Theatre and Performance Studies

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

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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
Olas de Otro Mar: Reenacting, Renarrating and Ruminating Dance in Quito-Ecuador (1997-2024)
(2024-07-18) Donoso, Esteban Ramon; Schweitzer,Marlis Erica
Olas de otro mar investigates embodied memory and transmissions in the field of dance in Quito-Ecuador (1997-2024). Navigating between the fields of performance studies and dance studies, I engage in an in-depth, oral history work with dancers who founded the all-women contemporary dance festival No mas Luna en el Agua NMLA in Quito (1997-2011). I intend to map out the processes through which they paved their way as women dance artists within a patently patriarchal environment. NMLA was created by the female members of dance collective Frente de Danza Independiente, Marcela Correa, Irina Pontón, Carolina Vásconez, Mónica Thiel, Cecilia Andrade and Josie Cáceres in 1997. The festival allowed the group of women to establish a space of creative solidarity and to blur boundaries between art and life. The project deployed a practice-based methodology for reenacting dance pieces performed at their festival, collectively conceived with a group of the original creators. Through revisiting their dances together, we deploy a feminist approach of revisioning and re-narrating the works to be able to see them and reassess them from different vantage points. My objective is to examine the influences and contributions of the group, tracing the connections of the works to their broader contexts, institutional, local, and global against the grain of patriarchal and colonial determinations. The dissertation elaborates on the practice-based work, tracing each of the dances’ reenactment journey, in conversation with archival materials and interviews on local dance histories and relevant decolonial and feminist concepts and methodologies. The revisited works are Histeria Blanca (1999) by Irina Pontón, La Huesudita (2001) by Carolina Vásconez, Más Adentro (2002) by Marcela Correa, 27 Minutos (2004) by Josie Cáceres. The project’s focus on embodied modes of memory and oral histories contributes to much needed conversations around memory, visibility and prevalent, often overlapping dynamics of colonial and patriarchal mandates in the field of dance in Ecuador, from a situated, embodied standpoint. It also generates knowledge around the politics of memory of ‘minor’, often overlooked dance histories and their social contexts.
Open Access
Our Stories: (Re)Imagining Disability Futures Through Autobiographical Performance by Neurodiverse Artists
(2023-12-08) Gold, Becky; Kazubowski- Houston, Magdalena
In response to the lack of neurodivergent (self)representation on Canadian stages, this dissertation explores autobiographical performance as a vehicle for self-advocacy and imagining disability futures differently. Over seven months in 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I brought four neurodivergent artists together on Zoom to co-create a performance piece about their lived experience. What emerged was Our Stories, a presentation of autobiographical storytelling that uses song, dance, poetry, and theatrical monologue to reflect upon and respond to these artists’ past and present experiences, as well as their goals for the future. Shaped methodologically by performance ethnography, this project illustrates the significance of the in-between moments and the learning that can emerge through the process of devising and creating new work with an interabled team. Each chapter of this dissertation illuminates the process of co-creating Our Stories while contextualizing the themes and findings that emerged in relation to existing scholarly discourse. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the interdisciplinary fields of research that informed this project and highlights the most salient scholarship. Chapter 2 explores the process of creating Our Stories and reflects upon accessible co-creation strategies and working within non-normative temporalities and structures. Chapter 3 engages in depth with the completed work and serves as a kind of script analysis, offering further context for the creative decisions made and highlights themes of representation, autonomy, and authorship. Chapter 4 discusses what happened after the presentation of Our Stories, how care and relations were maintained even after the formal research project had concluded and what this means in the context of public allyship and interabled friendship. This dissertation contributes to the currently limited scholarship around neurodivergent self-representation on stage and highlights the value of upholding practices of care and interdependence in interabled artist collaborations and the significance of performing and (re)imagining disability futures.
Open Access
In-Between Images: Everyday Performance, Generational Succession, and the Shaping of Polonia
(2023-12-08) Kulinski, Wiktor; Kazubowski- Houston, Magdalena
This dissertation is an interpretive ethnography and autoethnography of how my interlocutors and I experience and perform the reality of migranthood as members of Polonia, the Polish migrant diaspora. I analyze how we imagine, devise, and perform the reality of living in-between spaces, places, and times using Julie Cruikshank’s lens that “life is lived like a story” and Lisa Stevenson’s “image as method.” I interpret lifeworld images that my interlocutors and I consider pertinent to our lives and Polonia, especially our memories and heritage, dreams of the future, and present experiences of generational succession between baby boomers and millennials. I combine self-interpretation of mystory with insights from analyzing fieldwork conducted with other Polish Canadians residing in Brant. Drawing from theory by Gregory L. Ulmer and Norman K. Denzin, I argue that, through everyday performance, our lives are simultaneously shaped by and contribute to shaping Polonia. That is, we perform our lifeworlds in ways that are in tandem and at odds with how we imagine them, individually and collectively. These performances then have affective potential to reinforce and alter our imaginaries and those of others. Furthermore, while there is a certain level of passing down of images through generational succession—as so-called Polonia heritage—these imagistic landscapes undergo substantial re-articulations as they succeed. As a result, I conclude that Polonia remains in the crisis stage of a Turnerian social drama as each generation seeks to shape Polonia in its image. I resolve the above insights by arguing that life is (not) lived like a story. Through everyday performance and generational succession, we are authors of our lifestories while simultaneously influencing the lifeworlds of others. Instead, this research reveals that my interlocutors and I live in-between images. This research was conducted in Brantford, Ontario between January 2016 and March 2017 with 14 principal interlocutors—six millennials (in addition to myself) and six baby boomers (in addition to my mother)—who self-identify as either Polish or Polish Canadian. I also conducted participant observation and interviews with members of a Polonia cultural centre in Brantford.
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
Infrastructural Dramaturgy and the Politics of Disability Art and Performance
(2022-12-14) Johnson, Megan Aileen; Levin, Laura
This dissertation draws on performance studies, critical disability studies, and critical infrastructure studies scholarship to investigate the infrastructural politics of contemporary disability performance. Throughout, I show how disability performance enacts modes of infrastructural inversion that reveal the politics and ideologies embedded within built, interpersonal, and administrative infrastructures. These inversions highlight how infrastructures provide uneven forms of support across different populations and contexts. I also illustrate the potential of disability performance to reimagine inequitable infrastructures in service of a more inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and just world—a world that enables disabled bodyminds and disability culture to flourish. This dissertation presents a series of case studies that closely analyze works of disability performance and explore how these performances intersect with infrastructures in both theatrical and quotidian contexts. To conduct these analyses, I develop a methodology of infrastructural dramaturgy; an approach that mobilizes the analytical potential of dramaturgy and critical infrastructure studies to emphasize infrastructural elements by attending to the context and composition of a performance. Using the lens of infrastructural dramaturgy, this dissertation engages with works like Alex Bulmer’s May I Take Your Arm?, Kinetic Light’s DESCENT, and Hanna Cormick’s The Mermaid, among others, to investigate the infrastructural politics of sites and practices including sidewalks, access ramps, administrative protocols, and ways of organizing time. Ultimately, in this dissertation I surface the politics, priorities, and value systems embedded within infrastructures and query how they could be altered to better support disabled bodyminds and disability culture. I also illustrate how disability performance is a form of world building that can imagine and materialize worlds that are rooted in the tenets of equity, interdependence, and ethical care.
Open Access
Intercultural Relations: Direct Audience Address in Contemporary Theatre in Canada
(2022-03-03) Lynch, Signy Copland; Levin, Laura
This dissertation examines the phenomenon of direct audience address in contemporary theatre in Canada, focusing in particular on how it informs discussions of theatrical interculturalism. It addresses a dearth of scholarship on this common theatrical device, while arguing that limited mainstream understandings of direct address have contributed to its marginalized position in scholarship. The chapters that follow draw from existing theoretical frameworks in theatre and performance studies and other disciplines in order to map out direct address as a theatrical phenomenon that can extend the dramaturgical work of a theatre piece, and begin to chart its history and contemporary roots in the Canadian theatre scene. The following chapters also establish how the concept of relationality helps to illuminate the work that direct address does, particularly in intercultural contexts. Chapter one explores direct address in theatre in Canada, drawing from interviews with contemporary theatre artists who employ direct address in their work and existing literature on monologue, solo performance, and a range of performance forms to theorize direct address in a Canadian context. Chapter two explores direct audience address in Tetsuro Shigematsu's autobiographical play Empire of the Son. It draws on media studies conceptions of technological immediacy to investigate Shigematsu's use of multimedia and direct address to illuminate his complicated relationship with his father, which carries implications for how we understand interpersonal and intercultural distance and difference and theatrical immediacy. Chapter three explores how the oppositional gaze of direct address in Cliff Cardinal's Huff challenges settler audiences to examine their complicity and undo harmful conceptual binaries that mar Indigenous-settler relations and perpetuate injustices. Chapter four, a queer feminist reading of Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory and Evalyn Parry's Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools, examines how direct address is part of the show's larger messaging to encourage relational ways of living, and how Williamson Bathory's performance of uaajeerneq mask dance models for spectators this relationality in real time. These varied case studies present an introductory look into direct address' richness, while exploring how the way in which an audience is addressed and who that audience is can have significant impact on a performances meaning-making process.
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
Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies: Textiles and the Twenty-First Century 'Female' Body
(2021-03-08) Fitz-James, Charlotte Anthea; Schweitzer, Marlis Erica
Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies explores the gendered and material politics of bodies and textiles in performance. It looks at how knitting, weaving, embroidery, and cloth perform the gendered body as a site of political upheaval, creation, and destruction. Here, I analyse how twenty-first century western artists and activists use textiles to explore the politics of bodies in space. Focusing predominately on western, feminist, queer, racialized, and activist artists, this project asks what threads these artists pick up, and why. It contextualizes itself within and across feminism, performance studies, and material culture studies, bringing all three together to develop theories of feminism and identity politics that queer the body, embrace dialectics, and explode binary concepts around gender and sexuality. It asks, can we use the traditional method of knitting, sewing, and weaving, to stage the body in startlingly new ways? How do we contextualize craft in contemporary protest and performance alongside feminist conversations and politics? Can we find the ghost of the seamstress in our own affective and phenomenological discourse with the world around us, our oppression, and our privilege? Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies demonstrates how seemingly passive textile works can illuminate structures of intolerance and oppression in contemporary art and politics. It unpacks contemporary politics at the intersection between objects and bodies, and between textiles and gender/sexuality/race. Seeing the stage, the body, and the street as contemporary sites with political stakes, Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies aims to uncover a practice of knitting, weaving, and embroidery found behind picket lines and in/on skin.
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
Queer Performance in the Post-Millennial Scramble
(2020-05-11) King, Moynan; Levin, Laura
The subject of this dissertation is contemporary queer feminist performance in Canada. My practice-informed research takes a unique approach to studying performance through what I call the queer performance scramblea term that draws on the multiple meanings of scramble to understand the aesthetics of queer performance and its challenges to stable conceptions of both identity and temporality. I investigate works that are happening now and that scramble the sticky elements of their own cultural constructions and queer temporalities. The temporal turn in queer theory supports my engagement with the effects of temporality, performativity, and history on queer performance, and, conversely, the effects of queer performance on time. I am equally interested in the formal and material dimensions of the work I study. I look to the content, style, material conditions, and social scenes of queer feminist performance from the perspective of both an academic and an artist to make accessible work that is often marginalized within Canadian cultural production ecology. Chapter 1 investigates queer feminist hauntings with an analysis of Allyson Mitchell and Deirdre Logues Killjoys Kastle: A Lesbian Feminist Haunted House. Chapter 2 argues that cabaret is the primary site for queer feminist performance in Canada, and when framed as a methodological problem/solution matrix, both the celebratory and limiting potential of the form can be explored. In chapter 3 I analyze performances by Jess Dobkin, Dayna McLeod, and Shaista Latif to excavate forms of durationality that expose the complex interplay of life and art. And, in chapter 4, I turn to practice-based research methodology to explore the concept of queer resonance in a trans feminist performance called trace. This research will give rise to new conversations about the Canadian performance ecology and its performance archive. It will enrich theoretical considerations of queer as always already transtemporal and intractable and make an intervention into the ideological space between queer and feminist performance studies. Thinking within the rubric of the queer performance scramble means thinking differently about performance and timewhile always keeping the art at the very centre of the investigation and always returning to it for guidance.
Open Access
The Consequences of Representing Human Suffering Distress, and/or Violence
(2018-08-27) Szlawieniec-Haw, Danielle Irene; Mitchell, Gail J.
Within academia, there has been much focus on representations of suffering, distress, and/or violence, including how these representations can foster meaningful change in audience members. The consequences of representing human suffering, distress, and/or violence, however, have received less attention. Given this, in this dissertation, I explore professional actors lived experiences of representing human suffering, distress, and/or violence. In order to complete this exploration, I undertook a world-first study, uncovering what professional actors experiences of representing human suffering, distress, and/or violence entail; how these actors respond to working with these complex representations; what concerns, meanings, strategies, and personal consequences these actors describe in relation to this work; and what, if any, support systems assist these actors as they engage with such representations. Throughout the dissertation, I review the themes that were identified in this study and consider what these themes can offer actors, the entertainment industry, and North American society moving forward.
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
Nights at the Hotel Illyria
(2018-05-28) Jacobs, Tanja Patricia; Lampert, Paul
Nights at the Hotel Illyria describes a production of Shakespeares Twelfth Night which was produced as a part of the 35th Anniversary of Shakespeare in High Park, directed and edited by Tanja Jacobs. The paper places the play in its historical context, and goes on to describe a production concept which sets the action of the play in and around a hotel in the early 1970s, a place for transients and of transience. The paper presents a description of the ways in which this conceptual lens creates a world for the play that not only expresses Shakespeares themes which are also described in detail but also is directly intelligible to a contemporary audience. Parallels are drawn between the theatrical and socio-cultural innovations of Shakespeare in his writing of Twelfth Night, and tantamount moments of political, social, and artistic upheaval which took place in the Western world during the 1970s.
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
Process vs. Product: Post-Secondary Musical Theatre Pedagogy
(2018-03-01) Pike, Keith Herbert; Greyeyes, Michael J.
In the fall of 2016, I directed a production of Shrek: The Musical as part of Theatre Sheridans 2016/2017 season. This document represents a record of the productions process, from the initial research in the summer of 2016, personal reflections on the venture, and journal entries of the rehearsal process. Chapter one addresses my journey as a director and educator. From Memorial University to Sheridan College, through to my development as a director, it traces the steps that led me to where I am presently. Chapter two examines process vs. performance as a central pedagogical ideal which plays an integral role in a young actors development. Chapter three is a summation of my research and my experience in the past few months as I explored a pedagogical approach of process based direction through Shrek: The Musical at Sheridan College. It is a reflection of the entire process. Chapter four contains my concluding thoughts on the subject. It defines how my research has influenced my pedagogical approach to exploring process in teaching and directing musical theatre. Chapter five is a selection of entries from my directors journal that I feel best represents the experience I had thought the rehearsal process of Shrek: The Musical.
Open Access
The Long Drive: Experiments in Theatre Creation
(2018-03-01) Woolridge, Kevin James; Armstrong, Eric
The following thesis records the process of writing, developing, rehearsing, and performing a solo theatre show called All The Birds in Their Bird Houses. It is a personal process that explores doubt and fear as both hindrance and catalyst for creation. It examines storytelling techniques via mask, cartooning, clown, and automaton. It touches on Anne Bogarts Viewpoints, Jerzy Grotowskis River Work, as well as the emotional colour wheel of Dr. Robert Plutchik. Ultimately it seeks to define and identify the concepts of risk and depth in theatre and how those concepts can be applied and utilized in the creation of solo theatre.
Open Access
Magic and Machine: Using the Repre Method of Theatrical Devising to Explore the Themes of Science, Spiritualism, and the Human Brain
(2018-03-01) McEnaney, Taliesin Kate; Batdorf, Erika
This thesis explores the application of The Repre Method of theatrical devising (also know as the RSVP cycles) to the ensemble-devised creation, Brain Storm. The narrative of the play centers on 3 characters; one woman dealing with a brain injury and its emotional and cognitive fall-out, another who believes she can communicate with the deceased across barriers of time and space, and the famous Canadian neuro-surgeon Wilder Penfield, who used electrical stimulation to provoke sensory hallucinations in his patients. The Repre Method, which uses objects and stories as resources for the actors to engage with, is explored as a means to find compelling narrative and emotional connection within the devising process and workshop production.
Open Access
Immersive Theatre and Embracing the Live Moment in "Still Still Still"
(2018-03-01) Ritchie, Andrew Owens; Batdorf, Erika
The purpose of this research is to explore and define core elements of contemporary Canadian immersive theatre and apply these elements to a new Canadian play. This papers research spans the history of immersive theatre with a focus on English language Canadian theatre. The research was explored through multiple practical productions throughout my degree at York University as well as four independent public projects. Collectively my theatre practice as a creator, director, and actor has explored immersive theatre since 2008. The research culminated in the direction of the workshop presentation of Still Still Still by Geoffrey Simon Brown. The thesis was publicly presented at the Commons Theatre in Toronto, Ontario in April 2017. The production, design, and rehearsal process of the workshop presentation is detailed through journals and appendices.
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.