Performance Studies Commons^™

Dancing In Circles: Bon Dance As Performance Of The Past, Travis Robb Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project traces the contours of the Japanese folk dance tradition of Bon Dance in Hawaiʻi through the nuances of public scholarship, diaspora, and racial capitalism by producing an original play which aims to perform the knowledge and praxis which the performance ritual puts forward. Treating Bon Dance as muse, the original play examines the necessity of turning to the past in order to disrupt a future made inevitable by oppressive systems; a fiction that comments on and critiques the predictive and generative technologies that have embedded themselves into society at large. Through intertwining conversations that explore prophecy and …

Vestigial Choreographies: Climate Consciousness In The Long Nineteenth Century, Alexandra A. Rego

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The aims of this project are twofold: (a) to develop a method of theoretical analysis and (b) to put this method into pointed use. In service of (a), I propose a method of choreographic analysis. This method operates relationally, highlighting the production of movement and stillness among and between bodies, objects, and encounters. Choreographic analysis draws from methods typically sequestered to dance studies. Towards aim (b), this project demonstrates the relevance and breadth of choreographic analysis by connecting it to ecocriticism. Throughout this project, I apply choreographic analysis to a diverse set of case studies. I use choreographic analysis to …

Through The Eyes Of A Daughter: Blues City Cultural Center And The Black Arts Movement, Ayana Williams

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This creative dissertation examines the Blues City Cultural Center (BCCC) as a living continuation of the Black Arts Movement in the American South. Founded in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1979 by Deborah Frazier and Levi Frazier, Jr., BCCC emerged from the cultural and political momentum of the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and continues to sustain their principles through original theater, community-based arts education, and grassroots cultural organizing. Challenging the notion that the Black Arts Movement is a concluded historical period, this study argues that the movement remains ongoing, adaptive, and deeply embedded within Southern Black communities. Using a creative …

From Ghorer Golpo To Global Voices: Digital Storytelling As A Decolonial Pedagogy For English Language Learning In Bangladesh, Tamanna Sharmin Kabir

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

From Ghorer Golpo to Global Voices: Digital Storytelling as a Decolonial Pedagogy for English Language Learning in Bangladesh highlights how Digital Storytelling operates as a culturally sustaining and technologically supported approach within Bangladeshi undergraduate English education. Informed by my own navigation of Western and South Asian narrative traditions, the study responds to a longstanding challenge in English instruction: exam-focused, Eurocentric pedagogies often marginalize learners’ cultural identities and lived experiences. The research investigates how participants engaged with Digital Storytelling as a multimodal, technology-enhanced practice that supports language development, identity expression, and intercultural communication.

The study employed an arts-informed case study design …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Restorationland: The Lost And Found Objects Of Atlanta's Doll's Head Trail, Thomas Fish

Faculty Articles

The Doll’s Head Trail is a grassroots, low-art installation nestled within a Southeast Atlanta wildlife preserve. Constructed by volunteers and visitors from decades of environmental debris, the trail converts waste into folk art-inspired “junk” displays. The creative upcycling ranges from a miniscule shrine to “Toxic Masculinity” to a stark shoe pile commemorating child gun violence. This article details how queer theory’s “temporal turn” provides insights into material performance as collaborative regeneration. The curious vignettes playfully invert hierarchies, revealing the merits of small-time memorialization. Through these defiantly unofficial grassroot performances, the Doll’s Head Trail both remembers and restores community ruins, demonstrating …

Cultural Of Authenticity And Commodification: Analyzing The Aesthetic Waves And Collective Culture In The 2010s And 2020s, Stefanny Leung Yu

Student Theses

The “authentic self” is curated, aestheticized, and most notably, commodified. Digital algorithms, likes, views, and engagement are more than just digital metrics, they are the management of performance. For millions of other users — including the author herself — social media is the locus of personal expression. Most notably, sites like Tumblr, where users in the 2010s posted hazy images or overly filtered graphics along with melancholic song lyrics that match the vibe of the moment, expression was earnest and idealized. Today, social media in the 2020s, new creators like Hannah Neelaman, better known as Ballerina Farm, dress in pastoral …

A Black Sherlock Holmes: An Exploration Of Nonconforming Characterization., Faith Janaye Artis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the wake of diversity initiatives in the greater American theatre landscape, we are now including more Black actors than ever. Whether that be through the inclusion of diverse playwrights or implementing new casting protocols, we now have Black people in the room. However, when portraying the Black “version” of a character (i.e. Black Annie, Black Ariel, Black Juliet) a question still plagues the Black Actor’s mind: how am I meant to fit here? I evaluate my process of portraying Sherlock Holmes as my thesis role. By challenging the implied white perspective in this “universal” story (despite its feminist retelling), …

Trans-Corporealizing Island On Stage: An Eco-Aesthetic Critique In Bare Feet Dance Theatre’S Tsiáh-Thóo And Tai Body Theatre’S Red Earth, Shih-Ming Zeng

Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

This paper explores an eco-aesthetic critique as it intertwines with island consciousness and theatrical performances in Taiwan. Focusing on Bare Feet Dance Theatre’s Tsiáh-Thóo (2020/2021) and TAI Body Theatre’s Red Earth (2019), both renowned for revitalizing Taiwanese cultural traditions, the study examines how these dance-theater productions embody and reactivate the traditional knowledge and/or practices of Han and Indigenous Taiwanese communities in a way that points to contemporary and near-future ecological crises. As an island nation, Taiwan has been dominated by successive imperial and colonial powers as well as by prolonged authoritarian rule over the past century, leading to a disconnection …

Carnival, Ritual, And Race-Thinking In The Bolivian Andes, Ximena Cordova, Adhemar Mercado

All Works

This paper explores the intersection of race, religion, and colonial legacies through the lens of the Oruro Carnival, examining its role in shaping Bolivian identity. Critical religion scholars argue that the entanglement of race and religion is a product of Western modernity and colonialism, which has influenced both historical and contemporary power relations. This framework is applied to analyse the Carnival, where religious practices and festive performances intersect, reflecting colonial efforts at religious conversion and racial categorisation. By focusing on the ethnography of Oruro’s embodied festive practices, this study investigates how the Carnival contributes to the construction of difference amid …

Coltrane’S A Love Supreme: Mediations Of Immediacy In Jazz Ritual And Recitation, James R. W. Crockford

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

This paper explores the ritualized performance ethic of John Coltrane’s later career, which is charged with a determined exploration of freedom and spiritual ascendance through participative and gestural immediacy. Conceiving of this music as a spiritual and political tool for embodied transformation, this paper traces this ethic at play in Coltrane’s iconic 1965 album A Love Supreme, identifying ways the work effects a mediation of immediacy. Through focus on the album’s closing “Psalm” recitation, its parallels in Coltrane’s other works, and their analogue in traditions of ecstatic liturgical and political oratory, this paper demonstrates the consistent priority Coltrane gives …

The Decoloniality Of Feeling: On Sandovalian Praxis, Ceremony, And Emancipatory Politics In The Classroom And Beyond, Kristian E. Vasquez

Regeneración: A Xicanacimiento Studies Journal

"The Decoloniality of Feeling: On Sandovalian Praxis, Ceremony, and Emancipatory Politics in the Classroom and Beyond" by Kristan E. Vásquez.

Manifesting The End Of Amerikkkan Theatre: Black Theatre’S Healing Power To Eradicate Anti-Blackness, R'Myni Watson

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the potential of Black Theatre as a catalyst for healing anti-Blackness within American theatre. Acknowledging the limitations of systemic change, this study advocates for incremental shifts within communities to combat ingrained racial biases through narrative change and theatrical exploration. Grounded in the theory of Black Theatre's energy force, Nommo, the study proposes the framework of Acknowledge, Dismantle, Re-Educate to address and eradicate anti-Blackness. Through directing the production of Blood at the Root, incorporating Black Theatre methodologies atop eurocentric foundations, this research documents the healing experienced by participants and audiences. Key findings reveal increased community engagement, support, awareness, …

Bedeviled Beauty: My Journey Through White American Theater Institutions, J'Aila C. Price

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Game console: Oculus Quest

World: American Theater Institutions

Player: Minority

Place: United States

Level: “Ain’t no way.”

This thesis explores the contrast between the Westernized philosophies ingrained in my education and my identity as a Black female artist. It sheds light on the difficulties of pursuing higher education in the arts and the gaps that arise from limited exposure to culturally diverse Black resources, revealing the systemic issues in Western performance education. The paper also discusses the insights gained from my journey as a Black female artist, focusing on my thesis performance of Blood at the Root, which is …

Raphael Montañez Ortiz And Alternative Art Spaces, 1966–1971: From Repulsion To Exaltation, Ana Cristina Perry

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1960s, Brooklyn-born Puerto Rican artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz built a successful and provocative career in New York. Throughout the decade, Ortiz created sculptures, performances, and events that were part of a sustained investigation into how embodied destructive and uncomfortable actions could physically confront rationality and objectivity. His works attend to how rationality and objectivity were valued in the United States as a consequence of colonization and imperialism. Beginning in 1969, Ortiz overtly addressed how museums are directly implicated in systems of oppression, protesting with the Art Workers Coalition and founding El Museo to meet the needs of the …

Other Oceans, Other Skies, Sharlene Lee

MFA in Visual Art

I create immersive installations, performances, and time-based media artworks that delve into stories of belonging, feminism, and language as power. These stories offer a potential for transformation from viewer to participant and a shift in how our world is seen and experienced. Through an exploration of perception and affect, I challenge dominant narratives, prompting a contemplation of contemporary power struggles for control.

In this text, I examine the impact of historical borders and migration on my life while also investigating questions of home, shared values, and rituals that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. I also highlight my commitment to …

Blacklash: Phenomenological Hermeneutics In Black Dance, Darvejon A. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

The horrors inflicted on Black bodies, souls, and spirits in the United States during the transatlantic slave trade, the Jim Crow era, and the current era (2023) have a lasting legacy of trauma metabolized through the body and transmuted generationally. Jones uses this data to contextualize the work of Black dance artists as hermeneutic phenomena in which the Black dance artist is a hermeneut tasked with delivering a message of the Black body/spirit complex: “I AM HUMAN. DO NOT KILL ME.” This paper examines how Black dance artists frequently petition for their survival — incessantly subjugated to the interpreter’s empathy, …

For What Is A Man?: Towards Languaging Contemporary Dance In A Black, Queer, Male-Presenting Body, Thomas Ford

Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines Queering Blackness: Solo on a Theme of Reconciliation, a performance event that invokes movement, spoken text, projections and sound to explore the mechanisms of identity. Engaging performance, Black, queer and dance studies, the paper contextualizes cultural identity markers, towards an understanding of what it means to be Black, queer and male-assigned in Black spaces.

Espacio, Edgar Perez Peña, Edgar Perez Peña

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Edgar Perez Peña (He, Him, His) is a Queer, Chicanx contemporary figurative painter, who lives and works in the Los Angeles County. A native of Los Angeles, California, his paintings, and assemblages are a strong combination of process, materials, and content that displays his fascination on how physical/psychological space (from where he resides), reflects on the Queer Brown body and its comfort/discomfort in relation to public and private space.

Peña looks at his artistic practice as an opportunity to explore the human condition from the Queer and Brown perspective as well the beginning of healing through the meditative process of …

The Potentiality Of Brown, Ariana Ruíz

Criticism

A Review of The Sense of Brown by José Esteban Muñoz. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. 224. $99.95 cloth, $25.95 paper.

The Black Performer's Toolbox: A Critical Authoethnography, Laura D. Oliver

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Blackness shines bright like the moon and beams outside of identity parameters that are limiting in Western society to determine its communicative function inside and outside systems of power. When Blackness intersects with performance, various ways to construct identity are highlighted to expand our understanding of theory and methods that emphasize difference and culture. This research project aims to reimagine Blackness as a performance methodology to explore the performer’s livelihood onstage and constructions of race that impact identity offstage. Additionally, this project is built from a specific method created from the continuous use of expressive work that reflects societal challenges …

Saved Babies, Dead Doctors: Settler Colonial Anxiety And Strategic Rhetorics Of/In The Anti-Abortion Cultural Narrative, Cassidy Ellis

Communication ETDs

In this dissertation I identify and analyze the rhetoric that creates the anti-abortion cultural narrative and locate its toxic secrets by exposing the logics and ideologies the secrets obscure and sustain, and finally, ascertaining the strategic rhetorics that enable the narrative’s power and centrality. There are two primary arguments proposed in this dissertation. First, I argue that settler colonialism is the primary toxic secret nestled just beneath the surface of the anti-abortion cultural narrative. It is the secret that animates and sustains the narrative in service of maintaining settler colonial social order via control and maintenance of the population. Second, …

Unsung Heroines In Black And White: Sixties Girl Groups As Sonic Rock Rebellion, Hilarie Ashton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Before the Beatles arrived in America, exploding open the intersection between pop music and the emerging genre of rock and in so doing, drawing heavily on the work of Black music and musicians, girl groups were powerfully enacting a kind of cultural rebellion in both of those genres. In contrast to the historical impulse to privilege a breathlessly incomplete white male lineage, "Unsung Heroines" examines in closer, more connected spotlights the subversive creative work of the Black and working-class teenage girls in the Ronettes, the Chiffons, and the Shangri-Las. Across four chapters, "Unsung Heroines" shows how these singers subversively tucked …

Introduction: Puppets Have Always Performed Others, John Bell

Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects

Puppets and performing objects have always performed alterities, often reflecting biased visions of Others. The papers in this collection about the object performances of Others can help us better understand global histories and cultures.

Introduction: Attitudes Toward The Other, Matthew Isaac Cohen

Representing Alterity through Puppetry and Performing Objects

The use of puppets, objects, masks and cantastorias in various societies around the globe, to represent and stage the Other.

Sana Sana: Unlearning Generational Expectation Through Performance, Jalen R. Ash

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is an exploration of identity as a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color) body traversing through the generational histories of my family and the struggle of cultural loss to our assimilation of Whiteness. Through the multi-faceted medium of performance, my work uses physical and mental spaces of self and technology to understand how the body functions as a screen. Our bodies house projections of generational expectations that have trickled down from the past into the present. These projections shape our own unique identities along with the personal experiences we gather as we move through the various spaces of …

An Arbitrary Aesthetic: Cultural Reproduction And Hegemonic Canonical Formations In The Western Theatrical Academy, Sim C. Rivers

Theses and Dissertations

Theatre as an artistic practice has often been celebrated as an art of and for the people, being a modality that in theory the common person has access to learn, explore and experience. In recent years I have become preoccupied with the growing rarification and privileging of this art form, particularly in how it is cognized and taught in the academic world. As such, I set out to investigate the mechanisms at work at levels structural, artistic, and personal that determine how theatre is taught and understood within the western academy.

This thesis seeks to examine and unpack the perceived …

Ua68/17/1 Wku Dance: Creating | Thinking | Artists, Wku Theatre & Dance

WKU Administration Documents

Newsletter by and about the WKU Dance Program. Articles:

• Dance on the Hill
• Potter College of Arts & Letters Collaborations
• Guest Speakers: Naila Ansari, Shyama Iyer, Jill Flanders
• Guest Artists: Tyler Gilstrap
• WinterDance
• Last Chance to Dance
• National Dance Education Organization

Homage To Eleanora: A Musical Journey Through The Billie Holiday Songbook, Keith A. Dames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Billie Holiday was a singer, songwriter, vocalist, bandleader and composer in the fields of music, black culture and more specifically the genre of jazz. The primary focus of this study is Billie Holiday’s discography, music, and compositions as treated in relation to the black culture of production. This study will explore a secondary content analysis of Billie Holiday’s music, musicianship, musicality and compositional skills within the American jazz mainstream, broader jazz audience and world at large. This project will take an analytical look at the structure and form of the compositions of Billie Holiday. Billie Holiday is credited with composing …

'My Name Is Peaches': Black Women's Affect In The Blues Biomyth, Taylor C. Scott

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

For this project, I am interested in the study of nuanced self-representations of Black rage that appear within African American literary traditions, specifically the blues aesthetic, wherein artists narrativize a wide spectrum of intelligent and specific emotion--not just melancholy. Blues narratives in which Black people self-represent are in direct opposition to flattened narratives of certain affective modes such as anger as a useless, backwards, pathologized, and flat feeling that appear within dominant U.S. and global iconographies. What I see in the blues aesthetic is the capacity for a multichromatic approach to studying rage and Black authorship in America. By using …