UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item El Broadway in Spain: Musical Theatre, Cultural Transpositions, and Artistic Process(2019) Reales Gregory, Jose David; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Broadway musical has been shaped by a distinctly American identity, but its rapid international success underscores the need for research which further explores the complexities surrounding its cross-cultural jump into countries with their own histories and identities. In a country where performance research sits largely on flamenco, guitar, and zarzuelas, the 21st-century Spanish stage has been transformed by an unprecedented boom in musicals such as Chicago, West Side Story, Billy Elliott, Phantom of the Opera, and The Lion King. This dissertation follows theatre makers of Spain and dives into their productions of Broadway musicals to uncover the cultural, linguistic, and social negotiations behind their creative experiences. I journey into Spain’s past to decode various constructions of Spanish identity through musical performance, examining how the function of musical performance changes with shifting notions of nationhood. I look at Madrid and its professional companies, tracing urban and economic factors that feed into the replication of Broadway’s symbolic space. Joining the creative process of individual artists, I watch how amateur groups performing Broadway musicals in civic spaces of the provinces unite against a backdrop of local traditions to define their community through distinct linguistic and creative translation processes. Finally, I turn to a national Broadway musical theatre festival to determine how competition, programming, and workshop sessions construct audiences’ ideas of legitimacy for the purposes of strengthening belonging within the community. The transposition of these Broadway-style musicals to Spain are subject to the pressures and cultural politics of their space which creates new intersecting sites for the exploration of belonging between city and world, region and nation, and self and community. Ultimately, the Broadway musical genre is historically embedded with hegemonic power structures that, while consistent with the globalized market and its artistic community in the United States, are tough to negotiate at local and individual levels in other cultures – raising questions about the sustainability of national arts in today’s world.Item Vienna's Transnational Fringe: Arts Funding, Aesthetic Agitation, and Europeanization(2011) Poole, Justin Aaron; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation deals with a subculture of transnational fringe artists, which is emerging in Europe in the early part of the twenty first century. It examines this subculture within the confines of Vienna, Austria, which was once the capital of a grand supra-national empire that spanned much of Central and Eastern Europe. Vienna is the site of this case study because in recent years the city has been instituting a self-conscious internationalization of its fringe scene, which resulted from local politicians' desires to help the city regain some of its long lost symbolic capital and become a legitimate competitor in an expanding and converging European field of cultural and economic production. In Vienna's struggle for symbolic capital, the city's subculture of fringe artists is defined by their need to collaborate with the socio-political demands of the local government. They are also impacted by the requirement that they adhere to the economic, ideological, and aesthetic demands of transnational social spaces, i.e. co-production venues and fringe festivals, throughout Europe. The artists are enmeshed in external pressures as they forge paths for themselves within an increasingly uniform European fringe scene. The artists' complicity in the processes of globalization and Europeanization, which enable their subculture as they threaten to divest them of their "avant-garde impulse," causes the artists to adopt a highly ironic posture in their work. This posture, which is evident in their performances, may be partially to blame for a widespread claim that European fringe artists are suffering from an aesthetic crisis. An examination of two fringe groups, i.e. Toxic Dreams and Superamas, which are thriving within Vienna's current system, reveals how any analysis of the aesthetics and ideologies of the performances being generated in the context of Europe's fringe scene must take into account the material realities that the artists are facing. In this dissertation the term conglomerate performance is used a as a descriptor for the emergent genre that is adapted from a media-induced and "McDonalidized" system of cultural production within a specific, yet vital niche of European culture.Item Costume Design for Enchanted April(2011) Schuller, Chelsey Anne; Huang, Helen Q.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis explores the costume design process and execution for the production Enchanted April. Included in this document is an explanation of the design approach, images from costume and character research, fabric swatches for constructed costumes, process photos and production photos. The production of Enchanted April studied in this paper was produced by the University of Maryland and opened on October 8, 2010. K.J. Sanchez directed the production, the set was designed by J.D. Madsen, the lighting was designed by Ariel Benjamin, and the sound was designed by Neil McFadden.Item 'Working the Crowd': Enacting Cultural Citizenship Through Charged Humor(2010) Krefting, Rebecca A.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Like many cultural practices, comic performance is one of a host of weapons in the arsenal of tactics, strategies, and offensive maneuverings available to individuals and communities seeking to redress inequitable distributions of wealth, power, rights, and cultural visibility. This dissertation examines contemporary jesters opting to use humor to develop community, instruct and mobilize audience members, and lobby for political and cultural inclusion. It is a kind of humor that illumines one's position in a specific socio-political, historical matrix; it is humor that creates community and conversely demonstrates the ways in which one does not belong. An examination of the economy--the production, exchange, and consumption--of this humor reveals how and why comics produce charged humor or humor that illumines one's status as second-class citizen and how this kind of humor is consumed in the US. I employ a mixed-methods qualitative approach using ethnography, archival research, and critical discourse analysis to investigate comic performances: stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, and one-woman shows. Throughout, I draw from dozens of contemporary comics performing in the US, but take as case studies: Robin Tyler, a Jewish lesbian comic and activist who is currently spearheading the marriage equality movement in California; Micia Mosely, a Brooklyn-based, Black, queer woman whose one-woman show, Where My Girls At?: A Comedic Look at Black Lesbians, is touring the country; and a group of young people (eighteen and under) participating in Comedy Academy programs (a non-profit arts education organization in Maryland), allowing them to author and perform sketch comedy. My sources for this project include popular culture ephemera such as print and electronic media, public commentary, documentaries about stand-up comedy, interviews with comics and industry entrepreneurs, performance and program evaluations, comic material (jokes), and performance texts. Drawing from nation and citizenship theories, cultural studies, performance studies, and a number of identity-based disciplines, I argue that humor intervenes on behalf of minoritarian subjects and it is part of our task to read these performances for the tactics and approaches they supply for being fully incorporated in the national polity.Item How The Waltz Has Won: Towards A Waltz Aesthetic(2010) Martin, Christopher Tremewan; Carpenter, Faedra C; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the development of ballroom dancing aesthetics between 1860 and 1915, focusing on the appropriation, neutralization, and commodification of African American somatic performance by various European American agents/actors. The study suggests that the waltz, a dance form that was in decline at the beginning of the twentieth century, became a vital component of European American strategies to safely encapsulate certain elements of African American aesthetics while eliminating others. This negotiation of African American aesthetics into European American performance is presented as a part of a broader discourse concerned with the maintenance of white hegemony during this period. The work is grounded in the field theory best articulated by Pierre Bourdieu, and the critical race theories of Michal Omi and Howard Winant. From Bourdieu the work draws upon three key terms: habitus, codes of perception, and hexis. Taken together these terms provide the structure for contextualizing the choices made by dancers, dancing teachers, and social reformers who were concerned with modifying ballroom dance forms that had been influenced by African American aesthetics. Omi and Winant's work provide a matrix for understanding the choices of these diverse individuals and organizations as a racial project embedded in a discourse of white hegemony that, even at its most progressive, sought to maintain the hegemony of white, European American culture.Item Gilgamesh: A Scenic Design(2010) Huizenga, Carissa; Conway, Daniel; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this thesis is to provide research, supporting paperwork, and production photographs that document the scenic design for the University of Maryland-College Park, Department of Theatre's Gilgamesh. This thesis contains the following: research images collected to develop and visually communicate ideas about color, texture, scale, and mood to the production team; preliminary sketches and photographs of the ¼" scale model, visual tools used to convey the idea of the scenic design; a full set of drafting plates and paint elevations used to communicate the look of each scenic element to the technical director and paint charge; a unit list providing detailed information about each element of the scenic design; a props list detailing each prop used in the production; and props / paint research images, used to visually supports the information in the unit and props list. Archival production photographs are included as documentation of the completed design.Item Opera Delaware's Family Opera Theatre(2010) Covert, Kalle; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nearly every opera company in North America conducts some form of outreach to children with the intent to educate and develop young audiences. By examining the forty-year history of Opera Delaware's Family Opera Theatre, the biography of its most influential director, Evelyn Swensson, and four children's operas commissioned and produced by the company, I identify the educational and artistic goals that have made this company successful. These include allowing children opportunities to participate in the creation of professional opera, providing high quality preparatory materials, and performing operas based on quality children's books that are taught in the school curriculum. The critical analysis of four original children's operas compares the approaches of three different composers to this task and demonstrates key features of successful children's opera, which include brevity, relevant subject matter, repetition of themes or lyrics, and a balance between musical elements that are familiar and unfamiliar to children.Item Mary Coble: Performance Art and Poltics of an Archive(2010) Talwar, Savneet K.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity. Using methods of critical ethnography, visual and textual analysis, I examine the archive of performance art, and the discourses of the body, especially in the work of performance artist Mary Coble. I explore the ways in which performance art disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especially those surrounding the body and constructing normative sexual and civic identities. The institutional archive has served as a guardian of memory that makes it the creator of knowledge. Performance artists work within the conceptual space of an archive as a way to make visible the ideological systems of power; this they do through reenactments and re-presentations, in effect creating a counter-archive of political and gendered memorial spaces. I question how performance artists, critiquing the visual hegemony of the white, male dominated art world, confront issues of identity and difference, including ones of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. I am interested in how "knowledge" is situated in the embodied experiences of the performer, researcher, artist, community and its participants. In this sense the archive is not simply a site of documentation and knowledge retrieval, but also as a locus of the feelings and emotions that produce knowledge and meaning.