Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item MAKING MADNESS ON STAGE: AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATRE SINCE THE AMERICANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT(2023) Barr, Lindsey R.; Marshall, Caitlin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Musical theatre, as the United States’ only unique theatrical genre to find global influence, is a powerful form of storytelling that began as staged reifications of American ideals. The American musical has been a prime location to explore what it means to be American and how American society reckons with its self-proclaimed status as a “melting pot” where people from diverse cultures and ethnicities come together to form the rich fabric of the nation. Though much scholarship focuses on the American musical as a site to reify American culture and ideals, this dissertation critiques exclusionary American ideologies that have harmed disabled people, mad people, women, and people of color for as long as it has existed. In this project, I argue that passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which established legal protections for people with disabilities, made physical and mental disability visible and relevant to the narrative action and staging of musical theatre in new ways. Combining my professional skills as a dramaturg with theoretical frameworks from performance studies, disability studies, and women of color feminisms, I examine Violet (1997), Jane Eyre the Musical (2000), and Next to Normal (2009) as my prime case studies. Through analyzing these case studies, this dissertation reveals an obscured history of how racialized and gendered disability ideologies inflect the narrative and staging of American musical theatre. I term this aesthetic and practical reliance on mad characters mad dramaturgy.Item CIVIC DRAMATURGY: CULTURAL SPACE, ARTISTIC LABOR, AND PERFORMANCES OF URBAN PLANNING IN 21ST CENTURY CHICAGO(2022) Thomas, LaRonika; Harding, James; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops a theory of “civic dramaturgy.” Civic dramaturgy is a process of performing identity through changes to and impacts on the built environment, as well as a method of analyzing and contextualizing those performances to better understand the multiple modes of identity expression that make up a specific place, in the case of this dissertation, that place is the city of Chicago. Civic dramaturgy joins theories of “performance and the city” together with theatre history and urban studies to examine cultural space, cultural policy, performances of urban planning, and the ways in which artistic labor is used by individuals, corporations, and governments in non-representational performances of civic and urban identity in the United States. This study first establishes a working definition of civic dramaturgy, tracing the development of the ideas of the “civic” and “dramaturgy” through western theatre history, as well as examining other theories significant to urban planning, critical space theory, spatial representations of gender and race, and performance of cities. Dramaturgy involved four main areas of practice: analysis of plot structure, relationship between artist and audience, locality and spatial awareness, and contextualization. Each of chapters one through four examine an aspect of Chicago through one of these practices to build toward this definition of civic dramaturgy. I identified the city of Chicago as the site of study for this work because of its history of planning the built environment and its robust theatre history, including the way in which its theatre has been intertwined with social and spatial movements through the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In addition to an examination of the development of the city and its theatre, civic dramaturgy requires an analysis of the ways in which artistic labor co-creates civic identity, the social space of the city, and the built environment. In particular, the work of Theaster Gates, an artist and planner working on the south side of Chicago, provides a poignant example of the ways cultural planning, performance, and labor work to craft a civic identity; and the structure of these interwoven performances are examples of civic dramaturgy. Finally, the performance of the digital space of the city is also an important component of civic dramaturgy and the fourth chapter breaks down the ways in which actor and audience relationships manifest through sensory-inscribed bodies in performance and planning of the built environment. This study builds upon existing scholarship that posits dramaturgy as a way to understand performance, architecture, policy-making, and politics, extending the use of the structural and spatial concepts of dramaturgy beyond the rehearsal room, the stage, and the site-specific performance, in order to craft a more comprehensive means by which to understand performance and the city, and providing an example of a kind of dramaturgically-based analysis that may also be used when looking at all kinds of urban spaces and phenomena, and which may be theorized as “civic dramaturgy.”Item A choreographer's refection on the dramaturgical process of creating "My Tempest"(2014) Farfan, Ana Patricia; Phillips, Miriam; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"My Tempest" is a character-based evening-length choreography inspired by the main images and characters of Shakespeare's "The Tempest." It was performed March 12-14th, 2014, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the M.F.A degree in Dance through University of Maryland's School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. The choreography and spoken word is a commentary on the role of subjectivity and the crisis of Otherness in our contemporary world; highly intertwining sets, props, music, costumes and sound designs contribute to the aesthetic discourse. Guided by the application of dramaturgy to choreography, and a search for intersections between dance and theatre, this paper details the research and creative investigations that occurred during the process of creating "My Tempest." The paper aims to contribute a better understanding of the potential dramaturgy has on dance and how it can support choreographers and dancers during the creative process.Item The Dramaturgy of a Maritime Metaphor: Marcus Rediker's Influence on Naomi Wallace's One Flea Spare(2013) Barker, Andrew Neal; Carpenter, Faedra C.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the dramaturgy of One Flea Spare by playwright Naomi Wallace, one historical source illuminates the story more than the others: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Marcus Rediker. By tracing the parallels between Wallace's drama and Rediker's history, a historical paradigm surfaces in Wallace's work just as a dramatic paradigm surfaces in the work of Rediker. Accordingly, this thesis asks: how does the exploration of Rediker's maritime history of the early eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world from a seaman's perspective suggest a dramatic paradigm for Wallace's play? After considering how Rediker centralizes conflict between the seaman and the captain, this study then focuses on the parallel situation found within One Flea Spare in order to provide a productive analysis of analogous scenarios. This thesis also argues that the class-conscious work of Naomi Wallace and Marcus Rediker uses history and metaphor to contribute to a common dramaturgy.