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 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 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.Item RESPONSIVE WILD: REDISCOVERING, REDEFINING, AND REALIGNING(2021) harris, kristina aurelia; Davis, Crystal U.; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The central question of, what is womanhood? anchors this work. Within that wondering and examination is research into feminism, in conversation with rock and roll and 1980s MTV, gender studies, queer studies, and dance studies. The interrogation of MTV as a superstructure for notions of White femininity operates as a site of exploration for the White heterosexual male gaze. This extends into a rediscovery of rock and roll history, and the Black and Queer women (also considered by this work as ‘original’ feminists) who laid a foundation for rock and roll’s future. Through choreographic practice and Queer methodology, questions of womanhood and femininity, Queerness, and feminism, are explored through movement. Memory, lived bodily experiences, community, and the sensations and desires connected to them, are centered in this creative process. Queer and feminist writers accompany this journey; rock and roll functions as a canvas for the exploration of ferocious and mammoth movement; metaphors of physics facilitate the choreographic research into identity as it shifts and navigates fluidity and transformation. Each of these ideas swirl, collide, and manifest through choreographed movement and writing; leading to a new and realigned question: What is Queer Womanhood?Item Theorizing the Brave: Black Girlhood, Affect, and Performance in Kirsten Childs's The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin(2019) Ealey, Jordan Alexandria; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Theorizing the Brave” is a critical study of Kirsten Childs’s musical, The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin (2000). Through a textual analysis of the musical’s book and lyrics as well as a thorough consideration of the musical’s historical context and implications, this thesis investigates the overarching question: How does Bubbly Black Girl interrogate the precarious political position of Black girls and women in the theatre? Specifically, how does Childs’s musical challenge and reframe notions of Blackness, girlhood, womanhood, and sexuality? By critically engaging The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin, this thesis project employs theoretical frameworks of Black feminist theory, critical race theory, and affect theory to examine how Childs interrogates and reformulates the discourse around Black girls and women in the American theatre, thereby also challenging the constrictive scripting of Black girlhood and womanhood in everyday life.Item TIDES(2019) Law, Mariama Kancou; Davis, Crystal; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This document explores the research and inspirations behind TIDES, a dance performance that employs a cyclical structure to incorporate personal experiences of Ama Law, the choreographer and director, as well as the cultural ancestry of its cast of thirteen women of African descent. Law shares her approach to developing TIDES that includes an anthropological perspective to investigate the personal histories of her cast and concepts of historical revisionism to bring awareness to black women on stage. This paper utilizes Knowledge (an important element of hip hop) as a methodology that brings healing to communities. Law also highlights stories of women in urban dance and histories of the African, modern and urban movement styles used in TIDES (Vogue, Chicago house, Dunham technique, movement from West African countries and more).Item THE IRRECONCILABLE VOLATILITY OF BLOODY BETTY & THE ONLINE ARCHIVE(2017) Walker, Jonelle; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project investigates volatile portrayals of rape and sexualized violence in gorelesque performances by Vancouver-based troupe Bloody Betty and the Deadly Sins, as well as the digital YouTube archive that preserves those performances. Through examining how both the work of Bloody Betty and the manner in which that work is preserved maintain mutually exclusive contradictions, this project offers performance scholars a feminist theoretical framework for approaching similarly volatile contradictions in Fourth Wave feminist aesthetics and the online archive. This project proposes that both those objects of study require a feminist reconsideration of the gaze (live and online) that does not neutralize the volatility of sexual objectification, but rather accepts its inevitability in service of more effective feminist praxis.Item Octavia's Brood: Riding the Ox Home(2016) Bowden Abadoo, Meghan Kamiche; Phillips, Miriam; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Octavia’s Brood: Riding the Ox Home was an evening-length dance concert performed October 15 and 16, 2015, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. Inspired by the prophetic envisioning of Harriet Tubman and Octavia Butler, it explores race, otherness, ownership and story-telling from the perspective of Black women’s dancing bodies and histories. Borrowing its title from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, it utilizes visionary story-telling, where science fiction provides a foundation for imagining socially just worlds inhabited by richly diverse protagonists. This paper is a written account of the research by which I composed this immersive dance event, leaping back and forth through time, landing between antebellum Maryland of the mid-1800s and an unknown place at an unknown date of a foreseen future.Item Let it Flo! Theatrical Process and Production(2013) Clay, Caroline Stefanie; Smiley, Leigh W; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Let It Flo! is a theatricalized imagining based on the real life of the late attorney, and feminist Florynce "Flo" Kennedy. It was borne out of my deep artistic need to understand the intersections between activism and identity. Kennedy's audacity, flamboyance, sharp tongue, and intellect were her currency in the world of 1970's racial and gender politics. In later years, Flo faces increasing anonymity among the very generation of women who benefitted most from her willingness to fight for their rights. This scholarly query is measured through the lens of Kennedy's life choice to walk the road less travelled as a free woman. Hers was a trajectory marked by verbal radicalism, personal triumph, contradiction, and ascension. As Flo faces her final transition, she fights to spur into action the current generation into a life of advocacy, equality, and authenticity.Item "Like a Unicorn in Captivity"(2013) Dooling, Shannon Marie; Pearson, Sara; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the process of creating Like A Unicorn in Captivity, I sought the answers to two primary research questions: "What happens when you realize that your idol isn't perfect?" and "What happens when you recognize her flaws in yourself?" The work began as a response to and an interpretation of the work of writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh, incorporating multimedia, spoken word, and movement in an exploration of celebrity, hero-worship, identity, relationship, ambition, creativity and duty. As we investigated these notions, the cast and I embarked on a transdisciplinary choreographic process, one that combined movement-based and theoretical research across dance, theatre, design, music, history, literature, feminism, and women's studies. This paper offers an explanation of the inspirations behind the piece, how I arrived at the notion of transdiciplinary choreography, what the practice looked and felt like in progress, and a description of the piece that resulted from the process.Item Meena's Dream: Theatrical Process and Production(2013) Yadav, Anupama Singh; Smith, Ashley H; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Meena's Dream is a one-woman play that portrays a young girl's epic conversation with God through the archetypal hero's journey, a metaphor for the universal battle to act with courage while coming face-to-face with our deepest fears. During the day, nine-year-old Meena wishes that her mother Aisha could get well; and by night, Hindu God Lord Krishna appears, entreating Meena's help in his war against the Worry Machine. Meena's Dream creates a fantastical world through storytelling and live music, from South Indian classical to indie folk, as Meena wrestles with life's unanswerable questions of mortality, suffering, and God's own existence.