This dissertation considers how best to define the imagined “life” of the puppet, and how that “life” offers new meaning to narrative puppet productions. In my first chapter, begin with the observation that puppeteers, scholars, and audiences often describe the puppet as an object that appears to “have life,” and...
This dissertation, “Altered Belonging: The Transnational Modern Dance of Itō Michio,” argues that Itō forged an artistic and social identity out of the very categories of racial and national difference typically used to exclude Japanese from Euro-American society. The strategies he employed provide a paradigm for how performing bodies marked...
What can the theatrical use of food accomplish in performances which assert cultural, legal, or moral rights to food production and consumption in a food insecure society? Case studies comprising the USDA's 1933-34 World's Fair exhibits, the May 1933 Wisconsin Cooperative Milk Pool protest, the 1936 Federal Theatre Project living...
This dissertation examines the development of a black theater aesthetic in Jamaica as the colony prepared for independence. I define my theory of myalisation to explain how middle class theatre audiences participated in the Afro-Jamaican religious rituals of the lower class and how their participation signaled the development of a...
By combining cultural theory with empirical data, this dissertation asserts that late-twentieth-century mainstream theatre had the potential to support emergent ideologies in the U.S. context. The study finds fault with those who dismiss mainstream theatre based on its commercialism and shows how a production's mainstream status may position its emergent...
This dissertation argues that theatre was a vital element of postcolonial culture in Ireland in the years 1919-1932, the period in which the Irish nation emerged from revolutionary war to become a stable postcolonial state. Although critics have bemoaned the rising dominance of conservative, anti-modernist playwriting and production in Ireland's...
This dissertation examines performance and textual techniques used by American and British artists to provoke discussion about the politics of viewing. I theorize a model of spectatorship which exposes the race and gender symbolism of actors' and spectators' bodies and its effects on meaning-making in the performer-spectator encounter. In contrast...
This study examines how Cape Verdean theatre artists construct transformative performances of race, gender, language, and colonial history at the Mindelact International Theatre Festival on the Cape Verde Islands. The aim is to understand how international theatre festivals participate in the production and shaping of new social imaginaries about nationhood....
This dissertation explores a form of performance I call “ototheatre,” which is a mobile and participatory audience experience executed with portable sound technology. Ototheatre is an emergent artistic form that sits at a convergence of contemporary technologies and audience consumption habits. Case studies, including smartphone applications and new theatrical works...
This dissertation narrates the circulation and institutionalization of an emergent category of talk performance within the late-twentieth century US avant-garde through the career trajectories of three artists from disparate disciplinary backgrounds working in and around the 1970s: theatrical monologist Spalding Gray, poet David Antin, and dance artist and filmmaker Yvonne...