Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies
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Item 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?Item Open Access Tradition is Dead, Long Live Tradition: Critical Approaches to Postvernacular Yiddish Culture(2024-11-07) Moore, Avia Robin; Levin, LauraThis 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.