Дисертації з теми "Performing studies"

My dissertation, Performing Politics: Visibility, Identity, and Meaning-Making in Docudrama, challenges scholars' privileging of documentary theatre, which relies solely on primary source material such as trial transcripts, over docudrama, which allows a blending of primary sources with fiction. I focus on contemporary docudrama theatre practitioners in the United States, and specifically on productions that address issues of gender and sexuality. My work argues for the feminist potential of docudrama to disrupt hierarchies of knowledge and destabilize the primacy of the primary source. I demonstrate in Chapter One that in a docudrama like Paula Kamen's Jane: Abortion and the Underground, "reality" operates alongside the imaginative potential of fiction, thus providing practitioners and audiences a unique realm in which to tackle difficult and politically charged issues. My second chapter argues that the interdisciplinarity of documentary theatre can be a feminist ethnographic model for scholar-artists to employ ethical research methods for artistic engagement. Through a critical examination of E. Patrick Johnson's Sweet Tea, I argue that reflexivity and the post-show talkback are promising tools for foregrounding the practitioner's positionality and raising public consciousness. Finally, I challenge implications that documentary theatre is inherently pedagogical. Through an analysis of Dustin Lance Black's 8, I question the ways in which parroting primary source material reifies dominant ideologies, further entrenching cultural hierarchies. I conclude by considering other promising feminist attributes of docudrama, specifically the symbiotic potential of dialoging documentary scholarship with scholarship on queer temporalities.

This study assists in gathering narratives of lesbian lived experiences in the culturally conservative context of the Shenandoah Valley during the political shift toward marriage equality in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Framed in relational-cultural theory (Jordan, 2010), individual narratives document 5 Shenandoah Valley lesbian couples’ conversations about marriage among partners located between February 13, 2014, when U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen declared Virginia’s ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, and October 6, 2014, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the appeals, thereby removing the delays to legal same-sex marriage in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Conducting this inquiry during this cultural transition, the study’s focus is centered on contextual factors contributing to personal responses to prospective legal marriage. A poststructuralist feminist inquiry, the thematic analysis provides a contextualized snapshot in a time when political change is leading culture and invites readers to reflect and challenge their own discursively defined views. The thematic analysis revealed 7 key concepts for deeper consideration: relative belonging, caution, equal protections, the respectable same-sex couple, revisiting the relationship, family of origin, and personal ideology about marriage.

This study broadens the discourse of marriage equality by contributing lesbian-generated knowledge to the literature on the impact of the political shift toward marriage equality, and presents 5 distinct interview narratives. The project documents the tensions between assimilation and re-imagining marriage for lesbians performing heteronormativity as a facet of creating connection in a socially conservative culture. The impacts on the socially conservative culture includes the creation of new myths that reconfigure a separate gay culture in the paradigm of Foucault’s (1978a, 1978b) homosexual into an ambient community (Brown-Saracino, 2011) of the posthomosexual (Valverde, 2006) aligned with the emergent respectable same-sex couple (Valverde, 2006) and queer-blindness, an appropriation of the racism construct color-blindness aimed at queer sexualities rather than people of color. This project is significant to queer, feminist, and social justice scholars, activists and practitioners, lesbian couples considering marriage, and antigay activists whose collusion to subordinate this population has largely been an ideological fight against a disembodied other.

A1207

Many countries are suffering from Non Performing Loans (NPLs), which are defaulted loans that banks are unable to profit from. There are two general ways to secure NPLs. One is for banks to handle them themselves, which is common in Sweden where the NPL market is not so widespread. The alternative is for banks to auction them in public to Asset Management Companies (AMCs), which purpose is to dispose of the assets as profitably as possible. This procedure is used at the vast Italian NPL market.

Our purpose is to describe how these countries secure their NPLs from three aspects; the market, legal and financial aspect. We investigate how Svenska Handelsbanken (Handelsbanken) in Sweden and Morgan Stanley Real Estate Fund (MSREF) in Italy handle their NPLs. The study has been made through interviews at respective companies.

Our study reveals that historic actions of the government, credit culture and management decisions have shown to be crucial causes to the spread of NPLs. The Swedish legal system allows banks to secure their own defaulted loans in a fast and efficient way, while the Italian is more unwieldy and does not give banks any incentive to work out their NPLs. From a financial perspective, neither one nor the other method can be stated better since the companies operate in different fields. The main reasons that affect the financial result are the specific national conditions. Credit culture and legal system are two vital factors that benefit Handelsbanken while they obstruct MSREF. However, both Italian and Swedish AMCs respective banks must continue to review their routines and adaptation ability in order to excel in the future.

This thesis explores the ways in which Caucasian theatre makers can become more effective educators and directors in diverse student populations. By drawing attention to their “whiteness” and overcoming the fear of being implicated in the subjugation of these student populations, Caucasian theatre makers can instead embrace this implication and thereby transform classrooms and theatrical spaces from static appreciations of sovereignty and beauty, into platforms for resistance and revolt. In this thesis, I interrogate my own process in the direction of my multi-actor, undergraduate student production that was borne of the journey of the creation of my solo play entitled ANTIMAN. In this play, I implicate my family and our own racism and naiveté and the many challenges I faced in telling a story that explores such controversial subject matters as racism, antiblackness, colonialism, colonization, and settler-indigenous relations from my own white, male, heterosexual orientation. It is my hope that through this examination of both my failures and successes in this process of creating and directing ANTIMAN, in concert with the history of St. Croix, that I will articulate the present-day predicament of St. Croix in a manner that creates a space for discourse, resistance, and change.

This treatise will address the late twentieth-century and well-known Korean composer Chung Gil Kim's piano work Go Poong (Memories of Childhood; 1981) as a case study on how to make pedagogical use of works intended for performance. Go Poong is purely a programmatic composition intended to create a musical picture of four items in Korean cultural history including: a temple incense jar, a wooden shoe, a jade hairpin, and a paper window patch. The piece is also capable of functioning as an ideal pedagogical tool for intermediate and early-advanced players to experience technical exercises and compositional features that are a necessary part in the training of successful pianists. Repertoire useful either as preparation or as follow-up will be suggested.

The Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011, known colloquially by the shorthand "3.11," claimed at least 16,000 lives and caused extreme damage to landscape and property, also triggering one of the most serious nuclear crises in history. These events were of great social, economic, cultural, and political consequence and are therefore in need of study from multiple perspectives. Sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander, as a leading theorist of the model of cultural trauma, sees the work of "trauma drama" as crucial to the collective creation and negotiation of claims toward large-scale trauma. My dissertation seeks to investigate Alexander's insight more thoroughly. This dissertation seeks not only to broaden the field of view of collective trauma studies with a new case study, but to deepen the understanding of how performance functions as a part of the collective trauma creation process. To that end, this dissertation has a topical organization that analyzes space, time, and the body as nodes of intersection between post-3.11 anxiety sites and aspects of stage and film performance. Closely reading film and stage plays while examining the specific formal mechanisms by which they manipulate space, time, and the body in the aftermath of disaster, I argue that stage and film performances are especially powerful means through which to stake and (re)negotiate claims regarding trauma, particularly in response to the specifics of the 3.11 disaster. Inspired by the socially contextualized approach to performance studies pioneered by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, this dissertation accesses a wide array of cultural and theoretical sources, including the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, the temporal Deleuzian scholarship of D.N. Rodowick, and Erin Manning's theory on the political impact of touch, alongside trauma theory and a multiplicity of readings on the significance of 3.11.

This dissertation looks at critical interventions made by select San Francisco bay area choreographers and dance programmers interested in altering spectatorial norms for contemporary dance. Those selected have strategically employed food themes and materials in and as performance, simultaneously tapping into existing foodie ideology and redressing concerns about dwindling audiences for live dance performance in the twenty-first century. I argue that such efforts 1) bring to light subsumed race, class, and gender politics embedded in the trend towards "audience engagement," espoused by arts funders and dance makers alike as a necessary intervention for the survival of contemporary dance; and 2) open up discursive and experiential realms of possibility by favoring material, associative exchange, (re)awakening synesthetic sensory-perceptive capacities, inviting spectators to refigure themselves as co-creators in performance, and providing opportunities to reckon with exoticizing desires to enrich one's own culture by consuming another's.

In theoretically grouping these choreographies together I illustrate a spectrum of responses that clarify how food-oriented performance gatherings can operate not only as strategies for altering audience relations, but as sites for alternative knowledge production and fruitful commensal exchange. Such research draws from and intervenes in the overlapping fields of food studies, American studies, and performance and dance studies. This analysis is uniquely positioned amongst other work addressing the interstices between food and performance in its emphasis explicitly on Western concert dance. It also contributes significantly to the archives of an often overlooked San Francisco bay area dance community.

Methodologically I take a dance studies approach, generating choreographic analyses enabled through interviews with choreographers and dance programmers, my own work as witness/participant in the selected events, and archival research into feminist theories of performativity, anthropologies of the senses, contemporary theories of embodiment and select dance and theatre scholarship from the 1800s to the present. Throughout I prioritize the embodied experience of spectatorship, highlighting how contemporary corporeality is shaped by shifting inclusions and exclusions of various peoples and practices, capitalist economic models, the pervasive reach of readily-available digitized media, and both dominant and alternative systems of knowledge production.

A live nude female performer can occupy a powerful identity equal to a man because she willingly places herself in front of an audience. She commits to this state of profound vulnerability as a means of gaining ownership of her body that men by virtue of their power in society take for granted. The female body occupies physical space, unlike how a body image seen on a television or in a magazine does. The actuality of the live female nude creates a transformation from the purely sexualized body to an authentic female nude body. This authentic female nude body, via her control of her physicality, is a “loud” and often rejected body. The acknowledgement of her authenticity is an acknowledgement of her power and this is common ground on which the female audience member and performer can relate intersubjectively. On the surface, it seems the most effective solution to eliminating objectification and this obstruction of the female body would be to take focus away from her body. Yet paradoxically, female subjects have altered these culturally shaped identity norms of objectification through nude performance, liberating the hyper-sexualized projections attached to the female body and replacing them with symbols of innocence, creativity and power.

The lives and careers of the three women composers Marion Bauer (1882-1955), Miriam Gideon (1906-1996), and Vivian Fine (1913-2000) spanned more than a century. Each wrote works for viola and piano, including Bauer's Sonata for Viola and Piano, op. 22, Gideon's Sonata for Viola and Piano, and Fine's Lieder for Viola and Piano. Together, these composers' careers encompass a number of important trends in the professional development of the twentieth century woman composer in the United States.

Women composers were hindered in their advancement and acknowledgement for a number of reasons. One of these was a lack of "female tradition", the absence of an existing community of successful women composers to look to as examples. Another was the "female affiliation complex", the idea that female professionals struggle to look toward their predecessors as models because the female tradition is devalued. First, this document will explore the lives and influences of Marion Bauer, Miriam Gideon, and Vivian Fine, aiming to contribute to a better understanding of how "female tradition" and the "female affiliation complex" affected these composers' lives. Second, each work for viola and piano will undergo theoretical analysis focusing on goal-directed linearity. Goal-directed linearity is an issue of interest to performers and will encourage a deeper understanding of the works in question, fostering their further performance and dissemination.

Wuhan Han Opera Theater (WHOT, formerly Han Opera) is a 400-year old regional opera based in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, in China. WHOT’s recent designation as a public institution under China’s neoliberal creative economy initiative to enter the global market has necessitated its transformation from a cultural institution ( wenhua jigou) into a creative industry ( wehua chanye). As such, WHOT must now create adaptive strategies, alter traditional conventions of performance, infrastructure, education and community presence, reconstitute traditional social functions at the national level, and most importantly, manage a relationship with the government that is entirely novel for both. In the summer of 2016, WHOT participated in two government-led projects: Opera into Campuses and the Chinese National Arts Fund. These programs were the focus of my ethnographic fieldwork, to identify possible effects of the creative economy initiative on a traditional musical institution. Specifically, inquiry was made as to whether and how creative musical and organizational adaptations were being decided, implemented and executed, and as to how the outcomes of these adaptations were being evaluated. Despite using an ethnographic approach, findings from the preliminary study were found to be much more broadly generalizable and applicable across disciplines than expected. As a result, this thesis makes the following arguments: for modernization of an institution of traditional music to be effective, a relationship must exist whereby the transitioning institution is given creative license to generate continued socio-cultural productivity through its creative class (“talent”) in joint cooperation with, rather than dependence on, government agencies. The goal must be to revitalize rather than simply preserve such an institution, and to avoid cultural attrition of unique musical qualities of the institution.