Dramatic Literature, Criticism and Theory Commons^™

Playing Proverbs With Madame De Genlis, Rebecca Cypess

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The theatrical genre known as the proverbe dramatique, which flourished as a pastime of French high society during the late eighteenth century, has often been understood through the written exemplars left by the author and artist Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle. Yet Carmontelle’s literary contributions to the genre have obscured the vast range of activities known as jouer des proverbes (playing proverbs)—activities associated especially with women—which included conversational games, pantomime, poetry, dance, and music making. Attending to the many descriptions of jouer des proverbes left by Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, the Com­tesse de Genlis, reveals that the literary …

Fall Faculty Dance Concert

Dance Programs

No abstract provided.

Transnational Ritual Poetics Of Blackness In Performance, Nina A. Mercer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I investigate transnational ritual poetics of Blackness through a historical, cultural, and spatial lens, centering my exploration on the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and waterways. I show how these formal poetics activate Africana cosmologies, cosmogonies, and mythologies dramaturgically by centering contemporary New York City performance works that bring together dance, theatre, and music. I contextualize NYC performance case studies in relation to performance practices in contemporary Salvador da Bahia. I am particularly interested in how the recurrence of circles, the crossroads, and water as formal poetics catalyze interventions along contested water-ways and landscapes marked by Black …

The 2022 Classroom Project: Land Of Ours, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2021-2022 Season Production

LAND OF OURS is a brand-new play devised in rehearsal by an ensemble of Otterbein University actors, designers, stage managers, and directors. The play explores the centrality of travel and journeying to human experience. Drawing on the ensemble's personal experiences, stories of mythical travel from legend and folklore, and travel explorations invented in rehearsal, LAND OF OURS is a theatrical journey that will transport you beyond the theater walls to a destination of the imagination.

A Gentleman's Guide To Love And Murder, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2021-2022 Season Production

Join us as we celebrate a return to live theater with a very special staged concert version of the show that was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March of 2020. While we are unable to fully realize the elaborate design of this hilarious knock-em-dead musical romp, the script will be performed in full with much of the original cast, and you will not leave without having a hearty laugh. Poor, low-born Monty Navarro is desperate to inherit the dukedom by surpassing no fewer than eight members of the well-to-do D’Ysquith family in line before him. Just wait until …

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 …

Dance 2020: The Wild Within, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

The Dance Concert, inspired by Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, “Where the Wild Things Are,” will include a collection of solos, duets and trios which will illuminate the immense power of imagination and prove without a doubt that there’s a wild thing within us all.

Pantomime: The History And Metamorphosis Of A Theatrical Ideology, Karl E. Toepfer

Open Educational Resources

This book offers perhaps the most comprehensive history of pantomime ever written. No other book so thoroughly examines the varieties of pantomimic performance from the early Roman Empire, when the term “pantomime” came into use, until the present. After thoroughly examining the complexities and startlingly imaginative performance strategies of Roman pantomime, the author identifies the peculiar political circumstances that revived and shaped pantomime in France and Austria in the eighteenth century, leading to the Pierrot obsession in the nineteenth century. Modernist aesthetics awakened a huge, highly diverse fascination with pantomime. The book explores an extraordinary variety of modernist and postmodern …

Embodied Nostalgia: Early Twentieth Century Social Dance And U.S. Musical Theatre, Phoebe Rumsey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I claim the collective emotional connections and historical explorations characteristic of musical theatre constitute a nostalgic impulse dramaturgically inherent in the form. In my intervention in the link between nostalgia and musical theatre, I look to an area underrepresented in musical theatre scholarship: social dance. Through case studies that focus specifically on how social dance in musical theatre brings forth the dancer on stage as a site of embodied history, cultural memory, and nostalgia, I ask what social dance is doing in musical theatre and how the dancing body functions as a catalyst for nostalgic thinking for …

The Choreopolitics Of Liberation And Decolonization, Harrison M. Goodall Iii

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis examines dance as a means of social and political revolt in the AIDS epidemic. The course of the AIDS epidemic within the United States was inexorably shaped by the way dancers and choreographers used their art form to rebel against concepts of masculinity, sexuality and disease transmission. Through confronting their audiences with the reality of their loss and humanizing themselves and their loved ones that passed away, dancers were able to change the image of the epidemic and push for necessary political and social reform. This paper also analyzes the ways that norms of masculinity and the stigma …

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