production in fulfillment of the partial requirements for Master of Fine Arts in Directing for Stage and Screen at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.

Topics addressed include play selection, script analysis, director/designer collaboration, coaching and actors and evaluation of final product.

Advisor:  Virginia Smith

The Great All-American Disaster Musical

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University’s Spring 1997 performance of The Great All-American Disaster Musical book by Tim Kelly and music and lyrics by Jack Sharkey.

The Cave Dwellers

Taylor Theatre Playbills

The playbill for Taylor University’s Fall 1964 performance of The Cave Dwellers by William Saroyan.

The Cave Dwellers tells the story of four homeless persons living on the stage of a theater about to be torn down, and how they recount the memories of their better days with joy.

Letter From Margaret Lloyd 10/26/1936, Margaret Lloyd

Correspondence 1922-1938

Letter from Margaret Lloyd to Charlotte Michaud discussing articles and books related to dance.

Margaret Lloyd wrote an advice column for the Christian Science Monitor.

Letter From Adrienne V. Descoteaux, Adrienne V. Descoteaux

Correspondence 1922-1938

March 18,1936: A typed letter from Adrienne V. Descoteaux of Lewiston, Maine, to Mrs. Cyrus S. Kauffman (Elizabeth Macy Kauffman), Publicity Chairman of the Portland College Club in Portland, Maine.

Letter From Elizabeth Macy Kauffman, Elizabeth Macy Kauffman

Correspondence 1922-1938

March 5, 1936: Letter from Elizabeth Macy Kauffman of Portland, Maine, to Charlotte Michaud concerning a performance of the Ballet Russe.

Letter From Mrs. Oscar A. Auger, Oscar A. Auger Mrs.

Correspondence 1922-1938

Handwritten letter from Mrs. Oscar A. [Diana] Auger to Charlotte Michaud regarding leads on upcoming theater performances.

Letter From Mrs. Fred [Rebecca] Marsh, [Rebecca] Marsh

Correspondence 1922-1938

February 4, 1936: A handwritten letter from Mrs. Fred [Rebecca] Marsh to Charlotte Michaud.

* Vaudeville Performance (May 12, 1916), Lindenwood College

Student Dance Programs & Brochures

St. Charles Cosmos-Monitor article on a Vaudeville dance performance (May 12, 1916).