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Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
The South is a region of mystery, of tradition, of shifting identity. As a cultural region within the United States, the South has always defined (and redefined) itself in such a way that it remains distinctive from, even oppositional to...
This thesis explores the links between early twentieth-century haute couture and the Italian avant-garde movement, Futurism. Although a definite cause-to-effect relationship cannot necessarily be assigned, the artistic and aesthetic...
Repossessing Spectatorship in Immersive Theatre and Virtual Reality proposes that material constructions borne by the ambitions of “immersion” do not fulfill their intended purpose: total passage to the reality of the performance. These...
The historical, national, and academic values of the Icelandic Eddic poems—or Elder Edda—have received much scholarly attention in the past. Yet, there is another aspect of these poems that deserves more exploration and consideration:...
When aerial performance became popular in the 20th century, critics reported the confusing gender appearance of its performers. Muscular women were described as mannish and Amazonian while men were observed to be graceful and feminine. I...
Perhaps no one has written musicals that address social, political, and personal issues so effectively and purposefully as Stephen Sondheim. He positions his audience to identify with his characters by placing them in every day...
Contemporary Ambulatory Theatre and Audience Agency explores recent productions that encourage individual audience members to move through large, public spaces in new ways, developing a sense of ambulatory agency as they explore their...
This thesis' focus lies deep within the Filipino immigrant's "home" in the U.S. and offers an investigation of how different Filipino/Filipino-American homes in the texts examined challenge and confront the seeming viability and...
The character of Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello is most often portrayed as a naïve, passive, all-trusting, all-loving young woman. Not only is this portrayal exceptionally flat, it also reinforces the naturalized gender norms of...
Only written from 1660-1714, intrigue plays provide a unique window into the social, political and theatrical milieu of early modern England. They were more successful than many plays now considered necessary to university curricula, yet...
Enter the Man is a study of representations of sexual violence that focuses on the trope of male/male rape as it has gained prominence as a linguistic and cultural metaphor in USAmerican, British, and Canadian society. This...
This dissertation examines the background, production history, and outreach projects of the New WORLD Theater (NWT) in terms of the NWT's usefulness as a model for diversifying theatre programs and, more importantly, for utilizing the...
Dora is a multiplicitous being who transcends time, space, and reality like a cubist painting. A fictional, literary character based on a once living woman, Ida Bauer, Dora is an amalgamation of Ida and of Freud, who published the sole...
In this thesis, I examine how two activist groups--the Electronic Disturbance Theater and Anonymous--have transposed Thoreauvian Civil Disobedience for the virtual realm to explore how this shift of performance space also shifts...
This dissertation illuminates how fear of the undead constitutes an integral part of the surviving ancient Greek tragedies, while also yielding dramaturgical research that can revivify contemporary productions. Following a survey of...
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States saw drastic shifts in the life of the nation, particularly with reforms centered on and affected by women. This project asserts that throughout this period, women in...
From 1993 until 1999, I worked with my colleagues at Florida State University to develop a series of workshops and presentations to advance some new approaches to teacher training for graduate teaching assistants. In these workshops, we...
Nigeria's pre-colonial, British colonial and postcolonial history colors every aspect of its art and literature. The values and practices of the cultural groups that inhabit this country have been in flux since the beginning of the...
My thesis argues that a critical study of the gay themes and issues in Finn’s work – both obvious and otherwise latent – elucidates historically specific and significant queer texts and subtexts, along with queer modes of reception....
During the 1990s, a sudden outpouring of new musical talent flooded both Broadway and off-Broadway. Dubbed at the time by both critics and scholars as creating New Theater Music, these challenging composers were and continue to be drawn...
Arthur Kopit's plays express what I believe to be the dominant cultural anxiety of the latter half of the 20th century: the conflict between the human need for order and meaning and our existence in a chaotic and fragmented world. The...
Using Carlson's theory that text can be considered "haunted" in the ways it recycles material already familiar to the audience, I suggest that Romanian playwrights writing after the year 2000 are highlighting the historical struggles...
This dissertation seeks to create a vocabulary and a theoretical framework with which to examine the political implications of nonlinear, non-realistic depictions of time in recent English history plays. I explore plays by Howard Barker, ...
This thesis takes as its foundational assumption that televised sporting events are not mere documentations of games as they unfold, but carefully constructed performances whose conventions are geared to its ideal spectator â the white...
Locating American Masculinity with(out)in the Male: Sam Shepard's Kicking a Dead Horse, Neil Labute's Reasons to Be Pretty, and Sarah Ruhl's Late: A Cowboy Song
This thesis focuses on the representation of the crisis of masculinity and how that crisis, real or imagined, both calls for and automatically creates a renegotiation of the masculine identity. Specifically, it interrogates three...
Inspired by the plays and performance art pieces of many Latina/o and African American artists who seek to resurrect indigenous beliefs as a method of political resistance, this thesis seeks to imagine possibilities for male individuals...
Throughout her time as a member of the famed Provincetown Players, for which she penned three successful plays, playwright Djuna Barnes simultaneously wrote twelve short closet dramas, none of which saw the light of the stage. Despite...
By employing an organic theory that views theatre as a living body, this thesis explores how theatre has adapted to pandemics throughout history. It suggests that theatre, like the human body and mind, operates as a complex adaptive...
My thesis explores the artistic effects of two different kinds of financial investment on Broadway. I define and then trace the rise of what I term the "corporate producer" over the past twenty years, then document the fall of the...
Measure for Measure is a complex play that deals with many socially charged issues of morality, religion and sexuality. In particular, the play emphasizes the issues of marriage, gender roles, and religious identity. Through an...
To combat rising levels of juvenile delinquency in Buffalo, New York, in the 1930s, the Federal Theatre Project created the Crime Prevention Serial. The multi-episode series follows the trials and tribulations of Johnnie Smith, a hard...
The Hill Cumorah Pageant is a large-scale Mormon cultural performance that has the power both to identify the primary Church doctrines and to transform those who witness and participate in its performance. The pageant performance uses...
Disneyland theme park's significance draws from its development as the first themed park in conjunction with its position as representative of a 1950s suburban American psyche. In attending a themed space, a visitor supplements and...
Edward Gorey (1925–2000) is primarily known as an enigmatic artist, author, and personality. All told, Gorey wrote and illustrated over one hundred books during his lifetime and designed book covers for countless others. He has an...
This thesis explores Weill and Green's Johnny Johnson, produced by the Group Theatre in 1936. The play is an example of gestic theatre, first seen in the works of Brecht and Weill and continued by Weill after his arrival in the United...
Space has long been a subject of theatrical theory, but rarely do scholars examine time. More specifically, what happens when playwrights break the conventional rules of time and space to present impossibilities on the stage, such as...
In this dissertation I examine mainstream representations of gay men in theatre and television between 1998 and 2006 in order to reveal how these texts contain within themselves both assimilationist and queerly rebellious narrative...
This thesis focuses on the intersection of nationalism and secularism. Specifically, I studysema, the whirling ritual ofMevlevis, and its representations in Turkey. I analyze Turkey's dissemination of a national image therefore its...
This dissertation examines the aging woman trope and the idea of the "trauma and aging" in theatre and performance. I argue that the pervasiveness of negative imagery associated with aging women as well as decline narratives of age...
I believe that acting theories are theatrical performances of societies, and a dominant acting theory is a performance of specific systems of power that control and regulate a culture. By observing the rules of a dominant acting theory, ...
This multidisciplinary dissertation progresses on several levels. The first cause is to examine the brief history of the Chautauqua Lake Camp Meeting (1871-1875), a religious organization preceding the Chautauqua Institution at its site...
This thesis focuses on Sharon Bridgforth's performance pieces. Examining Bridgforth's performance texts, a more complicated and--at times-- contradictory way of approaching subjectivity emerges, challenging ideas of cultural authenticity...
The Best There Ever Was, the Best There Ever Will Be: Michael Jordan, Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Candace Parker, and Performances of Surrogation in Basketball
The Best There Ever Was, The Best There Ever Will Be operates at the intersections of sports and performance studies. This dissertation builds upon Joseph Roach's concept of surrogation, first outlined in 1996's Cities of the Dead, with...
This thesis addresses two plays and their entanglement with ecological crises in the United States and abroad, specifically Mexico and Canada: Chantal Bilodeau’s Sila and Victor Cazares’ Ramses Contra Los Monstruos: Salmas para el fin...
Participants at today's Rocky Mountain rendezvous dress in pre-1840 clothing and gather to camp in period shelters and engage in an assortment of history-based activities. These encampments, which last several days, evoke the Rocky...
The "Total Work" and Political Implications of the Open Program of the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards: Shuttling between the Workcenter and Our "World in Crisis"
Theatre scholars and practitioners alike recognize the contributions of Jerzy Grotowski. His avant-garde, experimental, site-specific, immersive, participatory, ritual, and laboratory theatre research, signal turning points in world...
U.S. and Western media depict the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s as one of the most horrific ethnic conflicts since the Holocaust. The Yugoslav Civil War developed while Yugoslavia was attempting to adjust to new definitions of state...
This thesis focuses on the staging of anxiety in modern American theatre. Specifically, I explore theatrical representations of anxiety around three events that shifted people's perception: 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the 2016...
Theatre educators have an obligation to the theatre arts, but more importantly, they have an obligation to educate their students. All too often, school arts programs are deemed less important than the imperative subjects of reading and...
This thesis is focused on the intersections of queer theory and violence. Specifically, I look at how acts of violation define and inform queer subjectivity in theatrical representation. Many theatre artists and practitioners use...
Some of the material in is restricted to members of the community. By logging in, you may be able to gain additional access to certain collections or items. If you have questions about access or logging in, please use the form on the Contact Page.
