Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2229
Effective July 1, 2010, the former departments of Dance and Theatre were combined to form the School of Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies.
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Item The Purpose of a Labor Theatre: Industrial Democracy and the Union Theatre of Detroit, 1946-1949(2024) Lapinski, Margaret; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1946, the Union Theatre of Detroit was established as a project to broadcast “labor’s” aims and achievements. Sponsored by the Educational and Recreational Departments of the UAW, the Union Theatre quickly became part of the UAW’s educational programming to help educate and politicize workers on social issues like racial discrimination. This thesis seeks to investigate the ways in which the Union Theatre labored on behalf of an industrial democratic political program that emphasized deploying both economic and political action to achieve the goals of “labor.” In addition to providing a brief history of the Union Theatre, I use methods from performance studies and theatre studies to analyze archival material and decipher the ways in which plays functioned as both recreational activities and educational opportunities for union members to rehearse the tactics and strategies of labor organizing. I argue that, post-WWII, theatre and theatricality (loosely defined as the conventions of theatre) were deployed as an organizing tool to agitate and educate union members during a period of theatre history that is characterized in theatre historiography as “politically apathetic.” In this thesis, I ask “What was the social link between the Union Theatre and institutions like the UAW?” and seek to uncover how cultural work labors in broader social and political movements like the American labor movement.Item Popular Theatre in Iran: Critical Perspectives on The Historiography of Lalehzari Theatre(2024) Haeri, Q-mars Mazandarani; Hildy, Franklin J.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By the mid-1950s a class of performers occupied the theatres, concert halls, and nightclubs of the Lalehzar entertainment district in Tehran. Many of these performers had abandoned their lives in small villages in faraway provinces. Many had come from poor neighborhoods in Tehran to pursue their dreams for theatre, dance, and music. Their diverse and varied performances known as “Lalehzari” (adjectival form) made deep and affective connections to the audience in the Lalehzar district. For the first time, a great population of Tehran’s spectators, who were often characterized as “uncultured” by various scholars, had finally found a body of performances that they could relate to, those that could speak to their struggles and sorrows, and that responded to political and social issues within their society.This dissertation considers the “Lalehzari” performances of the 1950s and 1960, the ways in which these performances originated in the 1940s, the ways in which they subverted the status quo, and the ways in which they have been described, theorized, and historicized in Iranian historical studies of theatre. Major theatre histories have been written with a Marxist lens by writers who had a relationship with the Tudeh communist party. As a result, such histories tend to emphasize, admire, and affirm so-called “committed theatre” and dismiss, denounce, and stigmatize Lalehzari popular theatre. Hence, there is a major gap in the available literature that represents Iranian modern cultural history as one-sided and political. This is not to deny that culture is always political but at a time when knowledge of Middle Eastern cultures in the US is limited to political discourse alone, an academic endeavor of the cultural history of Iran is crucial for understanding this multifaceted society. This dissertation addresses fundamental questions about how notions like immigration and class challenge the ways in which we think about culture and how cultural history may be written without erasures. To reconstruct the history of Lalehzari theatre, I am organizing my dissertation into these chapters: Lalehzar’s unique geographic location in Tehran and the history of its theatre houses (chapter 1), the improvisatory popular performers of the 1940s and how they gained access to Lalehzar (chapter 2), the stigmatization of Lalehzar (chapter 3), Racial depiction in performances in the district (chapter 4). Each of these chapters has a historical part that explains the cause and effect of events, the continuation and changes of performance styles, and the operation of theatre houses. Each chapter also offers a close reading and analysis of a few artists whose lives and performances reflect the class tensions between the Lalehzar district and the outside theatre scene. I am looking at the ways in which history unfolded and also how it affects us today, therefore, the dissertation addresses the preservation quest for Lalehzar theatres (chapter 5) and how lasting narratives about Lalehzar shaped the Iranian culture today (conclusion).Item The White Arm in the Smoke: The Meaning of Theatrical Violence on the Victorian Stage(2023) Kaleba, Casey Dean; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This PhD dissertation examines Victorian theatrical combat on the London stage to place it in both historical and cultural context. By first establishing a possible dance-based origin for stage combat, the paper explores the overlapping modes of practice in different forms of popular and elite entertainments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they influenced the development of historically inspired movement. Using archival documents, literary analysis of stage fights, physical culture and gender studies, the study aims to contribute original research to the field of stage combat history and propose new theoretic lenses with which to examine historical practice. The paper discusses the relationship between dueling as cultural habit and representations in dramatic literature, as well as the influence of changing patterns in physical culture. Finally, this dissertation examines the role of spectacle theatre and acting theory in the development of new Modernist ideas of representing sword fights on stage.Item The Songs of Her Possibilities: Black Women-Authored Musicals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present(2023) Ealey, Jordan Alexandria; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Songs of Her Possibilities: Black Women Authored Musicals from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, examines Pauline Hopkins, Zora Neale Hurston, Vinnette Carroll, Micki Grant, and Kirsten Childs as black women creators of music theatre and their use of the form for social, political, and creative interventions. In so doing, I argue that these creators employ the form of the musical as a site for black feminist intellectual production through dramaturgical strategies in playwriting, composition, and direction. My project is animated by these major questions: How do Hopkins, Hurston, Grant, Carroll, and Childs employ the form of the musical to significant sociopolitical ends? How do their respective musicals creatively shape how musical theatre is researched, taught, and circulated? And finally, how do the black women creators at the center of this study reject, remake, and revise musical forms to challenge, critique, and change the overdetermined boundaries of the artistry and scholarship of musical theatre?In musical theatre, there is often an adherence to a strict dramaturgy of integration; that is, the dialogue, music, choreography, and other elements of a given musical must be perfectly uniformed. Black women musical theatre creators, however, are not bound to this dramaturgy and challenge it. I contend that this is accomplished through what I call strategic dissonance—a black feminist dramaturgical strategy that makes use of disintegrated and disjointed elements as an artistic method. This method is drawn from their material realities as black women (and the multidirectional nature of navigating black womanhood) to reflect the realities of black life and propose new ways of living. The project uses a significant amount of research from different archival sites such as the Library of Congress, Fisk University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Currently, no manuscript exists that explores and examines this under-theorized and under-documented history; thus, my project intervenes in the invisibilization of these musicals from the historical narrative of American musical theatre. Therefore, The Songs of Her Possibilities simultaneously argues for the significance of black women’s musical theatre for black feminist worldmaking capabilities.Item GENDER AND SEXUAL DISSIDENCE IN REGGAETÓN: THE POLITICS OF CUIR PERFORMANCE IN THE HISPANIC CARIBBEAN(2023) Farnell, Lauren; Marshall, Caitlin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Global reggaetón superstar Bad Bunny has performed in traditionally “female” clothes, worn nail polish, and kissed men on the international stage, but has never named his identity explicitly. Many have taken to the internet to call him, among many other celebrities a “queer baiter .” With US representational politics and queer people in the spotlight – this thesis wonders how homonormativity and neo-imperial respectability politics fueled these queer-baiting discourses. This thesis aims to tackle the contemporary debates surrounding racialized minoritarian subjects in reggaetón who are constantly caught in discourses of “too queer” or “not queer enough.” These queers frequently under colonial or neo-imperial rule, negotiate the boundaries of American homonormativity and obsession with “outness.” This thesis takes up the idea of “queerbaiting” and questions, “what happens when people outside the homo-“norms” perform their queerness in a way that is not necessarily legible to other global queers?” Utilizing methods from performance, queer, and Latine and Caribbean studies, I argue that we need new understandings of what it means to be queer. Using case studies from the reggaetón genre of Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, I argue that performances by Bad Bunny, Tokischa, and Ivy Queen negotiate, performances of queerness that exceed those of US imperial homonormativity. Intervention statement: this redefines how we come to understand our own queerness and futures and how we understand the most popular global music genre.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 Spoken Words, Embodied Words: A New Approach to Ancient Egyptian Theatre(2022) Hedges, Allison; Hildy, Franklin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, the author advocates for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of dramatic texts and theatrical performances in ancient Egypt. Two primary lines of inquiry run through this study. The first is an in-depth historiography of ancient Egyptian drama and performance in the American discipline of theatre history over the last one hundred years, to better understand the positioning (or lack thereof) of ancient Egypt in American narratives of early theatre history. An important aspect of this historiographical approach is the observation of missed connections between twentieth century Egyptological advances in the discovery and interpretation of dramatic texts, and contemporary conversations in the field of theatre history about the role of ancient Egypt in the formation of the art form. The second line of inquiry follows a Performance as Research (PAR) approach, to evaluate theatrical practice as a useful tool in further interpreting dramatic texts and understanding theatrical performances in ancient Egypt. The goal of this study overall is to encourage collaboration between theatre practitioners, theatre historians, and Egyptologists for a more holistic understanding of the ancient Egyptian theatrical tradition, and to raise awareness of the potential for modern performance of ancient Egyptian dramatic texts.Item Beyond Resistance: Performing Postdramatic Protest(2022) Scrimer, Victoria Lynn; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As its point of departure, this dissertation takes stock of the fact that activist performances like sit-ins, marches, banner drops, rallies, and occupations are deeply informed by dramatic theatre in both the way activists design these actions and in the way audiences read them. The dissertation argues that these performative arrangements, narratives, images, and tropes are naturalized to the extent that they have come to constitute a sort of Gramscian common sense that can limit our ability to imagine other ways of thinking and being. The dissertation seeks a conceptual alternative to those limitations. Combining performance analysis, interviews with artists and activists, and autoethnographic accounts of my own experiences as an environmental activist, the dissertation illustrates the limitations of dramatic representation in activist performance and then explores how Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre—theatre that eschews the hallmarks of dramatic theatre—might provide alternative models for activism and new ways to talk about and understand the successes and failures of activist performances as they play out in the 21st century.Item THE PROPERTY MAN – AN EXPLORATION OF REPRESENTATION OF AND WITHIN TRADITIONAL CHINESE OPERA(2022) Gillett, Cary; Harding, James; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The lack of scholarship and recognition has rendered the Property Man of Chinese theatre and the vital work that he does largely invisible to western theatre historians. The English language written theatrical archive provides us with various narratives as to the Property Man’s purpose and existence. His tasks help us know the narrative behind a play like The Yellow Jacket, and at the most basic level they address the question whether the Western representation that is the character of the Property Man coincided with the actual historical Property Man in Chinese theatre. This thesis explores the visibility and invisibility of the Property Man in Western drama by his presence in five theatre history texts and three plays scripts and by considering how these portrayals created the Property Man as a caricature and therefore stereotype. The relationship between the East and West creates an overall foundation for this exploration as well. Western narratives of Eastern practices create and problematize the understandings of the roles, responsibilities, and representations of, in this case, the Property Man both on and off the stage. The final section of the thesis provides a comparison of Eastern and Western staging and production support practices, and how the practices of a Western stage manager align with the Property Man. The idea of invisibility is carried forward here as both stage manager and Property Man uphold the concept of invisible labor both onstage and backstage. Though this exploration proves that his purpose is worth knowing and that his role, however enigmatic, was critical to Chinese theatre. The labor the Property Man provided alongside actors on the Chinese stage revealed within the historical archive proves the necessity of his being. Ultimately this inquiry adds to the archive a narrative that allows others to engage with and understand who he was and what he did.Item Women in White: Performing White Femininity from 1865-Present(2021) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores how white woman character tropes on stage, page, and screen are both haunted by histories of post-Civil War racial terror and themselves haunt white women’s everyday embodiment. This spectral framework is undergirded by a less traditionally academic approach: a self-reflexive interrogation of a compulsion to endangerment, peril, fear, and self-destruction the author observes in representations of white women and in herself. The study of white femininity represented in theatre, literature, film, and social media is narrowed to focus on this predilection for danger and its political implications for racialized-gender embodiment. The dissertation attributes this phenomenon to a dialectic central to white femininity in an Anglophone context: being in/the danger, that is simultaneously being victim and instigator of violence, tragedy, and destruction. The project pursues being in/the danger within the context of theatre and performance studies by asking: How has the white woman been made and continuously remade through staging white woman character tropes? Which gestures, affects, and self-fashionings from these tropes haunt everyday white womanhood? Each chapter examines one trope and its implications in detail, including the damsel in distress, the girl crime victim, the suicidal authoress, the anorexic waif, among others. The dissertation examines how characterizations of melancholy, endangerment, and frailty in these characters shaped common and highly racialized understandings of white womanhood during the period studied. To illustrate this broad cultural phenomenon, the dissertation studies an appropriately broad set of objects including plays; films; literature; artist biographies; and social media communities.