Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42581

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Access status: Open Access ,
Performing on and in the Borderlands: Embodiment, Authority, and Knowledge Production in Scientist and Spiritualist Confrontations
(2026-03-10) John, Paula; Levin, Laura
This dissertation examines the performances of Spiritualist Mediums and the scientists who sought to debunk them during the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries in Britain and North America. I use archival sources and performance analysis in order to craft a transhistorical study that deconstructs the power dynamics of spiritual performance, knowledge production, and scientific authority. Specifically, I focus on the embodied Spiritualist performances of the Medium Kathleen Goligher, who expelled ectoplasm – believed to be the physical matter of spirits – out of her vagina. Locating these performances in this specific site of the body allows me to analyse the ways in which various signifiers of femininity and antitheatrical discourse aimed at women came to bear on interpretations of Mediums that cast them as frauds. I compare this against the figure of the “man of science,” and the ways in which the professionalization of science in the latter half of the nineteenth century conflated attributes such as objectivity, disinterestedness, and reason with masculinity. I argue that out of this powerful site of authority emerges the figure of the scientist debunker. By analysing what I call “debunker discourse” I show that contrary to patriarchal cultural narratives that cast men as inherently trustworthy and unaffected, these scientific debunkers engaged in highly theatrical performative practices – and in some cases carried on as what some might call drama queens. I then reframe Spiritualist and debunker performances by placing them in conversation with the politics and aesthetics of twentieth-century feminist vaginal performance art. In doing so, I expand previously articulated genealogies of body art, and make an argument for the debunker-as-critic – figures who, I argue, use debunker rhetorical strategies in their attempts to discredit, regulate, and shut-down these performances. Throughout the dissertation I use the interstitial spaces between chapters to build on and extend the work of Gloria Anzaldúa by developing a poetic theory of the Borderlands, a liminal space that exists between the binaries of science/Spiritualism, male/female, life/death, and performance/life (to name but a few). I argue that it is in their very in-betweenness that the Borderlands hold generative potential – for art, theory, and other modes of political expression. The discomfort and destabilization provided by the Borderlands is generative in its ability to draw attention to, and critique, the problematic and divisive foundations upon which such binaries are constructed, and provide a space from which different futures can be imagined.
Access status: Open Access ,
Stages of the Box: Corrugated Cardboard in Puppetry and Material Performance
(2025-04-10) Rogers Valenzuela, Denise; Schweitzer, Marlis E.
Stages of the Box focuses on late capitalist performances of, and with, corrugated cardboard. As one of the leading packaging materials of 21st-century global capitalism, corrugated cardboard boxes circulate worldwide transporting consumer goods large and small, before accumulating in recycling bins, garbage cans, streets, and storage spaces. The paper industry hails corrugated cardboard as a sustainable packaging material as it comes from trees—ostensibly a renewable source—and because it is highly recyclable. This framing, I argue, allows the unsustainable production and consumption patterns of late capitalism to continue as usual. But the use of corrugated cardboard as boxes for global commodity circulation is one part of the story. On the flip side of this capitalist abundance, people in the margins employ waste corrugated cardboard creatively for survival, including through informal collection for the recycling industry, as a material for temporary dwelling, and for signs. At the same time, as a cheap or free, abundant, and versatile material, puppeteers, artists, and activists have been turning to cardboard for their creations and interventions. My project considers these different realms—global trade, performing arts, galleries, online videos, and streets—as stages of corrugated cardboard performances. Situated as both puppeteer and performance studies scholar, I incorporate reflections from my creative practice and critical analysis to frame cardboard as a performing object with material and expressive propensities that guide their human collaborators. In this, I engage with new materialist, material culture, puppetry scholarship, and discard studies frameworks, and an assortment of chapter-specific methods stemming from an emergent research design. By focusing on contemporary case studies of cardboard-based performances in Canada, the USA, Mexico, Hong Kong, and Chile (my home country), I ask: What are the stakes of performing with cardboard—an ambivalently eco-friendly, mass-produced material—amid social and environmental crises? Beyond reuse and upcycling, how do cardboard puppets, protest objects, and artworks intervene in both local and global contexts? How are cultural producers engaging with the semiotic, economic, affective charges, and material affordances of cardboard packaging? What questions, worlds, and modes of relating to matter do these performances bring forth?
Access status: Open Access ,
Tradition is Dead, Long Live Tradition: Critical Approaches to Postvernacular Yiddish Culture
(2024-11-07) Moore, Avia Robin; Levin, Laura
This study takes up the position that postvernacularity is the vernacular of the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene, creating the space for a subjective, relative, and contingent relationship with Yiddish cultural practices, and that this context necessitates that critical thinking be integrated into the pedagogy and transmission of cultural practice. The study also hypothesizes that code-switching and the juxtaposition of fragments is a central strategy in contemporary creative practice and Jewish identity formation. Previous literature on the Yiddish cultural revival has focused on ethnomusicological and linguistic transmission. Through interviews, observation, and autoethnography, this study takes an entangled and interdisciplinary approach, focusing on the experience and creative practices of artists who were first immersed in Yiddish culture through festivals and events. Chapter One frames the study, contextualizing the contemporary Yiddish cultural scene against the backdrop of the klezmer revival. Chapter Two focuses on the cohort of artists interviewed for this study, showing how they transform tradition through cultural practice, put tradition to work in their activism, and build community and social infrastructure around a shared affinity with Yiddishkayt. Chapter Three offers insights into the ways that participatory performances at KlezKanada’s Summer Retreat experiment with and model methods of engaging with tradition and strengthening diasporic collectivity. Chapter Four examines the Yiddish cultural imaginaries that are employed by artists in the process of world-building. Chapter Five discusses the creative interplay between individual and community in Yiddish culture as illustrated through Yiddish dance, and examines pedagogical and curatorial strategies that create space for many voices within the structure of the community. This study illustrates the impact of curated cultural spaces, pedagogical strategies, participatory performance, and artistic projects on the evolution of traditional cultural practices. Festivals of Yiddish arts and culture emerge as primary spaces in which Yiddish cultural practices are transmitted, new work and networks are instigated, and community values are fostered through shared practice. A key finding of this study is that contemporary Yiddish cultural practice, pedagogy, and curation lifts up the heterophonic qualities of the scene by intentionally making space for a diversity of individual expressions within community settings.

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