Theatre and Performance Studies

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/27647

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Open Access
Accessing the Underground Forest: Exploring Confidence, Release, and Artistic Integrity in the Three Sisters
(2017-07-27) Wayne-Phillips, Hannah Ella; Armstrong, Eric
With this dissertation, I have investigated the relationship between the unconscious and accessing rich detailed sources as an actor. I have established a methodology for addressing physical and psychological blocks in order to find confidence, detail, specificity, and artistic integrity in performance. I have applied this methodology to my performance of Masha in "Three Sisters" by Anton Chekhov, which was part of the 2016-2017 Theatre@York Season. I have also written an extensive character, period, and author analysis of Masha and Anton Chekhov. During rehearsals and performances of "Three Sisters" I wrote journal entries documenting my process and the application of my methodology to the role of Masha.
Open Access
Align and Crumble: Internally Falling Towards Authentic Behaviour in Acting and an Investigation of Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters
(2017-07-27) Rossoff, Matthew Robert; Lampert, Paul
The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how to internally fall towards authentic behaviour and apply this means to the preparation and performance of the role of Doctor Chebutykin in Anton Chekhovs Three Sisters. The primary area of exploration will be to channel full body awareness by releasing the pelvic bowl and stimulating the enteric nervous system. Areas of investigation include Philip Shepherds New Self New World: Recovering Our Senses in the Twenty-first Century; Moksha Yoga practice and application; Erika Batdorfs approach to interoceptive awareness and emotional connection; Paul Lamperts twenty-six questions to character development; Kristin Linklaters progression of vocal exploration and warm up; Allyson McMackons teachings of Grotowskis river work; and Sage Willows coaching of American Sign Language. The thesis will contain supporting research including research and analysis of Russian history at the turn of the twentieth century, the Moscow Art Theatre, Chekhov and his play Three Sisters, the character of Doctor Chebutykin, as well as some performance history. It will conclude with a selection of journal entries from the rehearsal and performance of the production.
Open Access
An Historiographical Reading of the Founding of Canada's National Theatre School
(2016-09-20) Tumarkin, Pola Rachel; Rubin, Donald H.
On November 2, 1960, French director and teacher Michel Saint-Denis declared the National Theatre School of Canada (NTS)the nations first professional theatre training institutionopen, and the Canadian theatreits English and French traditionsentered a new stage of professional development. But how did it get there? This historiographical study of the NTS founding is the first thorough examination of the complex process through which the only bi-cultural, co-lingual school in Canada was established, from first inklings in the nineteenth century to its official opening in 1960. This dissertation utilizes Thomas Postlewaits four-part model of historiographical theory to explore and document the various contexts which helped to shape the ways in which the School was structured, operated, and received by the public at the time it opened. While the National Theatre School of Canada is clearly recognized as an important part of the professional Canadian theatre, it is argued here that the details of the Schools foundingeven nowremain contradictory, forcing the discussion to focus more on the results of the school after it officially opened rather than on the ideas which created it. After half a century, it seems time to articulate, at the very least, those founding debates, adding them to Canadas theatre history and giving them relevance in todays increasingly diverse Canada.
Open Access
Animating Performance: Tracing Venices Resonant Diva Attraverso il Palco e la Soglia
(2020-08-11) Wier, Claudia Rene; Bernardi, Guillaume
Seventeenth-century Venetian operatic divas pioneered a new social identity for women both onstage, as virtuosic opera singers, and as independent professionals in Venice. They accomplished this partly in prototypical commercial opera houses. From such spaces, the sounds of their voices and the memory of their performances in cross-dressed, madwomen, and warrior woman roles spilled out on the cutting edge of performance to spread the novel form across Europe. Their performance transgressed normative gender codes and is one way early modern divas overcame misogynist perceptions. They exceeded and reworked accepted norms performatively while modelling independent agency to pioneer a new profession for women. In this project, I trace the reception of the early modern divas sonic transmissions and her transition across the stage, out the door of the theatres sounding architectural space, and into the city. I apply the analytic lens of performativity as employed in gender and performance studies scholarship to analyze the social impact of the early operatic divas performance of self. This interdisciplinary approach knits together material historical data, formal text, and music readings, with performance theory. In this, I examine the music and texts of five performance scores to understand how composer Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) and his librettist collaborators tailored iconic warrior woman roles to fit the voices of lead women singers. To comprehend the reception of the diva, I examine the career of Anna Renzi (c.1620-c.1661) and her riveting performances in La finta pazza (1641) and La Deidamia (1645) contextualized in Venetian cultural history and the performance events in Teatro Novissimo. I place Renzis work into a performance genealogy from commedia dellArte to the dramma per musica. Finally, I theorize how Renzis sonic emissions and vibrant performances resonated socially as an energetic electric force transgressing the librettists texts and the composers musical composition to effect society and the status of women in it. With theoretical approaches centered on embodiment, gender, reception, celebrity status, and sound, I work to discover remnant traces of ephemeral presence.
Open Access
Archiving the "Sweet" Candy-Loving Matinee Girl: Fashion, Confectionaries, and Fan Scrapbooking in Urban American Culture, 1880-1915
(2018-08-27) Mendonca, Marlene Ramos; Schweitzer, Marlis Erica
A product of Broadway theatre and celebrity culture in New York City, the matinee girla fashionable city dweller and a theatre-loving girlfirst emerged in popular media at the end of the nineteenth century. She was both a fictional figure in the popular media as well as a young female fan that reflected the tensions of a changing society. In contextualizing the matinee girl within girlhood studies, theatre history, performance studies and fandom, I examine how this modern girlfrom a wage-earning immigrant to a middle-class college studentco-existed in public spaces and disrupted power structures and class lines. Chapter one questions how gender was performed and negotiated by the matinee girl through exploring the ways she used temporal and urban spaces to revise and reproduce identities for modern girls between 1880-1915. In using fashion as a tool, she destabilized notions of class and gender. In addition, chapter two explores newspaper articles, postcards, playbills and advertisements to understand the relationship between matinee girls and the consumption of sweets, including chocolate bonbons and ice-cream soda. My research pays particular attention to the ways in which girls destabilized and challenged the categories to which they were assigned, from chewing loudly in public to purchasing their own boxes of chocolates, a symbol of romantic heteronormative relationships. In examining the witty and provocative The Matinee Girl columns, two decade-long columns that were published in Winnipegs Town Topics by Harriet Walker and the New York Dramatic Mirror by an anonymous author, chapter three explores how these texts were used to fight against gender stereotypes. In doing so, these columns provided autonomy for girls and highlighted the labour and housing issues affecting single, wage-earning women during the period. Chapter four questions how female fandom was conceptualized and performed by matinee girls by exploring scrapbooks and fan art created by fans of matinee idol sensation, Maude Adams. Finally, I draw on the idea of place to understand how girls have been, both then and now, active producers of culture. From making noise to being actively present in public, the matinee girl, in particular, has helped to cultivate a culture of female fandom and shaped modern girlhood.
Open Access
Attuning to Sites of Violence: Performing Spectral Relationality Across North America
(2024-11-07) Webber-Heffernan, Shalon; Levin, Laura
Attuning to Sites of Violence: Performing Spectral Relationality Across North America foregrounds the agentic liveliness of disappearance and focuses on often unseen elements as active collaborators in non-forgetting. This dissertation argues that disappearance itself can perform and reveal significant insights if attuned to. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this research navigates theatre and performance studies, contemporary visual art, embodied practice, and critical memory studies. Methodologically, it includes conversational interviews with artists and community activists, personal observations, archival research, and site visit analyses. The dissertation emphasizes a relational and intuitive method, drawing on associative poetic reflections and speculative knowledge sharing, alongside an auto-theoretical approach that intertwines personal narrative with critical analysis. The writing adopts a curatorial perspective, combining case studies and ideas that might not otherwise converge, creating connections and interactions that provide new insights. By attuning to site as performer, the dissertation expands ideas of site specificity. It weaves together artistic practices and theoretical frameworks to reveal how disappearances, erasures, and sites of violence communicate and relate across space and time. This work underscores the importance of attuning to the spectral and relational dimensions of violence and ecological kinship, advocating for a more just and interconnected world. Attuning to Sites of Violence acknowledges the persistent presence of past violence, engaging with the traces left by historical and ongoing acts of violence and disappearance, and explores the complex ways these forces shape our understanding of the present. Instead of mapping or directly connecting the disparate case studies, it examines the shared relationalities touched by absence, and the complex ecologies of violence operating through space and time. The project explores broader social processes that enable, conceal, and frame our thinking about disappearances and other violent forces that occur out of sight. By examining what these artistic case studies reveal about specific sites of nonappearance, the dissertation focuses on cultivating practices of attunement with the more-than-human world, embodied care, grief, and spectral relationality through deep time. Here, the elemental traces of violent disappearances and erasures persist, continuously haunting the present, and compelling us to take action.
Open Access
Between Letter and Spirit: The Ontology of Jewish Performance
(2021-07-06) Schwartz, Shira; Levin, Laura
This dissertation is an ethnographic and auto-ethnographic study that focuses on the discursive, gestural rituals and performance practices in the orthodox Jewish community in Toronto, Canada over the last decade. It explores how the written law factors into an oral tradition, a script not passed on by bodily surrogation alone but in the form of guidebooks, performance manuals and legal texts. We have learned from Judith Butler and others how we perform cultural and ideological scripts; performance theory has taught us how scripts are passed down generationally through oral traditions and the repertoire. Diana Taylors bookThe Archive and the Repertoireargues the vital role of performance gesture, spoken word, movement, song, dance, etc. in storing and transmitting cultural knowledge. What distinguishes this methodology from Taylors and others is that it asks how does performance differ in a cultural context where those performance scripts are not implicit, but written? In this project I focus on the scripts central to the religious and cultural life in orthodox Judaism. Indeed, these prescriptions seem to compel their own transgression. The scriptand the performance are passed down, and what results is a sort of contest between them. This dissertation argues that the archive and the repertoire were never meant to line up that their efficacy relies precisely on their mutual disconnect.With disidentification as a major theme and throughline, I look at various sites of more progressive enactments of orthodoxy in orthodox communities, which, in some cases, include overt subversions. These phenomena are not a turning away from orthodoxy but rather a recreating of customs often characterized as orthodox, which construct new avenues for embodied performance, mindful enactments, and community formation. In this dissertation, I pose the questions: How are identities formed and agencies acquired through failing to meet a standard or perfectly match a picture? How does this Sisyphean process of striving for the impossible, in the words of Haym Soloveitchik, produce music that is better than it can be played? (73)
Open Access
Bleeding Red: Decolonizing the Actor's Process in Search of Emotional Authenticity
(2017-07-27) Caribou-Curtin, Brefny Caroline; Armstrong, Eric
The contents of this thesis will discuss the search for emotional authenticity and vulnerability in performance through an investigation of my Indigenous identity and decolonization. Through the role of Maybe Jane and ensemble member in the adaptation of Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, I intend to explore indigenizing my role and process to access my full range of emotion, ultimately, allowing a non-Indigenous story and character to be expressed through my Indigenous body. Using Yvette Nolan's Medicine Shows: Indigenous Performance Culture, and the works of many Indigenous scholars, as my source material I will further examine how the practices of the Indigenous performance community can be incorporated into non-Indigenous, multi-cultural theatre processes. This investigation will be aided through the examining of the life and works of original author Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, the roles and status of women at the turn of the 20th century, my summer research working in Indigenous pedagogies, and personal investigation of my own indigeneity.
Open Access
Body-Mind Balancing: Exploring Deep Embodiment in Oh What A Lovely War!
(2015-08-28) Elchuk, Tanya Marie; Greyeyes, Michael J.
Acting methodologies have long been divided into two simplistic streams: “outside-in” and “inside-out.” These reductionist models fail to account for the range and synergistic nature of the elements integral to an actor’s work. Exploring these elements I discovered a personal tendency toward favouring an intellect removed from its source in breath, body, and imagination, and disengaged from sensation and emotion. Undertaking an exploration of deep embodiment through the practices of Syntonics©, Linklater voice work, Middendorf Breathexperience, and Batdorf Technique, and applied in Theatre@York’s production Oh What a Lovely War! I discovered a rich new source of information arising not from intellect, but from an intelligent, unified, physical being, or body-mind. This experience has revealed a new understanding of how to approach acting, in which every element becomes a potential entry point into a holistically integrated, reciprocal system, and in which visceral, sensate awareness births true presence and performance.
Open Access
Collective Will: Shakespeare's The Tragedie of Julius Caesar
(2016-09-20) Shook, Estelle Nicole; Buchli, Ines
This project situates William Shakespeares The Tragedie of Julius Caesar as a secular Passion Play, whose central themes of collective violence and sacrifice will underpin a directorial approach that seeks to actively engage and include the audience in the staging and dramaturgy. This will be accomplished by using popular models of crowd constellations such as the sporting event, the religious assembly and the protest rally, as design, staging and conceptual templates. By emphasizing the social dimension of the High Park Amphitheatre audience, we create conditions for them to be self aware of the nature, power and potential of their assembly, the ideal place from which to explore the themes of civic responsibility and government for which the play is famous.
Open Access
Director as Dreamer: Directing Strindberg's A Dream Play
(2017-07-27) Di Giovanni, David Donato; Batdorf, Erika
What does it mean for a theatre production to have soul or spirit? What choices can the director make, starting from the conceiving process, to encourage a production to find spirit? How do these choices factor into the questions around the theatre director as creative or interpretive artist? In directing August Strindbergs A Dream Play, I intend to answer these questions. This paper looks at how August Strindberg crafted poetic autobiography into A Dream Play, and proposes a similar conceiving process for the director. The research is then followed by selected journal entries from the rehearsal process.
Open Access
Embracing Fear: Finding Opportunities within Failure
(2017-07-27) Lloyd, Rebbecca Alison; Lampert, Paul
As an actor I am a careful explorer. For this careful explorer the challenge is: Embracing Fear: Finding Opportunities Within Failure. The primary area of investigation concerns the relationship between Race: Understanding Origins and Sensuality/Sexuality: Understanding the Vocabulary of my Body. I am investigating the structure of Racial Passing as it relates to fear and limitation in theatre performance. Through academic research and physical/studio exploration I have built a conscious awareness of my own habitual participation in Racial Passing. This awareness will allow me to have more effective use of the vocabulary of my body resulting in more range and specificity. This, in-turn, will allow me to discover/utilize different aspects of myself and allow the text to function as a road map for moments of discovery, the natural geographical information filled in with in-rehearsal risk taking.
Open Access
Every Inch a Queen: Reckoning with Misogyny/Reclaiming the Feminine in Shakespeare's King Lear
(2018-05-28) Newton, Alistair Lee; Lampert, Paul
This paper presents a production concept for Shakespeares King Lear, to be adapted and directed by Alistair Newton as a part of the 35th Anniversary of Canadian Stages Shakespeare in High Park presentations. The production employs a conceptual framework which seeks to interrogate the misogyny inherent in the play by recasting the king as a queen, inspired by the final days of queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeares play is put into its historical context, the original source material that inspired its writing is examined, and an interrogation of Elizabethan attitudes towards gender is undertaken. This leads to the description of a directorial concept which addresses the plays problematic aspects, and employs the conceptual strategies of cross-gender casting, drag and gender play, and a queer reading of two of the central characters as a method of challenge and reinterpretation. The design for the physical production is then described in some detail.
Open Access
Excursions into Otherness: Performative Cosmopolitanism and Movement Culture
(2015-08-28) Griffith, Anna Maire; Levin, Laura
Embarking on an interdisciplinary study of movement practices that transcend traditional spaces and modes of transfer, I ask if it is possible to politicize our use of Yoga, Muay Thai and Capoeira. Can framing these practices as part of movement culture allow us to view the complexity of performative cosmopolitanism? Introducing my project, Chapter One argues for the importance of theorizing practices we use to regulate our bodies and express our identity. Chapter Two offers theoretical backbone – a literature review of cosmopolitan theory and scholarship on consumerism, Neo-Primitivism and Orientalism. Exploring how cosmopolitanism is signified by consumption of otherness, I suggest alternatives highlighting the terms of cultural exchange. Chapter Three analyzes how each practice is framed through advertising and social media in order to signal specific lifestyles and identities. I consider how myths are activated in order to consolidate whiteness. In Chapter Four a performance analysis of cultural festivals allows me to position cosmopolitanism as performative – generating difference as much as embracing it. Displaying, performing and consuming otherness at festivals simultaneously butts up against more resistant challenges to dominant culture also being created. Embodiment of form is my focus in Chapter Five. Through autoethnography I consider classes as performances of everyday interculturalism. Describing how practices function to perpetuate myths of Neo-Primitivism and Orientalism and become vehicles to inscribe power and consolidate whiteness, I also consider the forms of resistance created at the level of individuals and communities. My conclusions analyze how movement culture highlights the performative nature of cosmopolitanism, and the power embodiment has in de-centering, challenging and re-positioning us in intimate ways. I suggest that recognizing the structures of inequity we live through, marking the myths of otherness we consume and seeing the places where power is subverted through practice can describe a form of embodied postcoloniality that reflects our globalized, networked world and moves us toward interconnection.
Open Access
Exploring Authentic Expression Through Body/Breath Connection in Theatre@York's 'Oh What a Lovely War"
(2015-12-16) Turner, Corey Andrew; Wilson, Mark E.
With this thesis, I have investigated authentic expression through body/breath connection. In playing multiple roles in Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War, I set out to find the heart and honesty of the soldier characters that I embodied. In doing so I had to address my habitual muscle tension that has arisen from emotional and psychological barriers from my past in order to find an ease and flow of my breath throughout my body. This was pursued by using warm-up regimens from master teachers David Smukler and Kristin Linklater, and by integrating my sense of Somatic Experiencing as well as yoga techniques. The analysis was ongoing throughout the rehearsal and performance processes. Moreover, the results were gauged by referring to Carey and Carey’s four-tier approach relating to competence. During the latter phase of performances, I was able to find the greatest developments in seeking authentic expression through body/breath connection.
Open Access
Fallen: Euripidess The Trojan Women as a Feminist Exploration
(2018-03-01) Ohanian, Theresa Marie; Armstrong, Eric
Was the ancient Athenian Euripides actually a proto-feminist? Euripidess writings have long been coopted and adapted by different political groups as historic evidence of their causes. This paper investigates whether this ascribed label fits the ancient writer through historic evidence and philosophical dissections of his work as it relates to the original play, Fallen, a feminist revision of Euripidess The Trojan Women.
Open Access
"Fandom and Co-Production in King of the Dot's Battle Rap Scene."
(2022-12-14) Robertson-Palmer, Sean Jason; Fogarty, Mary
This interdisciplinary dissertation documents the performances of fans of the professional battle rap league King of the Dot (KOTD), the biggest battle rap league in Canada and one of the highest viewed platforms for battle rap in the world. By collectively tracing and articulating battle rap’s aesthetics, practices, formats, and community standards in digital spaces such as social media sites and fan forums, fans document the scene’s histories while driving innovation and shaping the culture they participate in. I argue that fans play a central role in the meaning-making of battle rap’s cultural practices through their participation in a digital battle rap scene. Through live and digital performance analyses, archival interviews, and oral testimonies, this dissertation prioritizes the voices of the participants in the scene, emphasizing the labour and agency present in battle rap fandom.
Open Access
Finding Deeper Connectivity Through Full-Body Resonant Listening in Joan Littlewood's "Oh What a Lovely War"
(2015-08-28) deGruijter, Deann Michele; Wilson, Mark E.
Abstract This thesis contains research on my artistic challenge to find deeper connectivity through full-body resonant listening as an actor in Joan Littlewood’s play Oh What a Lovely War. It documents my research on my mind/body artistic practice, Joan Littlewood, Mindfulness, The Great War, Charlie Chaplin, corporal resonance, and the further development of my visceral approach to theatre. Selected journal entries demonstrate the application of my research in rehearsals and performances. They reflect my practices, processes, observations, and applications (successful and unsuccessful) during my research. My anticipated outcome is the attainment of full-body listening and a deeper connection with others and my immediate environment. After a detailed investigation of my artistic challenge in multiple applications, I was able to achieve a state of what I refer to as a porous presence and availability. I believe I was successful in finding deeper attunement and connection when listening with resonant full-body awareness.
Open Access
From Clowns to Computers: Performing Theatrical Interactivity and Pervasive Transmedia Fictions
(2014-07-09) Laviolette, Byron James; Rubin, Donald H.
The Collins English Dictionary defines “Interaction” as “a mutual or reciprocal action or influence”, and “Interactivity” as “allowing or relating to continuous two-way transfer of information between a user and the central point of a communication system”. This study will analyze the range of pre-existing interactive theatre types, using the model of interaction theorized by Gary Izzo in The Art of Play. This model will be used to categorize and problematize the various strategies developed and deployed through seven years of practical interactive research in the theatre. The sites of this research include five productions I worked on as a director, from 2008-2012, with Toronto-based U.N.I.T. Productions, featuring clown duo Morro and Jasp, and an eight-month long, massive, trans- media fiction project called ZED.TO, created by The Mission Business, a local event design company where I worked in 2012 as both writer and narrative designer. The central research question steering this dissertation is twofold. First, what strategies of interactivity already exist and how has the pre-existing theory of audience interaction behind these strategies evolved through the production and performance of these two projects? Second, in what ways have these strategies been proven effective, in real-time or during online encounters, to encourage an audience to believe, trust, share, play and ultimately participate inside an interactive theatre production? To prove the efficacy of these strategies, observations and opinions of both the public and the press are examined. The answers to these research questions trace the sources, evolution and distribution of these strategies from within the established theatre practice (including improvisation and clown) as well as interactive approaches sourced from game design and social media. This multidisciplinary research helps to define what strategies work towards achieving interactivity in the theatre and how, or when, it is appropriate to utilize it during a theatrical production. In essence, this study examines, through a survey of the history of immersive and interactive theatre, the strategies realized by the Morro and Jasp clown series and ZED.TO and how these projects have contributed to the evolving theory and practice of interactivity in the theatre. Analyzing such strategies will create a sourcebook for those seeking to bring theatre into the digital world as well as understand (and perhaps even undertake) the performance of pervasive interactive narratives in the future.
Open Access
Good Mourning Canada? Canadian Military Commemoration and Its Lost Subjects
(2015-12-16) Vosters, Helene Teresa; Levin, Laura
Using the Highway of Heroes as my point of departure, in “Good Mourning Canada? Canadian Military Commemoration and its Lost Subjects” I interrogate the role of Canadian military commemoration in the production of hierarchies of grievability and the construction of nationalist narratives. I argue that military commemoration plays a critical role in the performative constitution of the privileged—and the “lost”—subjects of Canadian nationalism. My investigation looks first at how Canadian military memorial projects operate as a means of interpellating Canada’s citizen populations into a particular kind of settler-nationalism, and second, at how performance might serve as a methodology towards the production of counter-memorials that resist the forgetful narratives of Canadian nationalism. My methodological approach weaves historical, theoretical, and performance analyses with first-person reflections on three counter-memorial meditations I performed as a method of embodied inquiry and critical engagement. While the reflective remains of Impact Afghanistan War are scattered throughout this dissertation, and Unravel: A meditation on the warp and weft of militarism and Flag of Tears are discussed explicitly in the final chapters, all three counter-memorial meditations inform—and are informed by—the entire project. Throughout this dissertation I deliberately posit both Canadian military commemoration, and performance, as broadly construed. I investigate repertorial performances of commemoration—like the Highway of Heroes, Remembrance Day ceremonies, and Impact—in addition to the archival performances of institutions and objects—like the Canadian War Museum, military fatigues, and Unravel’s threaded remains. I also intentionally wander outside the constructed borders of Canadian military commemoration to consider how these memorials disappear the violence of settler-colonialism. I bring popular culture performances of nationalist and counter-nationalist narratives—like the Winter Olympics and Jeff Barnaby’s film, Rhymes for Young Ghouls—into conversation with performances overtly linked to the contested terrains of Canadian social memory, like the World War I and II documentary, The Valour and the Horror, and Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In bringing this range of performances together under the umbrella of Canadian military commemoration I make visible the larger scenario of Canadian settler nationalism and its sticky “inter(in)animations” with militarism and colonialism.