Performance Studies Commons^™

In Search Of A Stimulating Visual Dance Art Medium: Overlapping Realities In Live And Screen Dance, Yael Levitin Saban

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper captures research into historical examples of artistic performance pioneers who integrated multiple layers of imagery into complex dialogue and describes how this research inspired and influenced the creation of an original 17-minute video work, “Overlay.”. My interest throughout my MFA Thesis Project has been to understand the effect of fusing or layering multiple movement-based art forms, the application and integration of modern technology to established traditional stage performance, and the creation of engaging new art form.

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

2020-2021 Season

No abstract provided.

Whatever It Takes: Redemption, Individualism, Altruism And The Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rianna Jeanine Robinson

Morehead State Theses and Dissertations

A thesis presented to the faculty of the Caudill College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Morehead State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Rianna Jeanine Robinson on December 14, 2020.

Nurture, Lauren Taylor League

Graduate Theses

Nurture is a series of sculptural and performative works created to explore the emotional and psychological effects of objects as they relate to familial memory and the various processes one uses to nurture and express love. These moments incapsulate the need for comfort and connection, the need to be nourished, the need for protection, and the need to remember. The filmed interactions with each individual sculpture evoke the natural relationship of emotional release to the processes of remembering and healing.

By using sculpture as a residue of performance and creating work that serves as a memory of interaction and experience, …

Taking Student Artists And Audiences To The West Side: Exploring The Value Of Creative Adaptation In An Arts Context Through A Case Study Of “West Side Story”, Rebecca G. Bateson-Brown

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project focuses on the practical application and conceptual acceptance of deliberate creative adaptation within the purview of the performing arts and arts education. More specifically, it centers this conversation around stagings of the iconic musical West Side Story, as my role as a choreographer and arts educator is used to further explore, examine, and emphasize these topics through the documentation of my production planning process, choreographic creation, and ultimate execution of performance material for a local high school production of the show. As such, this project builds with greater specificity off of my previous investigations of “adaptation” as …

Dismemberment In The Medieval And Early Modern English Imaginary: The Performance Of Difference, Frederika Bain

Late Tudor and Stuart Drama

The medieval and early modern English imaginary encompasses a broad range of negative and positive dismemberments, from the castration anxieties of Turk plays to the elite practices of distributive burial. This study argues that representations and instances of bodily fragmentation illustrated and performed acts of exclusion and inclusion, detaching not only limbs from bodies but individuals from identity groups. Within this context it examines questions of legitimate and illegitimate violence, showing that such distinctions largely rested upon particular acts’ assumed symbolic meanings. Specific chapters address ways dismemberments manifested gender, human versus animal nature, religious and ethnic identity, and social rank. …

In The Next Room, Or The Vibrator Play

Theatre Programs

No abstract provided.

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.

An Enemy Of The People, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

When a water contamination crisis puts their community in peril, siblings face off in a battle of political ambitions and moral integrity.

The Theory Of Relativity, Otterbein Theatre And Dance Department

2020-2021 Season

Whether you're allergic to cats, in love for the first or tenth time, a child of divorce, a germaphobe, or simply a unique individual, you’re sure to find yourself in this fresh new musical.

Recalling The (Afro)Future: Collective Memory And The Construction Of Subversive Meanings In Janelle Monáe’S Metropolis-Suites, Anders Liljedahl

Third Stone

Focusing on the intersection of collective memory, technology, and African American popular music, this paper use aspects of the sonic narratives in Janelle Monáe’s Metropolis-Suites I–V to introduce core concepts of Afrofuturism. The paper challenges the positioning of collective memory as being exterior to the sphere of individual cognitive memory. By inhabiting past, present, and future at once, Afrofuturism is able to critically revisit collective memory not only as a social framework but also as actual individual memory. Afrofuturist discourse questions the status of the human being by examining African Americans as always already robotic, and posits African American …

Annotated Bibliography - Grace Jones, Slave To The Rhythm, Bennett Brazelton

Third Stone

Annotated Bibliography entry for Grace Jones' album, Slave to the Rhythm (1985).

Accomplices In Art: The Expansion Of Authorship In The 1970s And '80s, Sydney Stutterheim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation introduces the “accomplice,” a new figure in histories of performance and appropriation art in the United States and Western Europe during the 1970s and '80s that allows us to completely revise the relations of property, agency, and authorship that have been assumed in these fields. The accomplice is defined here as a type of agent who shares in the responsibility of artworks that are often centered on tactics of legal or ethical disobedience while the recognition of her or his authorial position in the artistic production is deliberately obscured, diminished, or overlooked. Focusing on the work …

Prosthetic Ontology Into Pedagogy: Applying Garoian’S Theory To The Performing Arts, Elise Lael Kieffer

International Journal of Lifelong Learning in Art Education

Prosthetic pedagogy, as developed by Charles Garoian, provides a framework for using artificial-real worlds created by the arts to influence and impact teaching practice. The prosthetic space is artificial, separate, from the artist and audience, yet it is felt authentically, as if it were part of their being. Garoian explored prosthetic pedagogy through visual arts and museum experiences. This research further examines prosthetic pedagogy by applying it the Theatre. The art of theatre builds worlds onstage and through performance that allow performers to be and exist apart from their physical selves in the realm of prosthetic reality. The artist and …

The Collaborators Draw The Circle, Gary K. Lengel

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The mystical appeal of a circle reverberates throughout the practice of theatre: from the story circles of our ancestors echoing through the caves and across the ancient savannahs to the modern-day arena palaces that allow playwrights, directors, actors, producers, designers, craftspeople, and, ultimately audiences, to engage and embrace our retold truths, we face each other in circles. This writing references academic instruction and professional experiences in live theatre, documenting various appearances of the circle metaphor as the rehearsal core drives through the production process. It is an endorsement of the circle’s power to the initial table read and beyond: this …

Social Power Of Jazz Festivals, Olga Bekenshtein

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Jazz festivals occur in all parts of the world, small cities and metropolises, urban and rural landscapes, stadiums, churches, streets, and abandoned factories. Being a part of the entertainment industry, they have the potential to impact social change. Jazz festivals help us reconsider notions of identity and community, and their communal experience has the potential to undermine dominant social norms. The industry of jazz festivals is based on Black music and has a history of positive and negative social outcomes. Evaluating festivals through the symbolic meaning of music provides an optic into how festivals marginalize and exploit African American cultural …

An Examination Of The History And Evolution Of Senior Adult Theatre Accomplishments That Impact Intergenerational Theatre Of The 21st Century, William Français Charette

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This thesis explores senior adult theatre recorded interviews, several text book, internet, and published articles that report on findings conducted by educational scholars regarding senior adults in theatre 60 and older. Subsequent background research reflects on multigenerational accomplishments within historical American Theatre and The American Theatre Association discoveries regarding senior adult theatre. Further inquiries include reflections on The American Theatre Association of Senior Adult Theatre, Liz Lerman’s Dance Exchange of Maryland, Ohio State University Senior Adult Theatre programs, University of North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement, Montgomery County Maryland Senior Theatre program, University of Oregon, Art Age, the history of …

Critically And Creatively Engaging With Trauma-Informed Mental Health Research And Treatment Of Lgbtqia+ Communities As Expressive Arts Therapists: A Literature Review, Kelli Lavallee

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Expressive Arts Therapists are uniquely situated as both artists and mental health counselors working in psychological pedagogy rooted in systems of oppression. Given the arts-based approaches to the therapeutic relationship, it can be unethical to offer these approaches without acknowledgement of the ways in which the arts intersect with social justice, and justice is only viable if practitioners critically review the clinical mental health education they are consuming from the institutions they learn in, specifically trauma-informed mental health research assimilation and treatment approaches for Expressive Arts Therapists in training, practice, and education. A review of the literature in this paper …

'Once Famous In An Odd Way': Curiosity And Queerness In Late 19th-Century American Male Impersonation, S.C. Lucier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis depicts the emergence of one particular iteration of the popular female actor within 19^th century performance, the male impersonator, and identifies the ways in which this theatrical expression was related to and affected by similar amusements of the period. Public amusements of this period include a diversity of experiential entertainment that was primarily geared toward working and lower-middle class males. Included in these types of illegitimate theater is the variety hall. Male impersonators were the height of theatrical fashion not only in New York City, which is the focused landscape of this paper, but this type of …

“I’M Real I Thought I Told Ya”: Developing Critical Media Literacy Through U.S. Latinx Digital Media Representations, Solange T. Castellar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how audiences engage with U.S. Latinx media representations through the practice of critical media literacy. I interrogate how media consumers construct critical media literacy through interacting with U.S. Latinx figures on digital media platforms, particularly on the social-media app, Twitter, and the user-generated video content platform, YouTube. Throughout this thesis, I argue that users on these platforms who engage with U.S. Latinx pop culture figures, like Jennifer Lopez and Belcalis Almanzar (Cardi B), read, digest, and comprehend a variety of multimedia images, texts, or videos, and that this engagement becomes an accessible form of critical media literacy, …

Corporeal Archives Of Hiv/Aids: The Performance Of Relation, Jaime Shearn Coan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Corporeal Archives of HIV/AIDS: The Performance of Relation, explores how choreographers and theater artists in the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in New York City used time and space to involve their audiences experientially in the project of grieving and rebuilding in the midst of the temporal chaos of mass death and illness (crisis time). Refusing to portray HIV/AIDS as a discrete or singular phenomenon, these artists revealed how it intersected with every aspect of life, including artistic practice, thereby delinking their bodies from a singular association with pathology and death. Undertaking extensive archival research on the work …

Revisiting Juchitán: Witnessing An Indigenous Mexico Within The Latin American Archive, Michelle G. De La Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout archives of photographic collections, as one discovers the focused, artistic selective process of images that become part of a photographer’s collection, one must venture further and ask: will these choices be decisively remembered by an individual or collective audience or actively be dismissed, misunderstood, and denied presence? For my master’s thesis, I will be analyzing Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide’s photobook, Juchitán de las Mujeres, a photo-collection of the women-empowered indigenous society in Oaxaca, Mexico which erupted during Latin American photography’s prime in the 20th century, turning away from a deeply exoticized past and towards a celebration of Hispanism as …

Kinesthetic Language: A Dialect Of Kinesics, Terrill Suzanne Corletto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Human communication requires the disciplines regarding physical fitness, codified language, and the performing arts to overlap, and exist symbiotically. Within the realm of artistic performance, the three disciplines working together deliver a deliberate message in a way unique to performing artists. The general tendency to compartmentalize sports, communication, and the performing arts into their pigeonhole categories of Kinesiology, Linguistics, and Theatre Arts is impractical, particularly for performing artists simply because all of the disciplines are mutually dependent in the context of all kinesthetic communications.

The purpose of this paper is to define and discuss several concepts and the ways in …

Washing The River In Relation To Interpellation, Theatricality And Spectatorship, Patricia Miller

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Patricia Miller's Master of Fine Arts Thesis Paper

Planning An Effective Class Session, Carol Damgen, Carol L. Damgen

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This reflection is based on an educational assignment from my Intro to Theatre course at California State University, San Bernardino, April 2019.

As an educator, I am always interested in combining new techniques with tried and true approaches. My hope is twofold- enhance my students learning and keep me inspired.

The concept of a beginning, middle and end in all classes, provides structure for your students and keeps the pedagogy focused.

I incorporated the “I do, we do, you do” approach to support a well-balanced framework for the class period. This technique is a creative take on a beginning, middle …

Developing And Using Grading Guides, Checklists, And Rubrics, Carol Damgen, Carol L. Damgen

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This reflection is based on an educational assignment from my Intro to Theatre Arts course at California State University, San Bernardino, May 2019.

Providing students guidance when taking on a new assignment is essential. This direction may be achieved through a variety of sources: lectures, videos, examples of past students work, rubrics etc.

One approach, which may benefit the learner in the immediate and have a lasting impression, is teaching students to use the grading tool at hand (rubric/checklist) to improve assignments.

Following an example you have provided, the instructor will work with their students to use either a checklist …

Aligning Assessments With Course Outcomes, Carol Damgen, Carol L. Damgen

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

This reflection is based on an educational assignment from my Oral Interpretation of Literature course at California State University, San Bernardino, May 2019.

A consistent focus and goal for me as an educator is to align assessments with course outcomes.

The learning outcome for this class session focused on the cognitive approach- “students will develop the skills to communicate an oral interpretation of literature to an audience with believability, dramatic action and honesty.”

The intention of this class period was for my students to clearly understand the difference between acting, reading and oral interpretation. Oral Interpretation is a type of …

Performing Mystical Union In Mechthild Of Magdeburg’S The Flowing Light Of The Godhead, Jessi C. Piggott

Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality

Thirteenth-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg characterizes her revelations not as visions but as greetings, a term she uses to encompass gestures, verbal exchanges, and experiences perceived through multiple senses. Mechthild’s mysticism is thus best understood as a series of scenarios, the embodied nature of which cannot be fully contained by text. Using a performance studies approach, this paper identifies the traces of performance—textual prompts inextricable from their (explicit or implied, real or imagined) completion in physical and vocal acts—that can be found throughout Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead. How does Mechthild’s use of performance repertoires convey the mystical …

Bridging The Gap: Exploring Indian Classical Dances As A Source Of Dance/Movement Therapy, A Literature Review., Ruta Pai

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Indian Classical Dances are a mirror of the traditional culture in India and therefore the people in India find it easy to connect with them. These dances involve a combination of body movements, gestures and facial expressions to portray certain emotions and feelings. There are seven major Indian Classical Dances- Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Kathakali, Odissi, Kuchipudi, Manipuri and Mohiniattam. These dances possess three common aspects - Natya, Nritta and, Nritya. These aspects include several other elements which are at the core of these dances. This literature review focuses on three of those primary elements – Abhinaya, Gestures and Navarasas because they …

Theatre Crawl: A Series Of Community Engagement Projects, Anna Rich

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis will focus on Theatre Crawl, a devised and immersive theatre experience grounded in the techniques of drama therapy. Beginning as a creative outlet for drama therapy graduate students at Lesley University, Theatre Crawl has provided performance opportunities for students to exercise the creative and theatrical skills which initially brought many of them to the field of drama therapy. From April 2018 to January 2020, four Theatre Crawl events have been facilitated. All events originated from the belief that providing opportunities for drama therapists to engage in personal art-making is an essential practice for the field of drama therapy …