Commemorations and Protest in the Zócalo: A History of Performance in Mexico's Central Square from the Colonial Era to the Present
Year of Dissertation:
2013
Advisor:
Jean Graham-Jones
The Zócalo, Mexico City's main square and the largest in Latin America, has been the material, symbolic, and official center of the country since the foundation of Tenochtitlán in 1325. It also continues to be Mexico's predominant public site of performance. More than that, the Zócalo is an architectural palimpsest: the material remains of past buildings are visible in its built environment. Throughout history, official performances in the Zócalo have theatricalized and legitimized governments and their domination over territory. Inversely, social and indigenous groups have used the Zócalo to stage performances contesting the official ideology. The dual purpose of this dissertation is to examine the Zócalo as Mexico's central site of performance and to unmask the official discourse regarding Mexico's natives.
Thomas Chaundler and Academic Drama: Performance Practices in the Medieval English University
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Previous scholarship has claimed that university drama did not exist (at Oxford or Cambridge) before the Tudor period. To support this claim, scholars have repudiated medieval pedagogy, in particular, for being unable to generate the kinds of "exploratory" forms of inquiry that would later allow university drama to occur in the early sixteenth century through humanist pedagogy. I contend that medieval or scholastic pedagogy is capable of producing dynamic forms of entertainment and that a vibrant tradition of medieval university drama and performance did occur throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This performance tradition has been unrecognized by scholars not only because of inaccurate assumptions about medieval pedagogy, but also because scholars have not considered the full range of medieval performance practices or "texts" beyond the traditional play text.
Staging Fat: Dramaturgy, Female Bodies, and Contemporary American Culture
Author:
Jennifer-Scott Mobley
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Abstract
Exporting America: Theatre, Gay Male Identity, and Anti-Americanism in Denmark and West Germany
Year of Dissertation:
2011
As a second generation gay theatre history, Exporting America offers an analysis of how US American plays concerning male homosexuality were performed and received in Western Europe, exemplified by Denmark and West Germany. Through analysis of The Boys in the Band, Bent, Torch Song Trilogy, and Angels in America as text and in performance, this dissertation argues that it is necessary to understand US plays in light of intercultural performance rather than as plays expressing universal desires, dreams, anxieties, and identities. In stressing the particularity of local cultures--employing a method of radical contextualization--Exporting America discusses how meanings travel across borders and how international reception adds to or subtracts from meaning, determined as a set of consequences for the individual and the society in which the production and reception of the original production takes place. Focusing on a specific identity, that of gay men, I offer a discussion of how gay male identity is performed theatrically and how a particular construction of this identity initially emanating from the USA arises in particular Western European countries. In the first chapter I offer a discussion of the theoretical framework informing the dissertation. Building on Raymond Williams, I argue that operating analytically with "structure of feeling" allows the theatre historian to reevaluate the construction of gay identity in the theatre. Furthermore, the first chapter argues that the Danish and West German reception of these plays must be understood as informed by a cultural anti-Americanism. Chapter two offers an analysis of performances of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band and Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy as examples of a domestication of the gay man in relation to discourses of gay sexual liberation in the United States and in Denmark. In chapter three I analyze the reception of Martin Sherman's Bent in England, Denmark, and, in particular, West Germany. The chapter argues for a particular relationship between gay identity and the performance of history and points out the ways in which the reception of the gay holocaust as performed in Bent must be understood in relation to the West German broadcast of Holocaust, the miniseries. The US genesis of Tony Kushner's Angels in America is discussed in chapter four, and the fundamental American nature of the play is highlighted by an analysis of the Danish and German reception.
Carmen Rivera: Theatre of Latinidad
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation explores the process of "latinization" as dramatized in the plays of OBIE Award-winning playwright, Carmen Rivera. For two decades, Rivera has been at the forefront of Latino/a theatre in the United States, both as a critical and artistic success. The author analyzes Rivera's texts as socio-cultural documents which represent latinidad on the stage. To pursue this course of examination, latinidad will be defined and theorized in relation to the academic work of noted sociologists including Agustín Laó-Montes' ideologies of latinidad and latinization, Suzanne Oboler's arguments against ethnic labels in the media and representation, Edward Said's theories of orientalism, and other socio-political and socio-economic explorations of latinidad, which are used to address Rivera's plays, not solely as dramatic texts, but rather, as living documentation of Latinos and their place in the twenty-first century. The scholarship of Arlene Dávila, Jon Rossini and Juan Flores provides a landscape for analyzing the characters as post-colonial reconstructions of a Latino past, building on Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez's, José Can You See? Latinos On and Off-Broadway. In-depth interviews with Rivera as well as accounts regarding playwrights and practitioners from the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Repertorio Español, INTAR, and L.E.F.T. document the impact that Rivera has had on the Latina/o theatre community and its audience. Finally, analysis of current trends in the Latino theatre help develop a perspective on where the theatre is re-creating itself as well as positioning Carmen Rivera's role in that evolution.
The Lost Apple Plays: Performing Operation Pedro Pan
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Advisor:
Jean Graham-Jones
From 1960 to 1962, more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors took flight from Cuba to the United States, establishing the largest recorded exodus in the Western Hemisphere. The displaced children and the country they left behind are often metaphorized using a popular Latin American nursery rhyme, "The Lost Apple." Now, more than four decades later, Operation Pedro Pan persists through a revealing body of performance by and about a nation's exiled children.
Staging The Volk: Nazi Policy and the Reality of Theatrical Production in Three Berlin Theatres, 1933-1944
Year of Dissertation:
2010
Although theatrical production flourished during Nazi Germany, resulting in tens of thousands of performance events, there is very little English language scholarship on theatre in Nazi Germany. The definitive theatre history textbook, Oscar Brockett's History of the Theatre, barely mentions this eleven year period. If the period is mentioned in theatre history surveys, there is the implication that theatrical production during this time must be either morally bankrupt or artistically inferior and is therefore unworthy of further study. This viewpoint is far too simplistic, and there is a need for a more in-depth examination of the theatre produced during the Third Reich.
Performing the "Ben Comune": The Political Functions of Performance in the Republic of Siena (1260-1555)
Author:
Jenna Soleo-Shanks
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation examines the civic function of performance in Siena, Italy, from the nascent communal era in the twelfth century through the ultimate collapse of the Sienese Republic in the middle of the sixteenth century. During this era the city-states that developed throughout northern and central Italy were dynamic and tenuous societies, many of which relied on a single ruler or familial dynasty for their survival. For the greater part of its 400-year history, however, the Sienese Republic eschewed such dependencies, instead fostering a representative government. Such a government functioned, in part, due to the support of its people, who came to see themselves, over the course of the republican era, within the frame of a unique civic identity. This identity was powerfully expressed through and dependent on festive performance.
The Pleasure Gardens of Antebellum America and the Performance of American Identities
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Pleasure gardens (outdoor, privately-owned entertainment venues) were popular in a number of European cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Typically-overlooked, the American exemplars have been assumed to be inconsequential and mere imitations of the English venues. However, I argue that pleasure gardens were important venues for citizens of the newly-formed nation to define through performance what it meant to be American. Focusing on performance as role playing and as providing opportunities to test identities, this study examines the practices of proprietors, patterns of patronage, and staged entertainments of twelve American pleasure gardens operating within five east-coast cities.
Theatres of Absence: Seville, 1248-1575
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Despite a notable lack of historiographic attention to medieval Iberian theatre, a golden age of performance existed on the Peninsula well before the appearance of Lope de Vega at the end of the sixteenth century. New archival discoveries and innovative research methodologies reveal medieval Seville as a vital site of performance culture. This dissertation employs interdisciplinary critical methods of postcolonialism, ritual affect, and phenomenology in order to examine performances of religious and cultural interaction between Muslims, Jews, and Christians along the Andalusi frontier in late medieval, early modern Spain. The coextensive relationships between textual, spatial, and corporal forms are considered in the analyses of Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, which, as staged in a converted mosque, disclose traces of pre-conquest Andalusi poetic and musical forms; the late medieval penitential movement in Spain that facilitated metonymic associations between Christians and religious minorities through symbolic links across an array of processional enactments; and, in the context of religious and economic imperialism, restaging of Amerindian ritual that contributed to the invention of New World subjectivity. From Christian reconquest through the culturally heterogeneous periods of Atlantic exploration and colonialism, performance was a method of compensating for social imbalances, erecting and crossing religious divisions, and facilitating cultural admixtures, and these interactions gave meaning to public devotional practices and communal identities.