Matching Items (50)
Description
This dissertation is both creative and scholarly, engaging in the technique of "narrative scholarship," an increasingly accepted technique within the field of ecocriticism. The project is framed by my experiences with Spanish and Latino actors as well as activists involved with the 15-M movement in and around Madrid. It takes a "material ecocritical" approach, which is to say that it treats minds, spirits and language as necessarily "bodied" entities, and creates an absolute union between beings and the matter that constructs them as well as their habitat. I apply the lens of Jesper Hoffmeyer's Biosemiotics, which claims that life is at its most essential levels a communicative process. In other words, I will explore how "all matter is 'storied' matter," as well as how the "semiosphere," which is an important concept in biosmiotics, signaling a semiotic environment that predicts and defines all biological bodies/life, the human, the plant and the animal as beings who are made of and involved in semiotic activity, can serve as a basis for union amongst all bodies and provide a model of cooperation rooted in "storytelling." My project aims to embody what Wendy Wheeler describes as ecocriticism's, "syntheses between the sciences and the humanities" It is my strong opinion that creative writing has the power to offer the general public insight into the reasons why new research in biosemiotics is so important to the work that activists are doing to raise awareness of how humans can live responsibly on the only planet that is our home. This will help readers of creative writing and cultural studies scholars understand why they ought to embrace science, especially in literary and cultural studies, as a path to better understanding of the role of the humanities in an increasingly scientifically oriented world.
ContributorsDay, Timothy (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Gutkind, Lee (Committee member) / Flys-Junquera, Carmen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
“Digital Shakespeares” is a study of the ways that Shakespearean theaters and festivals are incorporating digital media into their marketing and performance practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The project integrates Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and digital media and internet studies to explore how digital media are integral to the practices of four North American and British Shakespearean performance institutions: the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Stratford (Canada) Festival. Through an analysis of their performance and marketing practices, I argue that digital media present an opportunity to reevaluate concepts of performance and relevance, and explore the implications such reevaluations have on the future of Shakespearean performance. The project addresses institutions’ digital media practices through the lens of four concepts—access, marketing, education, and performance—to conclude that theaters and festivals are finding it necessary to adopt practices from multiple media to stay viable in today’s online attention economy. The first chapter considers the issue of access, exploring the influence of social media on audience-institution interactions as theaters and festivals establish online presences on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Chapter two argues that theaters and festivals incorporate digital media into their outreach through poaching the practices of other media and cultural institutions as they strive to become relevant to their online audiences by appealing through the newness of digital media. Chapter three focuses on two digital educational outreach programs, the Globe’s Playing Shakespeare and the RSC’s Young Shakespeare Nation, to understand how each institution seeks to employ digital media to make their educational audiences life-long lovers of Shakespearean performance. Throughout the final chapter, I analyze potential models for incorporating digital media into Shakespearean performance, both in performances that bring digital media onto the stage and in performances that use social media as the platform for dramatic performance. Ultimately, I argue digital media have become an integral part of the practices Shakespearean performance institutions use to establish and sustain their cultural relevance with modern audiences, while raising questions regarding the implications of those practices in an increasingly globalized world.
ContributorsWay, Geoffrey (Author) / Thompson, Ayanna (Thesis advisor) / Lehmann, Courtney (Committee member) / Ryner, Bradley (Committee member) / Fox, Cora (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
It’s Not That Simple: A Complex Journey of an MFA Applied Project discusses the experience of graduate student, Molly W. Schenck. Schenck’s applied project, It’s Not That Simple, was an interdisciplinary dance theatre performance piece that challenges rape culture on college campuses. While the focus of the applied project was this performance, it was the obstacles and highlights that were related to the project that made the journey memorable. This paper will discuss the history and evolution of It’s Not That Simple, the creative process, the research, the trajectory of the project, and reflections on the journey.
ContributorsSchenck, Molly W (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Kaplan, Robert (Committee member) / Sterling, Pamela (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This document analyzes the use of the Principles of Design within the applied project It’s My Party, a multimedia dance theatre production, as a means to address and overcome the stigmatization of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV). Through the orchestration of dance, music, props, acting, video, and spoken word, this interdisciplinary work investigates how these production elements synthesize into a transformative theatrical experience for audiences. Outlined in this document is the eight month design process. The process included concept design, assessing, processing, customizing the message, script development, rehearsals, and video production, and concluded with an evening length production. Analyzed through the structural narrative of The Hero’s Journey, this autobiographic work details the author’s HIV-positive (HIV+) coming out story from a restorative narrative perspective. By addressing the subject of HIV from a contemporary point-of-view, this project strives to reencode the troubling associations affiliated with HIV with an empowered and hopeful understanding.
ContributorsAlvarez, Ricardo (Author) / Schupp, Karen (Thesis advisor) / Magenta, Muriel (Committee member) / Rajko, Jessica (Committee member) / Standley, Eileen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
In May 2014, The Encyclopedia Show: Chicago performed its last volume. Like all others before, the Show was a collection of performances devised by artists, musicians, poets and playwrights all performing various subtopics surrounding a central theme, taken from “an actual Encyclopedia.” The final show was Volume 56 for Chicago; the founding city ended their six year run with an amassed body of work exploring topics ranging from Wyoming to Alan Turing, Serial Killers to Vice Presidents.
Perhaps more impressive than the monthly performance event in Chicago is the fact that the show has been “franchised” to organizers and performers in at least seventeen cities. Franchise agreements mandated that for at least the first year of performance, topics were to follow Chicago’s schedule, thus creating an archive of Shows around the world, each that started with Bears, moved to The Moon, onto Visible Spectrum of Color, and so on.
Now that the Chicago show has ended, I wonder what will happen to the innovative format for community performance that has reached thousands of audience members and inspired hundreds of individual performances across the globe in a six-year period.
This project, like much of my own work, has two aims: first, to provide the first substantive history of The Encyclopedia Show for archival purposes; and second, to explore whether this format can be used to achieve the goals of “interdisciplinarity” in the classroom. In an effort to honor my own interests in multiple academic disciplines and in an attempt to capture the structural and performative “feel” of an Encyclopedia Show, this dissertation takes the shape of an actual Encyclopedia Show. The overarching topic of this “show” is: Michelle Hill: The Doctoral Process. In an actual Encyclopedia Show, subtopics would work to explore multiple perspectives and narratives encompassed by the central topic. As such, my “subtopics” are devoted to the roles I have played throughout my doctoral process: historian, academic, teacher. A fourth role, performer, works to transition between the sections and further create the feel of a “breakage” from a more traditional dissertation.
Perhaps more impressive than the monthly performance event in Chicago is the fact that the show has been “franchised” to organizers and performers in at least seventeen cities. Franchise agreements mandated that for at least the first year of performance, topics were to follow Chicago’s schedule, thus creating an archive of Shows around the world, each that started with Bears, moved to The Moon, onto Visible Spectrum of Color, and so on.
Now that the Chicago show has ended, I wonder what will happen to the innovative format for community performance that has reached thousands of audience members and inspired hundreds of individual performances across the globe in a six-year period.
This project, like much of my own work, has two aims: first, to provide the first substantive history of The Encyclopedia Show for archival purposes; and second, to explore whether this format can be used to achieve the goals of “interdisciplinarity” in the classroom. In an effort to honor my own interests in multiple academic disciplines and in an attempt to capture the structural and performative “feel” of an Encyclopedia Show, this dissertation takes the shape of an actual Encyclopedia Show. The overarching topic of this “show” is: Michelle Hill: The Doctoral Process. In an actual Encyclopedia Show, subtopics would work to explore multiple perspectives and narratives encompassed by the central topic. As such, my “subtopics” are devoted to the roles I have played throughout my doctoral process: historian, academic, teacher. A fourth role, performer, works to transition between the sections and further create the feel of a “breakage” from a more traditional dissertation.
ContributorsHill, Michelle (Author) / Etheridge Woodson, Stephani (Thesis advisor) / Linde, Jennifer (Committee member) / Early, Jessica (Committee member) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In the United States, we tend to understand linguistic systems as separate and autonomous, and by this understanding, bilinguals are people who speak two different languages and switch between them. This understanding of bilingualism, however, does not reflect the reality of the way many bilinguals use language. Rather than “code-switch” between two languages, sociolinguists posit that many bilinguals understand their language as a single linguistic system, and choose different elements of that system in different situations, a process termed, “translanguaging.” Translanguaging provides an alternative framework for examining bilingual language as an ideological system in plays, particularly plays which use translanguaged dialogue to describe the experiences of young people who dwell on and cross borders, a category of plays I term, “Border Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA).” This descriptive study utilizes grounded theory and close reading theoretically grounded in border studies and sociolinguistic theory to determine what roles Spanish and English play in Border TYA as autonomous systems, and as pieces of a new, translanguaged system. Playwrights of Border TYA u translanguaging as a structural metaphor for cultural negotiation to examine identity, belonging, and borders. Translanguaging provides subaltern characters a process for communicating their experiences, examining their identities, and describing encounters with borders in their own unique linguistic system. Border TYA, however, does not exclusively translanguage. Border TYA also incorporates monolingual dialogue and translation, and in these instances the languages, Spanish and English, function autonomously as tools for teaching audience members to recognize vocabulary and cultural experience.
ContributorsSchildkret, Elizabeth (Author) / Etheridge Woodson, Stephani (Thesis advisor) / Underiner, Tamara (Committee member) / Garcia, Lorenzo (Committee member) / Bernstein, Katherine (Committee member) / Hughes, Erika (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The purpose of this study is to examine how community-based youth theater ensembles create conditions for youth to practice cultural agency and to develop a sense of themselves as valuable resources in a broader community development process. The researcher employed a qualitative methodology, using a critical and interpretive case study approach which enabled her to document and analyze three community-based youth theaters in New York City: Find Your Light, a playwriting/performance program for youth associated with the NYC shelter system; viBeStages, an all-girl youth ensemble (part of viBe Theater Experience or "viBe"); and Ifetayo Youth Ensemble (IYE), a multi-age ensemble for youth of African descent living in Flatbush and its surrounding neighborhoods (part of Ifetayo Cultural Arts Academy). All three programs are youth-based performing arts ensembles with a mission-driven focus on positive youth development and community building; they are long-term engagements, active in their communities for at least three years; and they are all part of arts organizations that value artistry as their principle means of impacting communities. All of the young artists involved in these programs participated in a sustained process of creating original performance pieces based on stories relevant to their lives and/or the lives of their communities. This dissertation examines how, through their playmaking processes, they began to identify, critique and experiment with commonly held beliefs about human agency and interaction, to activate and embellish the symbolic systems and repertoires that make up their communities, and to practice new ways of coming together. Through their use of artistic practices, the youth developed a sense of themselves as viable shapers of their communities and, in varying degrees, also used other aspects of culture (values, rituals, traditions, aspirations and the arts) to make meaning, contribute, and shape their cultural locations, offering new forms, symbols, structural models and imaginings.
ContributorsIkemire, Heather (Author) / Underiner, Tamara (Thesis advisor) / Catlaw, Thomas (Committee member) / Woodson, Stephani E (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
Since the 1920's, the school musical has been an important event in American high schools and in the lives of students. This study begins with a condensed history of the American musical theatre, into focus on selected shows' value as potential high school repertoire. Review of literature included studies of high school musical theatre, production guides and related materials, and writings both against and in favor of musicals at the high school level. The school musical is usually undertaken as an extra-curricular activity led by performing arts faculty. This study focuses on the preparation, responsibilities, and attitudes of high school music educators toward musical theatre direction. Musical direction is defined as teaching the vocal music, and teaching and leading the instrumental music of the production where applicable. A researcher-designed survey was distributed to Arizona music educators in schools that included grade 12. The response rate was 71%. Questions included items designed to assess the pervasiveness of musical theatre productions, the roles and responsibilities of music educators, and their preparation for those roles. Additional Likert-type questions comprised an inventory measuring attitudes toward musical theatre productions. Results of the survey showed that musicals are produced in 80% of Arizona high schools, and music faculty are expected to lead at least the musical aspects of these productions. Although 62% report that they learned about teaching musical theatre on the job, and that they received no other preparation, 70% report a large amount of personal enjoyment and fulfillment from their work in musical theatre. The mean attitude score for positive feelings about work in musical theatre was found to be significantly higher for choral teachers than instrumental teachers. The primary implications of the study are the need for better preparation and in-service opportunities for music educators in musical theatre pedagogy.
ContributorsDavey, Debra Jo (Author) / Stauffer, Sandra (Thesis advisor) / Bush, Jeffrey (Thesis advisor) / Reber, William (Committee member) / Schmidt, Margaret (Committee member) / Sullivan, Jill (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
The purpose of this study was to explore current pedagogical approaches of undergraduate directing curricula in selected U.S. institutions of higher learning. Building on the work of Clifford Hamar and Anne Fliotsos, the thesis builds a foundation for further study of contemporary directing pedagogy. Fourteen course syllabi were collected voluntarily from members of The Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and served at the primary source material. They were interpreted and analyzed qualitatively for components that identified the methods and philosophies of the instructor and/or institution. From these syllabi, the researcher found 11 "skill categories" which cover all potential skills and bodies of information that, according to the data, a director should master. The categories are: (1) Script and Performance Analysis; (2) Directorial Techniques and Methods; (3) Production Practices; (4) Role and History of the Director; (5) Actor Training; (6) Technical Knowledge; (7) Personal Growth, Expression, and Vision; (8) Collaboration; (9) Communication; (10) Directorial Criticism; and (11) Storytelling. The categories fall on a spectrum ranging from practical based "knowledges" to skills based in individual resources and artistry, termed "abilities." Once these categories were established, the researcher examined two case study institutions: State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) and University of New Hampshire (UNH). The researcher collected public information concerning the guiding philosophies, financial profile, and curricula for both universities. From this data, combined with the 11 categories, the researcher found that the "personality" of the institution was reflected in the pedagogical approach of their respective directing courses. In the case of UB, a research-oriented institution had a production-focused directing course. UNH, with its Liberal Arts philosophy that promotes personal exploration, had a directing course that emphasized the artistic resources of the individual. Most importantly, this work creates a foundation from which future studies can be built. Broader and deeper analysis at a national level can now be approached with a framework of evaluation and analysis, leading ever closer to an understanding of the art and craft of directing.
ContributorsWelch, Peter Benjamin (Author) / Saldana, Johnny (Thesis advisor) / Gharavi, Lance (Committee member) / Partlan, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
DescriptionThe Culminating Graduate Works of David Dudo.
ContributorsDudo, David James (Author) / Sterling, Pamela (Thesis advisor) / Mcmahon, Jeffery (Committee member) / Partlan, Bill (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010